August 16, 2018 12:35 PM UTC

Cory Gardner, Banana Republican

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• by: Colorado Pols

The decision this week by President Donald Trump to revoke the security clearance of former CIA Director John Brennan continues to reverberate, being an unprecedented break with longstanding bipartisan tradition to strike back at one of the administration’s more potent critics. Trump’s original threats to revoke clearances for his critics was laughed off by House Speaker Paul Ryan as “trolling,” but nobody’s laughing now.

They’re normalizing:

Cory Gardner, chairman of the NRSC, tells us this of Trump move to retaliate against Brennan: “I think what John Brennan has said about this country over the past several months has been disgraceful.”

— Manu Raju (@mkraju) August 16, 2018

That’s Colorado’s own Sen. Cory Gardner, defending the decision to revoke a former CIA director’s security clearances, acknowledging that the action was taken because of things John Brennan said about the President. We get that Brennan has no right to a security clearance, and the the President necessarily has the authority to revoke them.

But this is not how American presidents behave. This is how petty thugs with no checks on their power behave.

At least for the purposes of this interview, though, Gardner was all game face–CNN’s Manu Raju continues:

Gardner says this of the Omarosa ‘dog’ comment: “I would not have made that comment.” And when asked if those distractions impact GOP bid to keep Senate majority, he said: “If you look at red-state Democrats, they are all trying to be the president’s best friend.”

— Manu Raju (@mkraju) August 16, 2018

To summarize, the United States is the in the grip of an unprecedented political and moral crisis because Donald Trump is disgracing his office at such a rapid pace it can barely be catalogued. He is alienating our allies, emboldening our enemies, dividing the American public, and misusing his power as President to lash out against his critics. His serial mistreatment of women is setting back gender relations in this country by decades. Donald Trump is unquestionably one of the worst Presidents in American history, perhaps the worst, and the damage Trump is doing will take years after he leaves office to undo.

And now we know with certainty: Cory Gardner is not going to lift a finger to stop it.