Convicted felon, adjudicated sexual abuser and President Trump in early June appointed 22 year old recent college graduate Thomas Fugate III to head the Department of Homeland Security’s Center for Prevention Programs and Partnerships (CP3), the section of DHS that works to combat terrorism, school shootings and violent hate crimes nationwide. The CP3 is in charge of overseeing an $18 million grant to help communities battle violent extremism.
Fugate’s job is to help protect and defend the U.S. amid heightened tensions with Iran and potential threats of terrorism inside the U.S. after the United States’ recent bombing of Iran’s nuclear sites.
Fugate replaces previous CP3 Director Bill Braniff, an Army veteran who has more than two decades of national security experience. Braniff resigned in March after the Trump regime slashed his staff of 80 people to just 20.
22 years old and zero experience
Fugate has no experience in national security or combatting terrorism. He graduated from the University of Texas, Austin in 2023 with an undergraduate degree in Politics and Law. His most relevant prior experience is being in a Model United Nations Club and working on Trump’s 2024 campaign. Fugate’s prior job experience includes being a self-employed landscaper and a supermarket clerk at an H-E-B grocery store in Texas.
Trump’s appointments have demonstrated his hostility towards people who have expertise in the subject matter their agencies oversee. The only qualification Trump seeks when nominating or appointing people to important positions is whether the appointee has shown complete and unquestioning loyalty to him and his agenda. That, along with manipulation of information and denigrating and discrediting anyone who disagrees with him, is how authoritarians consolidate power and maintain control.
Long time New York Times White House correspondent David E. Sanger, who has covered four presidencies over six decades, writes that “the most dangerous occupation in Washington right now is being an expert.”
Federal pay scales suggest Fugate’s salary ranges between $90,000 – $150,000/year.
@msnbc “He’s 22-years-old, one year out of college with no evident national security experience whatsoever.” After the Department of Homeland Security warned that “the ongoing Israel-Iran conflict could contribute to US-based individuals plotting additional attacks,” @The Rachel Maddow Show shares her take on Trump’s pick in charge of overseeing the government’s main hub for terrorism prevention, Thomas Fugate. #trump #nationalsecurity #dhs #news #politics #government ♬ original sound – MSNBC
Another unqualified appointee to create more havoc
The sand throwing started in 2016 and has continued unabated since.
In case you missed it, Trump has had a pretty good run, lately. Four Supreme Court cases went his way, he’s being praised by many in the US and.other nations for his actions against the Iran nuclear sites, the NATO secretary general unapologetically called Trump daddy because he managed to get agreements from almost all members to increase their contribution to 5% of GDP. He brokered a peace treaty between the Congo and Rwanda, who’ve been at war for sixty years, and best.of all…the southern border is closed.
This is certainly not the end of anything and there must be eternal vigilance about everything, but memes and shaming don’t seem to be doing the trick.
So its okay that he’s ignoring the Constitution, right? This all makes up for destroying our democracy.
Got it.
I’m curious about who you think your audience is. I think 97% of the people who read Anne’s blog are your fellow travelers and probably enjoy the insults you use on me. Are you playing for them? Certainly you aren’t trying to convince me of anything because I’m a hopeless, deluded hypocrite. But maybe you just enjoy being ugly.
The reason I post here is because I love to think through and articulate political ideas and get a read on what others are thinking. Anne always manages to give me subject matter. Luckily, I’m not trying to convince anyone of anything.
Your focus on the end of democracy (for real) is notable. I wonder if you or anyone here is really afraid or if this is just fear porn. If it’s real, that’s too bad and apparently you don’t know the history of this country and conflicts that have eventually gotten sorted out…ya know…democracy.
But you think that somehow Trump is a special case. You seem to think he is capable of wresting complete power, while at the same time calling him a buffoon.
None of this makes sense to me and eventually I come down to that you just hate him, no matter what.
I keep hoping you will realize how guillible you have been, but it isn’t a big hope.
If you are here to “get a read” on what liberals are thinking, you keep getting it wrong. It looks more like you’ve already decided what liberals think, and you just come here looking for anything to confirm that.
And no, the end of democracy is not fear porn. Did you klnow there is a provision in the “Big, Beautiful Bill” that will allow Trump to cancel elections? One of those SCOTUS wins you’ve been trumpeting makes it much harder for courts to stop unconstitutional actions. Do those sound like democratic actions to you? At this point, I seriously doubt we will have any more elections in this country. Certainly not for federal offices. Trump even said during the campaign that if you voted for him, you wouldn’t have to vote ever again. I take that seriously. Do you?
He is a buffoon. His people are buffoons. But they are smart enough to know how to work within the system to ensure they never lose the power they currently have. As usual, you have a black-or-white, all-or-nothing view of the world. The world isn’t like that. That is the biggest lie they’ve duped you into believing.
“The reason I post here is because I love to think through and articulate political ideas and get a read on what others are thinking.”
Your comments don’t supports this. You can articulate your political ideas by starting your own blog. You are instead engaging in trolling – by definition.
Anne, the walls of text and repeated messages are characteristics of trolling, please consider limiting badhhatharry’s comments.
I’m wondering if Anne has ever laid out the felonies Trump was convicted of. This is a little off topic but since she insists on reminding us, i thought it would be good to explain.
There were thirty four felonies..for falsifying business records. Alvin Bragg decided to make things look really bad, so he made every entry into the ledger into a separate count. In other words, two counts for each of the 17 payments. In New York this kind of malfeasance is a misdemeanor and punishable by a fine. But Letticia James (who is now under investigation for loan fraud) had sworn to bury Trump when she ran for Attorney General, so she and Bragg figured out a way to elevate the misdemeanor to a felony by saying it was election interference.
Not only that but they figured a way to trot out poor Stormy Daniels to testify about all her salacious stories (which had nothing to do with the case) And let’s not forget about sad Michael Cohen, another convicted felon testifying.
And the funniest part of all is that the judge allowed the jury to pick from three options which charges Trump should be convicted of and they didn’t have to agree. And here I thought juries had to be unanimous in their verdicts. I’m so old school.
The upshot of all this turmoil at the taxpayers’ expense is that Trump has been unconditionally discharged. No jail time and no fines. But thankfully Trump got his iconic mugshot and Anne gets to call him a convicted felon.
Next time I’ll expound on the three other cases, one of which involved the changing of a law which permitted a woman who couldn’t remember any dates, well past the statute of limitations, to sue Trump for rape.
That one reminds me of Blasey-Ford…right out of the democrats playbook.
Just today, an educated, high-functioning acquaintance said “I may not agree with Trump about everything, but I’m in favor of….”
What, I thought, like eliminating millions of Americans health insurance? Like rounding up brown-skinned working Americans, calling them criminals, and sending them to known-to-be-hellholes, foreign prisons without due process? Like telling his “followers” to harm his enemies, like journalists, judges, witnesses against him in his innumerable criminal and civil prosecutions?
Let us do, as the anti-Nazis did in the 1930s and 1940s: throw sand into the gears of the MAGA machine. Use your imagination. Be creative. Create memes. Obfuscate. Shame those who are deserving of shame.
It is an asymmetrical conflict, but We, the People, outnumber the predators and the malefactors.
The sand throwing started in 2016 and has continued unabated since.
In case you missed it, Trump has had a pretty good run, lately. Four Supreme Court cases went his way, he’s being praised by many in the US and.other nations for his actions against the Iran nuclear sites, the NATO secretary general unapologetically called Trump daddy because he managed to get agreements from almost all members to increase their contribution to 5% of GDP. He brokered a peace treaty between the Congo and Rwanda, who’ve been at war for sixty years, and best.of all…the southern border is closed.
This is certainly not the end of anything and there must be eternal vigilance about everything, but memes and shaming don’t seem to be doing the trick.