I am moderately suspicious of any report that makes former Department of Homeland Security secretary Kirstjen Nielsen look like the good guy knowing just how terrible she is, but this is not necessarily a story about her.
This is about Trump's Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney coddling his boss at the expense of national security and possibly democracy itself.
The New York Times reported this morning that Mulvaney told Nielsen that discussing 2020 election security was off-limits because discussing it might hurt Trump's feelings.
Officials said she had become increasingly concerned about Russia’s continued activity in the United States during and after the 2018 midterm elections — ranging from its search for new techniques to divide Americans using social media, to experiments by hackers, to rerouting internet traffic and infiltrating power grids.
But in a meeting this year, Mick Mulvaney, the White House chief of staff, made it clear that Mr. Trump still equated any public discussion of malign Russian election activity with questions about the legitimacy of his victory. According to one senior administration official, Mr. Mulvaney said it “wasn’t a great subject and should be kept below his level.”
I wish I could sit here and say we'll never have a worse president. I can't do that, but I am fairly certainly that we'll never have a more cosmically-petty president.
Trump is a man who still assigns more emotional importance to the size of his inauguration crowd than the defense of western democracy.
But I suppose Democracy did not give him the adoring crowd he wanted.
State governments and congressional Democrats have to make election security a priority if the Trump regime will not.