President Donald Trump targeted two members of his former administration with an executive order on Wednesday and then asked if the Justice Department would investigate them.
Among the targets is Miles Taylor, who published an anonymous New York Times op-ed exposing shocking details about Trump from the inside. Chris Krebs, the other Trump target, was the director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. He released a statement saying that 2020 "was a secure election."
Speaking about the order with MSNBC's Nicolle Wallace, Republican pollster Sarah Longwell called it all "insane."
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"Let me just say how insane it is that the mechanism by which he is attacking these people is an executive order," Longwell began. "Why would that be? I mean, it's one thing if he wants to be upset or he wants to pursue litigation if he thinks claims have been made. But to sign an executive order attacking these people, especially Chris Krebs. I mean, Chris Krebs? All he did was rebuke the president's false claim that the election wasn't stolen, as somebody in his administration."
Longwell estimated that Trump might be trying to get people to look in a different direction after he backed down on his trade war.
"Is he trying to distract?" Longwell wondered aloud. "You know, like a guy with a laser pointer and the media is a bunch of cats. Is he trying to get people to chase things so they stop talking about the fact that he caved and did a total about-face on the tariffs after telling us for days that he wasn't going to do a pause? And now he's suddenly pausing because the world economy is collapsing. Is he doing this as a distraction?"
She then noted that targeting people like this can scare others away from leaking information to the public.
"And what he's trying to do here, though, is to make people afraid of speaking out against him. Not just people from before, but people who are there now. People who have an understanding of what he's doing, and as people, are looking for insight," Longwell said.
Trump is trying to intimidate his staff from speaking out during this administration, she continued.
"He's saying, if you leak, because people leak against Trump all the time. I mean, nobody leaks against Trump more because people inside are trying to make Trump not do crazy things by telling the media he's about to do crazy things. And so, leaking is like a mechanism for them to curb some of Trump's worst impulses. And so he's trying to make people afraid by saying he's going to launch investigations into anybody who speaks out," Longwell said.
She added, "I mean, this is some of the most insane authoritarian stuff we've seen out of him."
