Mandy Gunasekara
Right now, it looks like former President Donald Trump will be returning to the White House in early 2025. His opponent is weak. Inflation remains high and confidence in the Biden administration is plummeting on everything, especially in foreign affairs.
Today, people can look at the Biden disaster and contrast it with Trump’s tenure. The choice is obvious.
At the same time, Biden’s absurd show trials of Trump have boomeranged to the former president’s benefit; no one is fooled as to what this Kafkaesque circus is about, which is scoring political points to distract from Biden’s numerous failures. Biden believes that voters are so stupid that, if they see a picture of Trump in handcuffs, they will forget all about how bad the last four years have been. This won’t work.
As it stands, Trump is getting back at his political enemies in the polls — all before entering office again. But at the same time, Biden and Co. are taking steps to get back at the former and future president, as well as his allies. Steve Bannon and Peter Navarro are two Trump allies and former officials who have been subjected to Democrat lawfare from the Biden government and its allies in Congress and elsewhere.
Any outspoken proponent of Trump can become a target of the Deep State. Unfortunately, I am now among that number of Trump administration officials subject to legal harassment.
In early May, my husband Surya was at our office in Oxford, in Mississippi, when two FBI officials and a representative from the Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Inspector General) walked in. I just happened to be out of town at a conference in Oklahoma City.
The trio informed my husband that they were in town to serve me a subpoena related to an ongoing criminal investigation. Moreover, they told Surya that they were in the process of convening a grand jury.
Surya accepted the subpoena on my behalf without issue. The decision of the EPA OIG to wait until the metaphorical eleventh hour was a deliberate one. Because Trump is poised to return to the White House next year, the partisans at EPA are taking preemptive steps to block me from returning in a leadership role.
This strategy is novel in that the Deep State wants to get at its opponents before they even enter into public service. As with Biden’s lawfare against Trump, the logic here is that, if partisans can sully my reputation with spurious charges, they can sink any potential confirmation vote or make the administration think twice before hiring me to a senior role.
Their additional goal is to create financial strain or even bankrupt me. Lawyers suited for addressing these types of subpoenas are not cheap and they know it. It’s also why they punctuated the entire process with a veiled threat to my husband. “You got any subpoenas for my time at CBP?” my husband asked as they exited our office — referring to his service at U.S. Customs and Border Protection under the Department of Homeland Security.
“Not yet,” said one of the agents. And on that ominous tone, they left.
Frustrating as this situation is, it is no surprise. In fact, it is totally on-brand for the Biden administration and its supporters in the civil service. Throughout my new book (Y’all Fired: A Southern Belle’s Guide to Restoring Federalism and Draining The Swamp), I have discussed the plans and processes for reasserting control over the Executive Branch. All the while, I have noted that reform will be difficult largely because those in power do not want to give up their illegally seized influence and authority.
I will ultimately be fine, but I worry that many others will not be. This is all the more reason to see the reform effort for what it is: a risky, deeply rooted problem made all the worse by the activists seeking to reinforce the status quo at any cost, no matter how immoral or illegal.
I reject the Establishment Republican idea that we cannot reassert our rightful, constitutional authority over the federal government. But I do concede that it will be hard, and that there will be political casualties, i.e., those whose careers are harmed by a Deep State that takes issue with their service, even though they committed no misdeeds as political appointees. To borrow a favorite word of Trump’s, D.C. is a truly “nasty” place. As conservatives, we will have few friends; and as reformers, we will have even fewer yet. We should be candid about this, but we should not be pessimistic. There is so much we can do, y’all — so much low-hanging fruit we can grab — that will go a long way in fixing things in our dysfunctional federal government.
To win these battles, we must keep in mind the important lessons explained, re-explained and hammered home throughout my book, including the importance of planning, teamwork, loyalty, focus and perhaps the most important, courage.
Mandy Gunasekara served as chief of staff to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency under President Trump. The above piece is an excerpt from the author’s new book, “Y’all Fired: A Southern Belle’s Guide to Restoring Federalism and Draining The Swamp,” which will release on Oct. 1, 2024.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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