White House struggles to defend Trump's orders targeting officials who defied him

Source: MSNBC

White House struggles to defend Trump’s orders targeting officials who defied him

The White House had a week to come up with a defense for Trump’s orders targeting Christopher Krebs and Miles Taylor. It apparently came up empty.

April 16, 2025, 9:43 AM EDT
By Steve Benen

Even those who’ve come to expect Donald Trump’s authoritarian tactics were taken aback last week when the president signed two first-of-their-kind executive orders targeting a pair of officials from his first term who defied him.

There was barely a pretense in the executive orders that the targeted former officials — Christopher Krebs, who led the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), and Miles Taylor, a former high-ranking Department of Homeland Security official — had done anything wrong. Indeed, the closer one looked at the stated rationales in support of the directives, the more ridiculous they appeared.

Nevertheless, the president directed Attorney General Pam Bondi and the Department of Homeland Security to launch a “review” into Krebs, while simultaneously ordering DHS to investigate Taylor.

It took nearly a week, but a reporter — in this instance, The New York Times’ Jonathan Swan — finally asked the White House to make some kind of effort to defend Trump’s actions.

-snip-

Read more: https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/white-house-struggles-defend-trumps-orders-targeting-officials-defied-rcna201500