Ninety percent of the time, at least, I agree with the views of former President Donald J. Trump.
When talking with people who attack him reflexively because of obvious Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS), I often ask them exactly what actual policies of his, discounting his personality, they dislike.
I have yet to get anything approaching a substantive answer. Most don’t even attempt one.
That word “derangement” in TDS couldn’t be more accurate.
But lately, something popped up on President Trump’s own Truth Social that I, and evidently other supporters, found rather disturbing.
“The FBI headquarters should not be moved to a far-away location, but should stay right where it is, in a new spectacular building, in the best location on our now crime-ridden and filthy-dirty, graffiti-scarred, capital,” President Trump said.
“They should be involved in bringing back D.C., not running away from it, especially the violent crime.”
Having been to D.C. numerous times in the past few years, I certainly agree with the 45th president’s characterization of our capital.
But I’ve also been to New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Baltimore, Seattle, Detroit, Chicago ... I could go on and on ... and find that description just as accurate for them. All those cities are drastically in need of revitalization, and just about everybody knows it.
Why Washington, in particular? More specifically, why the FBI?
The FBI and its handmaiden, the Department of Justice, have been under heavy, justifiable criticism for extreme bias and the weaponization of justice over the past few years—even longer actually—as President Trump, of all people, well knows.
Their proximity to the levers of power—the White House, Congress, the Supreme Court, K-Street, not to mention the mainstream media—has only exacerbated this.
Washington is where political power is a blood sport and the impetus to misuse justice is the strongest.
This isn’t going to go away with a rebuilt, “spectacular” (whatever that means) building. It may even get worse as the technology continues to improve.
Both agencies should be moved as far from Washington as possible, somewhere in Middle America, such as Kansas or South Dakota, where the old-fashioned values of right and wrong still hold at least some sway.
The old FBI building, with its hideous brutalist architecture, could be turned into what we might call a Museum of Totalitarian Citizen Surveillance as a reminder of the dangers of state authority. This would include the corrupt career of J. Edgar Hoover all the way to the invasion of our privacy by contemporary big tech.
It wouldn’t just be domestic. Also exhibited would be the Gestapo, the KGB, the Chinese Communist Party’s Ministry of State Security, and other similar organizations with their techniques.
Now, I realize this is a bit of a too-good-to-be-true fantasy, but I mention it to buttress my overall point about getting the FBI out of Washington. (We also have the International Spy Museum with some of that.)
As many have said, we have far too many government agencies anyway. Several, notably the Department of Education, should be eliminated, while as many as possible of the others moved out of Washington.
My guess is that would actually improve our capital city, much of whose problems stem from an egregious and flagrant two-tiered social structure.
We have massive amounts of federal employees—many of whom are featherbeds—living inside the Beltway, but largely in the wealthier suburbs of Washington proper in Virginia and Maryland.
These people vote uniformly Democratic, no matter the realities in the world, because that’s who’s paying for their life appointments in the grand tradition of the Swamp.
At the same time, we have a mostly black underclass living unhappily and semi-employed at best inside the city itself, making it, to put it mildly, an unpleasant place to walk around for anybody, white, black, Asian, or Hispanic.
These people also vote largely Democratic under the misapprehension that the government handouts initiated by President Lyndon Johnson make a better, or at least easier, life. Actually, those payments ended up incentivizing the breakup of the black family.
This, then, is, in essence, a catastrophic pattern, basically immutable for years as the capital city has gone into decline with much of America.
No glittering FBI buildings are going to change that. In fact, they'll preserve it, after a fashion.
President Trump isn’t often one to backtrack on his pronouncements. He’s of the “never complain, never explain” school, and that’s easy to understand, considering the almost uniformly irrational attacks against him.
But this time, he would be advised to do so. An intelligent plan to disperse government agencies throughout the country is called for, not the reverse.
What he has done is give former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis an opening by which to attack him during their forthcoming CNN primary debate. (Vivek Ramaswamy has been excluded, probably because he had the temerity to question CNN about the Jan. 6 Capitol breach during an earlier town hall with the network.)
Admittedly, it won’t much matter and you don’t have to be Nostradamus to see President Trump will be the winner in Iowa and beyond. But for the good of the country, his reconsideration of this pronouncement would be beneficial.
