The GOP Appointees Who Defied the President
“America hired @realDonaldTrump to fire people like the first three witnesses we’ve seen,” Donald Trump Jr. tweeted Friday. “Career government bureaucrats and nothing more.” It was the second day of the House Intelligence Committee’s impeachment hearings, and Marie Yovanovitch, a career diplomat who had served as the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, had been called to testify about how the president’s personal lawyer, Rudolph Giuliani, had undercut her in pursuit of Trump’s political interest. Within hours, the phrase “” was retweeted by thousands of pro-Trump accounts. This wasn’t the first time that defenders of an embattled Republican president declared war on skilled professionals working for the federal government. Sitting inside the Oval Office with then–Treasury Secretary John Connally in 1972, Richard Nixon echoed similar sentiments as
