The Lincoln Logue | Seize the Oil, Change the 'Woke' Font, & Call It Leadership
From kneeling agents to seized oil, the Trump administration keeps teaching the same lesson.
The week unfolded less like a sequence of policy decisions than a demonstration of how power behaves once it no longer feels obligated to justify itself. Institutions that once relied on procedure now move through assertion alone, confident that explanation is optional and contradiction can be ignored. Personnel decisions arrived before investigations finished, sanctions blurred into seizures, and rhetoric hardened into doctrine without the inconvenience of proof. Small acts were elevated into punishable offenses while large ones were brushed aside as misunderstandings or jokes taken too seriously. Across agencies and borders, authority was exercised with a tone that suggested permanence, even when officials insisted everything was temporary. What emerged was not chaos, but a recognizable system learning how far it can go without resistance.
Beyond Washington, the effects landed unevenly but unmistakably. Career public servants discovered that restraint and de-escalation could be retroactively reclassified as disloyalty. Lawyers who once operated inside the machinery of accountability began building parallel structures outside it, adapting to a government that treats independence as hostility. Abroad, enforcement language expanded to cover everything from drugs to oil to entire governments, collapsing distinctions that once mattered. Even the smallest bureaucratic choices became ideological terrain, repurposed to signal dominance rather than function. Governance began to resemble a series of tests — not of competence, but of submission.
Underneath the noise ran a quieter recognition that this isn’t improvisation anymore; it’s repetition. Each episode reinforces the last, normalizing retaliation, trivializing escalation, and daring institutions to object. And yet the public response remains sharper than the architects of this system expect, with patterns becoming easier to trace and harder to dismiss. People are learning what this version of power values, what it punishes, and what it no longer bothers to defend. That clarity carries its own weight, even when the answers are unsettling.
Welcome back to The Lincoln Logue. Let’s get into it.
Monday, December 8 — The FBI Discovers a New Crime: Not Making Things Worse
▌Twelve former FBI agents say deescalation was rebranded as disloyalty.
The lawsuit lands with the quiet force of a record being corrected too late to undo the damage. Twelve former FBI agents say they were fired not for misconduct, but for kneeling in 2020 as a tactical move to calm a volatile crowd after the killing of George Floyd. Senior FBI officials at the time reviewed the incident and concluded it was nonpolitical, a judgment that held until politics returned years later to reclassify it. What once counted as restraint was retroactively labeled bias, and what was praised as de-escalation became evidence of impurity. Institutions that once defended judgment now punish it on command.
The mechanics of the purge matter as much as the symbolism. According to the complaint, an internal investigation was still pending when the agents were terminated, with no findings of wrongdoing and no completed review. That sequence turns due process into theater, a formality performed only until it becomes inconvenient. Termination letters accused the agents of “weaponizing” the bureau, even as the internal materials allegedly showed the opposite. Loyalty, in this framework, is no longer demonstrated through service or discipline, but through aesthetic alignment with the prevailing narrative. The law becomes something to cite after the decision has already been made.
What makes the episode especially corrosive is how small the original act was. Kneeling was not a declaration, not a policy position, not a protest staged for cameras, but a split-second decision made under pressure to prevent violence. By elevating that moment into a career-ending offense years later, the administration signals that neutrality itself is suspect when it interrupts spectacle. De-escalation threatens a politics that feeds on escalation, because calm leaves no villain to punish. The lawsuit doesn’t just challenge a set of firings; it exposes a government teaching its workforce that restraint will not be protected.
Source: Reuters