The Week's Saturday Wrap
Wray’s resignation, halting polio vaccines, and a school’s cotton lesson

 
controversy of the week

Wray: Surrendering the FBI to Trump?

America needed Christopher Wray to be a “profile in courage,” said Anthony Coley in MSNBC.com. Instead, the FBI director took “the easy way out,” announcing last week that he’d step down before Donald Trump’s January inauguration. Yes, Wray’s days were numbered. Trump, who nominated the Republican to be the nation’s top cop in 2017, has never forgiven Wray for authorizing the 2022 raid to retrieve classified documents from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate. Trump had also already named MAGA sycophant Kash Patel to be Wray’s replacement. That left the FBI director with a choice: resign “or stay until Trump fired him.” Wray decided to do the former, saying it was “the best way to avoid dragging the bureau deeper into the fray” of politics. He has that exactly backward. FBI directors are appointed to 10-year terms precisely to insulate them from the political fray and prevent incoming presidents from installing vengeful loyalists. Had Wray stuck around and forced Trump to weather the scandal of firing him, it’s possible the Senate would have blocked Patel’s nomination and the FBI would have remained a nonpartisan law enforcement agency. Instead, Wray “did exactly what a would-be autocrat wants: He obeyed in advance.” 

“Good riddance,” said Miranda Devine in the New York Post. Trump has his reasons to distrust Wray—starting with that “needlessly provocative” Mar-a-Lago raid—and so does the public. When Wray wasn’t “stonewalling” congressional probes, he was “siccing” agents on such dangerous criminals as Christians praying outside abortion clinics and concerned parents trying to speak at school board meetings. Americans want new leadership at the FBI, said Charles C.W. Cooke in National Review, and Trump campaigned on a promise to deliver it. Is the unwritten norm of the bureau’s “independence” so sacred that Trump should betray voters and preserve the FBI as a “rogue agency that answers to nobody”? 

Better that than a rogue president with a private police force, said Garrett M. Graff in Politico. With his “anticipatory surrender,” Wray is effectively handing the keys of the planet’s “most powerful, best resourced, and farthest-reaching law enforcement agency” to Patel, a grotesque figure whose plans to “weaponize the FBI against Trump’s foes” are so explicit, they include a published 60-name enemies list. Trump had hoped Wray would be that kind of loyalist, said Jonathan Chait in The Atlantic. But when Wray sent agents to retrieve the boxes of classified military plans and nuclear secrets Trump was hiding—and repeatedly lied about hiding—at Mar-a- Lago, he disqualified himself from a job that in Trump’s mind has only two duties. They are (1) to let Trump break the law “with impunity and (2) to investigate anybody who interferes with (1).” 

Wray’s resignation may actually be an “act of defiance,” said David French in The New York Times. Under federal law, an FBI director who voluntarily resigns can be replaced only by a senior FBI official or by someone the Senate has already confirmed to a different post. Patel meets neither of these requirements, and so can’t “walk into the job on Day 1” as Trump intended. Perhaps, said Nick Catoggio in The Dispatch, but “spineless” Senate Republicans will likely “end up rubber-stamping Patel’s nomination” before too long, and it won’t be Wray’s fault. Defiant rhetoric about saving “American norms and institutions from Trump” is all very well, but after voters just knowingly elected a law- and norm-disdaining president, the hard question presents itself: “Who are you saving them for?”

 
 

Only in America

Virginia’s Loudoun County school district has apologized after a history teacher passed around a piece of raw cotton during a lesson on slavery. Southern states’ reliance on African slaves to pick cotton for its textile industry is widely recognized as one cause of the U.S. Civil War. But after complaints from local civil rights groups that letting students handle cotton was “culturally insensitive,” the district apologized and pledged, “We must and will do better.”

 
 
talking points

Polio: The threat to a ‘miracle’ vaccine

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has said he won’t “take away anybody’s vaccines” if confirmed to lead the Department of Health and Human Services. “But his right-hand man has other ideas,” said Janna Brancolini in the Daily Beast. Lawyer Aaron Siri, who has been helping Kennedy vet candidates for key health positions in the incoming Trump administration, petitioned the FDA in 2022 to revoke its approval of the polio vaccine. Scientific studies have repeatedly shown the shot is safe, yet Siri wants it pulled until a lengthy new round of testing is completed, a process that would leave children vulnerable to “a highly infectious disease” that once killed or paralyzed 500,000 people worldwide each year. Siri has more targets in his sights, said Bindu Bansinath in New York magazine. He has petitioned the FDA to “pause distribution” of 13 other shots, including those for tetanus, diphtheria, and whooping cough. This is the man that RFK Jr.—who last year falsely claimed the polio shot “killed many, many more people” than the disease itself—wants as his general counsel at HHS. “What could possibly go wrong?” 

Kennedy’s ties to Siri “could tank his HHS nomination,” said Ross O’Keefe in the Washington Examiner. It will take only four GOP senators to sink a nominee, given Republicans’ 53-47 majority in the chamber. And Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), a childhood polio survivor, last week warned anyone seeking confirmation “to steer clear” of even appearing to undermine public confidence “in proven cures.” Even without Kennedy, Donald Trump’s next administration “could be teeming” with anti-vaxxers, said Aaron Blake in The Washington Post. Former Florida Rep. Dave Weldon and Dr. Mehmet Oz have been nominated for top health jobs; both have parroted the debunked theory that childhood vaccines cause autism. His choice for FBI director, Kash Patel, has hawked quack vaccine “detox” supplements. And then there’s Trump himself, who last week promised to nix any vaccines that he considers “dangerous.” 

“For my family, the prospect of halting polio immunization is horrifying,” said Jana Kozlowski in The Free Press. A decade before Jonas Salk’s vaccine arrived in 1955, my maternal grandparents lost two sons—ages 3 and 7—to polio in a single week. The disease kills children when their nerves are destroyed, “when their muscles shut down, when they can no longer swallow, and then can no longer breathe.” Millions of children have been spared that suffering thanks “to the miracle of the vaccine,” which eradicated the disease in the U.S. It’s a miracle that we forget at our peril.

 
 

It wasn’t all bad

After moving into their Honolulu apartment three years ago, Andy Pender and his wife, Lydia, began hearing loud music through the walls. Knocking on the door, they met Derek Peart, a 98-year-old former British Navy pilot whose hearing aids weren’t properly adjusted. They helped fix the hearing aids, and in Peart’s apartment, they spotted a piano. With Lydia’s prodding, Peart began playing from memory. Soon, the couple began a monthly tradition: pizza followed by a piano concert—sometimes with Lydia singing along with lyrics Peart writes.

 
 

Image credits, from top: Nathan Posner / Anadolu / Getty Images; Hulton-Deutsch / Getty Images