President Donald Trump has commenced a "purge" at the Department of Homeland Security by dismissing former secretary Kirstjen Nielsen and United States Secret Service director Randolph Alles.
Trump broke the news Sunday that Nielsen would be leaving the administration after reports described the president growing increasingly frustrated with the situation at the border. Alles, who reports directly to Nielsen, was asked to step down as the head of the Secret Service on Monday. It is unclear why Alles was asked to step aside but the White House told reporters it didn't have any relation to the recent security breach at Mar-a-Lago.
"Secret Service has done a fantastic job from Day 1. Very happy with them," Trump said.
The media cited an unnamed White House official that described this as a "near-systematic purge."
"There is a near-systematic purge happening at the nation's second-largest national security agency," one administration official said.
How asking for the resignation of the DHS secretary and the removal of the head of U.S. Secret Service constitutes as a purge remains a mystery.
The press did something similar in regards to the special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation. They compared the firing of former Attorney General Jeff Sessions to the Saturday Night Massacre, when President Richard Nixon fired his attorney general and deputy attorney general so he could fire the special prosecutor. Trump didn't fire Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein or fire Mueller, despite numerous predictions that he would. Early in his administration, the media also compared Trump's firing of acting Attorney General Sally Yates for not enforcing the administration's travel ban, to the Saturday Night Massacre.
People in the media may want to take note that firing two people for unrelated reasons does not match any commonly accepted definition of a "purge."