A fateful day in Donald Trump's presidency: Feb. 20, 2020
How cruelty and incompetence marked Trump's every choice as president, as shown on this fatal day for Americans in harm's way, then and now.
Ed. note: The Resistant Grandmother (TRG), while never a fan of Donald Trump, was reminded again of why he must never again be president when encountering a brief article in the Washington Post on Sept. 1. It gave an update on former FBI agent Peter Strzok’s lawsuit against his former employer for firing him in 2018. The story as to why he was fired is referenced in this posting, as is a link to the Post article. That reminder led me to reread a Politico article that appeared in 2020. It described Trump’s cruelty toward Strzok on a particularly fateful day in his presidency, which has inspired this posting. A link to that article also appears in this post. If you believe, as I do, that Donald Trump should never again enter the Oval Office, this column concludes with resources to link up with to ensure he
does not.
On the ill-fated day of February 20, 2020, President Donald Trump decided to forego his morning intelligence briefing, as was his custom, to the afternoon, or sometimes never — handing it off to Jared Kushner or others in his circle who happened to be handy. But Trump’s decision to put off a morning briefing meant he did not know early on about three American soldiers who were blown up by a car bomb
in Afghanistan.
Photos of the tragedy splashed across 24/7 news screens as reporters followed up on the CIA’s strong suspicion the bombing had to do with Russian President Vladimyr Putin’s having put a bounty on the heads of U.S. soldiers with the Taliban: a certain number of dead American soldiers for cash rewards, was what the CIA suspected.
No action
It was a stunning report on its face, and one could assume an American president would care deeply about. Any previous Chief Executive would have been likely to leap into action – getting intelligence updates from CIA and DOD sources, meeting with the CIA and NSA chiefs and Secretaries of State and Defense, and then calling Putin, demanding answers and giving him hell.
But not Trump. He said nothing about the three shattered soldiers on active duty more than 6,000 miles away – on that day, or since.
Coincidentally, on that day Trump’s Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was busy drafting an American exit strategy for getting the United States out of Afghanistan.
Given that three soldiers had just been murdered most likely by Taliban forces, Pompeo and/or Trump might have stopped the process and squelched the Taliban deal until further notice. But neither man expressed any word of outrage or concern. And so it was business as usual on developing the exit plan.
His schedule
After all, on Feb. 20, 2020, there were other presidential activities to attend to. Trump and Melania were hosting a late February reception for African American History Month. And he was putting Vice President Mike Pence in charge of the Coronavirus task force, ousting Department of Health and Human Services Director Alex Azar and not replacing him with a respected public health pro (https://www.politico.com/news/2020/04/28/trump-support-fox-news-coronavirus-214517).
Although things were heating up on Covid 19, Trump didn’t express any sense of urgency, believing and claiming without evidence that some day soon Covid would just fade away on its own. Instead, he called the early low number of 15 confirmed U.S. cases a “miracle,” bragging of the “incredible achievement” of the United States in fending off the disease compared to Italy and China.
Trump instead took the familiar tack of complaining about the media: he hadn’t received enough credit for the nation’s temporary, then-low incident rate. Hedging his bets in a way that offered no practical information about, or leadership on the topic, Trump said simply, “We’ll see what happens. Nobody really knows. It could maybe
go away.”
Jokes amid death
On Feb. 20, Trump was meeting with a bevy of entertainers, including comediennes Diamond and Silk, whose comedy had taken a hard-right turn in 2015 with Trump’s presidential candidacy and their frequent appearances with him on the campaign trail.
On that late winter Thursday of the Taliban murder of three U.S. soldiers, Trump spent hours in the comic duo’s company – cracking jokes and accepting compliments on what a great job he was doing.
As if to send a signal to the majority of Black Americans who did not vote for Trump, the former president also scheduled a session with conservative Black leaders, placing them around a table where they lavished praise on the 45th president, similar to what Trump’s team were called upon to do during Cabinet meetings.
The day was capped off with a photo op of Diamond and Silk and other Black conservatives standing behind Trump at his desk in the Oval Office, hands placed on Trump’s shoulders, praying for him, the get together concluding with chants of “Four more years!”
Presidentially scheduled degradation
There were still more entertainers who would arrive to amuse Trump that day. Before Diamond and Silk’s audience with the 45th president, Trump welcomed the actor, actress, producer, and screenwriter for a play involving an FBI agent and attorney, fired for their personal texts expressing criticism and concerns in 2016 over Republican candidate for president Donald Trump.
The FBI agent was Peter Strzok, deputy director in the Counterintelligence Division of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The Bureau’s attorney was Lisa Page who had begun an intimate relationship with Strzok as the 2016 presidential campaign was
heating up.
Strzok was initially tasked to investigate the issue of Hillary Clinton’s emails, but had been later assigned to look into Donald Trump’s possible connections with the Russians, earning a spot in 2017 on Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation team after Mueller’s being appointed special counsel in the probe.
As Strzok studied Trump’s Russia connections, he grew increasingly concerned, seeing the Clinton emails issue pale in comparison to the possible threat Trump posed with his campaign’s too-cozy Russian links.
In personal texts to each other, Strzok and Page worried about the possibility the Republican candidate might win and what that could mean to the country.
Enemy fires
The texts’ contents are available online because they were leaked in 2017 by the FBI reportedly under pressure from Republicans and then president Donald Trump. But they are the kind you’d find between any two people realizing the danger Trump posed to America, and seeking and giving hope to each other that maybe Trump might not win.
But with Trump in the White House, as president he and his Republican allies embarked on a campaign of humiliation of Strzok and Page, with Trump in a Dec. 2, 2019 Twitter piling on, featuring his usual lapses in punctuation:
“When Lisa Page, the lover of Peter Strzok, talks about being crushed, and how innocent she is, ask her to read Peter’s ‘insurance policy’ text, just in case Hillary loses. Also why were the lovers (sic) text messages scrubbed after he left Mueller. Where are they (sic) Lisa?”
Trump’s Puritan-like taunting of the couple is even more distasteful and puzzling given Trump’s own troubled history of marital infidelity, having cheated on all three of his wives, often in very public fashion. His continuous finger-wagging showed how hypocritical the new American president was, and eager he was to pile-on —still more unattractive traits.
Facts as irrelevant
And then there were factual errors — another habit Americans would get used to. In casual text form and even with aides now paid to help him put his best foot forward, Trump could not be trusted to get his facts straight. All 375 texts between the two were released to the media on Dec. 13, 2017 with no evidence of being “scrubbed” from the earlier texts.
After the texts were leaked earlier in 2017 by the FBI, Mueller asked Strzok to step down from the special counsel’s investigation. And in 2018 the FBI fired Page and Strzok essentially for writing the texts, a personal action that would not have had embarrassing consequences had the Bureau not leaked them on its own.
Normally, what Strzok and Page had done would not have elicited firing, but rather an administrative slap on the wrist in the form of a temporary suspicion or demotion. In fact, the Bureau’s internal disciplinary office recommended those consequences rather than firing, but was overruled by FBI higher-ups.
But Strzok and Page were now caught up in the maelstrom of American politics as Donald Trump and his Republican Party were redefining them: cruel, hardball, take-no-prisoners, and recasting what was true into lies and vice versa.
The advent of projection
In the emerging right-wing fashion, Trump allies did what we’ve come to recognize as a tactic out of the Trump/authoritarian playbook: accuse other people of doing what Trump and his supporters were actually doing: acting as part of a conspiracy – not against the interests of the United States, as Strzok’s early FBI investigation had been probing and what the Mueller investigation described as likely, but did not prosecute for lack of enough evidence. Instead, Trump and his Republican allies accused Strzok and Page of working in a conspiracy to undermine him.
By February 2020, Strzok became one of Trump’s favorite whipping boys. Within that atmosphere, Trump welcomed the stars and creators of “FBI Lovebirds: UnderCovers,” into the Oval Office for a Stalin show-trial fest of humiliation of his FBI targets. Touted as a “verbatim theater” production based on the anti-Trump text messages recovered by the FBI from the cellphones of the former Trump-Russia investigators Strzok and Page, Trump and his B-list celebrity guests waxed on and on about the former FBI agents’ love affair and texts while peddling their play, scheduled to debut later at an alt-right Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) event.
According to a February 27, 2020 article in Politico:
“Trump met with Dean Cain and Kristy Swanson, who play Stzrok and Page, along with playwright Phelim McAleer and producer Ann McElhinney to ‘discuss the importance of the play’ ahead of a live performance” scheduled for later that afternoon (https://www.politico.com/search?q=donald+trump+peter+strzok+and+diamond+and+silk).
Judge orders now Trump will be deposed
Now, four years later, a Washington Post story caught my eye. It described how Strzok’s lawsuit against the FBI requesting reinstatement has been winning legal victories, the latest with U.S. District Judge Amy Jackson Berman’s finding that Donald Trump must be deposed in the case.
Judge Jackson allowed for a two-hour deposition, saying that “Trump’s repeated public statements about the pair justifies further probing of whether he pressured the Justice Department to retaliate against them after the investigation of Russian interference in the presidential election of 2016” (https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2023/09/01/trump-deposition-strzok-page-fbi/).
It’s taken this long to wind its way through the judicial system, but Peter Strzok’s day in court may finally be in sight.
A Feb. 20, 2020 list of “indictments”
To this, the former president may now add still another legal obligation to his list of four criminal indictments and two civil.
The details of the former president’s legal comeuppances may be hard to keep straight. So to them the TRG offers a set of behavioral indictments based on what he did and failed to do on just one day of his presidency, Feb. 20, 2020, based on human, if not legal failings. They serve as reminders of what a second, more unguarded Trump term could lay in store. These presidential competency and human decency-related indictments include his…
* disinterest in intelligence reports describing the deaths of
three American soldiers at the hands of the Taliban if not
also of Trump friend Vladymyr Putin;
* absence of presidential follow-up to those deaths;
* business-as-usual drafting of exit plans from Afghanistan as
if the deaths never happened;
* wise-cracking with comedians and entertainers on what should
have been a solemn day in the White House;
* sycophantic treatment of Trump allowed by visitors because
that had come to be expected of the American president;
* atmosphere of unreality and inability to take seriously the,
arguably, most serious public health crisis in American
history;
* attempted villainization and humiliation of two former FBI
agents whose personal dalliance should not erase their
service to their country, especially since Trump’s own
marital history was far from chaste.
What also bears mentioning on Feb. 20, 2020 was that stock markets across the world suddenly crashed in record fashion after growing instability due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet Trump did not address the nation that night or the next day to allay its fears.
Maybe, given the former president’s lack of seriousness and penchant for lies and humor in the face of serious challenges, it was better that he did not.
It’s enough to inspire Americans to donate, work, and vote to ensure a future America without another president Donald Trump. Here’s how.
How to Get Involved
Grass roots Democratic organizations like Swing Left and Indivisible take volunteers to do all sorts of things — phone work, canvassing, etc. Their links are:
https://swingleft.org. and https://www.indivisible.org.
For anyone who would prefeer to concentrate on writing, you can opt to write letters with Vote Forward at https://votefwd.org or Postcards to Voters at https://postcardstovoters.org.
Vote Forward has offered both "social" campaigns targeting underrepresented voters, and a "political" campaign targeting Democratic voters whose 2024 turnout is key.
Rock the Vote helps pre-register 16 and 17 year olds, as many states allow them to preregister. You can help at:
https://www.rockthevote.org/how-to-vote/nationwide-voting-info/voter-pre-registration/
Irregular voters need to make sure they haven't been purged from the voter rolls and are registered at the correct address. (https://www.vote411.org/voting-rules) explains all things that are voting related. Most of the GOP-controlled states have rolled back any accommodations they made in 2020 for Covid, so be prepared for it to be more difficult to vote.
The Brennan Center for Justice and the ACLU focus on voting rights. Their links are:
https://brennancenter.org and https://aclu.org.
Short list of links mentioned above.
League of Women Voters
https://www.lwv.orgSwing Left
https://www.swingleft.orgIndivisible
https://www.indivisible.orgSister District
https://www.sisterdistrict.comRed Wine and Blue
https://www.redwine.blueVote Forward
https://www.votefwd.orgPostcards to Voters
https://www.postcardstovoters.org
Activate America
https://www.activateamerica.voteField Team 6
https://www.fieldteam6.orgVote Save America
https://www.votesaveamerica.com
League of Conservation Voters
https://www.lcv.org
Environmental Voter Project
https://www.environmentalvoter.org
–trg
Thank you for reading! Please leave a comment.
Thank you for shedding light on ONE day in the hands of Trump - an incompetent, careless, totally irresponsible president. Reelecting this man would mean the final straw of ruin for our country. And thanks also for providing that great list of organizations we can work through to foster a broader understanding of that threat and to muster the voters and votes necessary to ensure sound leadership on all levels of government.
Insightful and most appreciated comments. Readers like you make it all worthwhile!