David Frum

At the FBI, which is also a bureaucracy in charge of keeping Americans safe against terrorism, many of the leading counterterrorism experts have been purged from the FBI because they had worked on cases involving President Trump.

Now, just how bizarre is this?

A week ago, the United States started a war or joined a war or resumed a war or intensified a war, you can put it however you like, against the world's leading state sponsor of terror.

It is a predictable response by the Iranians to this military confrontation with the United States.

They would try to turn on all of their worldwide terror networks

And the United States is without leadership and without a budget for the agency that is most responsible for keeping Americans safe against terrorism.

That's something you would think that would be thought of in advance, but apparently it has not been.

OK, all right.

Maybe they didn't think about it in advance.

But now, now that the war is actually here, you think there would be a big hurry to get the Department of Homeland Security on a counterterrorism footing to stop the inessentials like detaining grandmothers and shooting Americans at street corners?

And to focus on the core mission for which the DHS was created back in the George W. Bush years, counterterrorism.

Focus on that.

But no, no.

President Trump posted on his social media platform this past weekend that he would not sign any budget for the Department of Homeland Security unless he got first the passage through Congress of a voting measure to make it more difficult to vote by mail.

Now, why President Trump cares so much about voting by mail is a little hard to understand.

Let me just go down this rabbit hole for a second.

Who votes by mail?

Above all, active duty service personnel and older people, typically Republican constituencies.

So even from a narrow party maximizing point of view, this makes no sense.

But Donald Trump seems to be motivated by a fear that or by theory that he lost in 2020 because of vote by mail.