Donald Trump's First 100 Days: "Trump private security force ‘playing with fire’"

The president-elect continues to employ a battalion of retired cops and FBI agents to protect him and clamp down on protesters.

President-elect Donald Trump has continued employing a private security and intelligence team at his victory rallies, and he is expected to keep at least some members of the team after he becomes president, according to people familiar with the plans.

The arrangement represents a major break from tradition. All modern presidents and presidents-elect have entrusted their personal security entirely to the Secret Service, and their event security mostly to local law enforcement, according to presidential security experts and Secret Service sources.

But Trump — who puts a premium on loyalty and has demonstrated great interest in having forceful security at his events — has opted to maintain an aggressive and unprecedented private security force, led by Keith Schiller, a retired New York City cop and Navy veteran who started working for Trump in 1999 as a part-time bodyguard, eventually rising to become his head of security.

Security officials warn that employing private security personnel heightens risks for the president-elect and his team, as well as for protesters, dozens of whom have alleged racial profiling, undue force or aggression at the hands of Trump’s security, with at least 10 joining a trio of lawsuits now pending against Trump, his campaign or its security. Read More

It is not only a break with tradition but a bad precedent. Only dictators have their own private security forces who are loyal solely to them. Trump's security team may be made up of ex-police officers and ex-FBI agents but that is not going to prevent them from acting like thugs and employing bully-boy tactics.

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With the Jerusalem Declaration conservative Anglicans committed themselves to a policy of creation care, or conservation. Article 10 states, “We are mindful of our responsibility to be good stewards of God’s creation, to uphold and advocate justice in society, and to seek relief and empowerment of the poor and needy.” That stewardship extends to preserving and protecting Earth’s natural resources but also its atmosphere and climate—two resources that are critical to humanity’s survival. We cannot raise crops and livestock on land that has turned into desert due to the lack of rain or has become covered by salt water due to rising sea levels. Climate change will impact agriculture here in the United States as well as around the world. The United States will no longer be the world’s bread basket. It will have trouble feeding itself much less the starving populations of countries hardest hit by climate change.

Right now a lot of food stuffs that are eaten in the United States are not grown or raised in the United States. The plenty we enjoy today depends not only on the agricultural conditions in those countries from which these food stuffs come – fruit from Chile, beef from Brazil, vegetables from Mexico – but also upon the goodwill of those countries toward the United States and other factors. They are not going to ship food stuffs to the United States if in doing so they are starving their own populations and creating massive political instability. Whether the United States could become self-sufficient in its food production like it once was is highly debatable. What the nation is likely to see is growing food insecurity and increased hunger. It can also expect to witness greater civil unrest.