Trump’s Pettiness Is the Simplest Explanation

The Trump administration appears determined to go out with both a bang and a whimper. The whimper is an easily predicted and plainly ludicrous contesting of ballot tabulations in states where there is no reason to suspect fraud. The bang is the ouster of a cavalcade of top national-security officials: Mark Esper, the secretary of defense; James Anderson, the acting undersecretary of defense for policy; Joseph Kernan, the undersecretary of defense for intelligence. Congressional leaders are reportedly pleading to save the job of CIA Director Gina Haspel. The director of the National Security Agency, Paul Nakasone, who just scored a huge victory in protecting the integrity of American elections, has evidently also fallen from President Donald Trump’s grace by releasing highly classified documents that would help adversaries understand how the U.S. managed to prevent foreign interference in the 2020 vote.