GOP VOTERS DON'T BELIEVE THERE WERE ANY ACTUAL AMERICANS IN THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT FOR NEARLY THIRTY YEARS

Frank Bruni makes an obvious point:

... this week, as several longtime civil servants testify at the inquiry’s first public hearings, a ... narrative demands notice....

That story is the collision of a president who has absolutely no regard for professionalism and those who try to embody it....

I mean William Taylor, America’s top diplomat in Ukraine, who is, tellingly, the first impeachment witness to testify on live television....

He’s a West Point graduate and Vietnam veteran with a half-century career that’s devoid of obvious partisanship and entirely about the public good.... He’s a creature of duty and discipline and earnestly accrued knowledge — all precious commodities that are worthless in Trump’s eyes. In other words, he’s a true professional, and it was as such that he recoiled from what Trump, Rudy Giuliani and the wretched rest of them were up to.

Marie Yovanovitch, the former ambassador to Ukraine, has a diplomatic résumé that’s three decades long and includes three ambassadorships, an unusual feat.... [Trump and Rudy Giuliani] quibbled with her professionalism, which had no place in their schemes....

It’s the professionals who keep pushing back at [Trump], whether at the Federal Reserve, the Birmingham, Ala., office of the National Weather Service or the State Department, which is where Taylor, Yovanovitch and this week’s other impeachment witness, George Kent, worked.

Steve Bannon spent only a year in Trump's orbit -- he took over the presidential campaign in August 2016 and left his White House position in August 2017 -- but he injected a massive dose of poison into our national narrative. Trump's habit of lashing out at anyone who prevents him from getting what he wants is infantile and instinctual, but Bannon gave Trump a framework for understanding his frustrations: The president wasn't merely battling with the bureaucracy, he was fighting a sinister force that needs to be eliminated from government, alternately known as "the administrative state" and "the deep state." With the help of Breitbart, Fox News, and other right-wing media outlets, Bannon spread this idea widely and made it mainstream on the right.

Now it's regarded as perfectly reasonable to question the patriotism of literally every person who's ever served in the federal government since the days of Saint Reagan. None of them can be trusted. All of them -- even the wounded veterans, or the ones who were loyal to Republican presidents lionized at the time by GOP voters -- are seen as evil.

This isn't completely new. For years, Republican voters have agreed that expertise is suspect and simple patriotic intuition is far superior. They've responded favorably to denunciations of "career politicians." They've made heroes of thin-résuméd, poorly informed presidents: Reagan, Trump, first-term George W. Bush.

But Reagan and W didn't launch all-out assaults on the very notion of expertise and experience at lower levels of government. W fired U.S. attorneys who wouldn't pursue mythical cases of Democratic voter fraud, and his team in Iraq tried to run the country after the overthrow of Saddam using unqualified young right-wing ideologues from America. But there was no publicly declared all-out war on expertise in government. Career diplomats and bureaucrats mostly continued to serve quietly and without incident. What's happening now is new.

Today, the average Republican voter believes that every long-serving underling in the government is a traitor. That's dangerous. Steve Bannon seems like a clownish has-been now, but he did a lot of damage before his downfall.