Trump is already Making America Gape Again
His administration is going to be just as incompetent as it was last time
— maybe more so.
By Dana
Milbank
November 15, 2024 at 7:30 a.m. EST
I had hoped to spend the week writing about a topic other
than politics. But suddenly, it was 2017 all over again.
My phone lit up with alerts that sounded like headlines
from the Onion.
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For director of national intelligence, Donald Trump had
tapped Tulsi Gabbard, whose parroting of Russian propaganda was so reckless
that Mitt Romney called it “treasonous.”
To run the Pentagon, Trump had tapped Pete Hegseth, a Fox
News weekend host with no major managerial experience who just five days
earlier said “we should not have women in combat roles” because men are “more capable.”
For secretary of health and human services, he selected Robert F. Kennedy
Jr., who has claimed antidepressants
cause school shootings, chemicals cause people to become transgender and
vaccines cause autism.
And to be attorney general he chose Matt Gaetz, just two
days before the House Ethics Committee was set to release its findings on what
The Post has called “his dealings with a
then-17-year-old girl.” Trump
named his personal defense lawyer to be the No. 2 Justice Department official.
President Joe Biden, meeting with Trump on Wednesday, said
he was “looking forward to having a smooth transition.”
But Trump doesn’t do smooth. He is going to Make America
Gape Again — and, after just one week as president-elect, he has already begun
producing one car wreck after another.
His ambassador to Israel is going to be former Arkansas
governor Mike Huckabee, who is on record saying: “There is no such thing as a
West Bank. It’s Judea and Samaria. There is
no such thing as a settlement. They’re communities. They’re neighborhoods.
They’re cities. There’s no such thing as an occupation.”
His choice to be secretary of state, Sen. Marco Rubio
(Florida), is relatively conventional — but this set off a campaign to get
Trump’s daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, appointed to Rubio’s Senate seat. Beating
this drum has been, among others, Elon Musk and, bizarrely, Musk’s mother.
Musk, after his super-PAC spent some $200 million getting Trump elected, is now requiring payback: He
has been Trump’s sidekick: sitting in on a call with Russian President Vladimir
Putin, joining Trump on a visit to the House Republican caucus, hanging around
at Mar-a-Lago and entertaining Trump’s granddaughter. Trump appointed Musk to
run the “Department of Government Efficiency,” which is a nonexistent
government department apparently created to form the acronym “DOGE,” which is
also the name of Musk’s favorite
cryptocurrency.
Musk has already announced a goal that would, if
implemented, cut all government functions except defense, Social Security and
Medicare by about 75 percent. His DOGE co-director, Vivek Ramaswamy, has
floated a plan that would eliminate veterans’ health care.
Those who were wondering what the second Trump term would
look like didn’t have long to wait. We’re already back to the chaos, caprice
and overreach. Any hope that he might moderate — in truth, this was never more
than a fantasy — has already been dashed.
But there is some good news in the way Trump has produced
mayhem and confusion right from the start. One of the greatest concerns about
Trump’s second term was that he would be more competent this time around. But
we can already see that there is no learning curve for Trump. His
administration is going to be just as incompetent as it was last time — maybe
more so.
Trump is making his decisions from “a makeshift situation
room at Mar-a-Lago, surrounded by TV monitors,” Axios reports. One Trump associate told the
Associated Press the chaotic process is like
“Game of Thrones.”
But if his personnel process looks like “Game of Thrones,”
his presidency will more likely resemble Fox News: constant vitriol, cultural
warfare and perpetual sense of crisis.
Gabbard, Huckabee and “border czar” Tom Homan — in addition
to Hegseth — have all been on Fox’s payroll. As Media Matters’s Matt Gertz
reported, many of the others are also Fox
fixtures. Rep. Michael Waltz (R-Florida), Trump’s choice for national security
adviser, has made at least 569 weekday Fox News appearances over the past seven
years. Stephen Miller, incoming deputy chief of staff, appeared at least 374
times; Gaetz at least 347; Environmental Protection Agency
administrator-designate Lee Zeldin at least 307; Rubio at least 263. There were
at least 180 weekday appearances by John Ratcliffe, tapped to run the CIA; 135
appearances by South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, Trump’s pick to be homeland
security secretary; and 108 by Rep. Elise Stefanik (New York), chosen to be
U.N. ambassador.
The new Trump is looking a lot like the old Trump, whose
administration had at least 20 former Fox News employees. “I’ve lost, like,
four guests,” Fox host Greg Gutfeld lamented on air. “I think the Gutfeld show
is going to be staffing the entire White House.”
“They are assembling a constellation of stars, which I
happen to know intimately, and I’ve never been this excited before,” said Jesse
Watters, another Fox News host who hasn’t (yet) joined the incoming
administration.
It is exciting, in the sense that
absolutely anything could happen at any moment, depending on the last guy who
spoke to Trump.
To run the Justice Department, Trump’s transition team had
been vetting possible candidates
since well before the election —
but Trump apparently offered the job to Gaetz on a whim after talking with him
aboard Trump’s airplane earlier in the day. It’s not clear whether Trump even
knew (as Gaetz surely did) that the Ethics Committee was about to issue a
“highly damaging” report about Gaetz, Punchbowl News reported not long after
Trump announced Gaetz as his choice. Gaetz then resigned from Congress in what
seemed to be an attempt to keep the report from coming out. The move caught
just about everybody by surprise — not least House Speaker Mike Johnson, who
told reporters he “begged and pleaded” with Trump not to take anybody else from
his thin House majority to serve in the administration.
Installing a Fox News host atop the world’s most powerful
military was likewise done with little apparent forethought. The Post reported
that the Trump transition hadn’t even vetted Hegseth until days before the announcement. That snap vetting
might have missed the detail that Hegseth cheated on his second wife
with a Fox News producer to whom he is now married.
News of the Gabbard pick came out in an appropriately bizarre
fashion. Trump leaked word that he had
chosen the avid conspiracy theorist to Roger Stone, also an avid conspiracy
theorist, who just happened at that moment to be doing an interview with Alex
Jones, the granddaddy of all conspiracy theorists. Stone read the announcement
live on Jones’s Infowars — and it turned out to be a last triumph for Jones.
The next day, the aforementioned Onion won an auction for
control of Infowars, which Jones had to sell to pay some
$1.5 billion in damages for his claims that the Sandy Hook shooting was a hoax.
Several of Gabbard’s conspiracy theorist ideas have been
worthy of Jones. She sided with Syria and Russia against the U.S. government’s
finding that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad launched chemical weapons
attacks. She amplified the false Russian claim that the United States funded
bioweapons labs in Ukraine. She also defended Russia’s “legitimate security concerns”
in Ukraine. Hillary Clinton had suggested that the Russians were “grooming”
Gabbard.
And now Gabbard will be atop the U.S. intelligence
community. Knowing that, what ally would share sensitive information with us?
Even before the Gabbard appointment, former British prime minister Boris
Johnson, a Trump ally, warned that some Trump advisers have a “weird homoerotic
fascination” with Putin.
In fairness, some of the more qualified people have said
they don’t want to be considered for Trump administration jobs. Sen. Tom Cotton
(R-Arkansas) reportedly declined to be considered for CIA director and defense
secretary, for example, while Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-Missouri) didn’t want to be
considered for attorney general.
Trump’s win was not exactly a landslide: The Post’s Philip
Bump and Lenny Bronner project that he will have beaten Vice President Kamala
Harris by about one percentage point — the closest popular vote margin since 2000.
Yet Trump is already signaling wild power grabs. His team
has reportedly drafted an executive order creating a “warrior board” to
recommend a mass purge of top military
officers and is preparing to fire all of
the Joint Chiefs of Staff,
replacing them with more malleable generals. Kennedy has proposed that 600
people at the National Institutes of Health be fired on the first
day of the Trump administration.
Trump himself is already making noises about serving beyond
the constitutionally allowed two terms, telling House Republicans: “I suspect I
won’t be running again unless you say he’s so good we got to figure something else out.” Trump also demanded that senators shelve their
constitutional advise-and-consent powers and instead “agree to Recess
Appointments” for his nominees.
Trump allies in Congress are pledging full compliance. “His
mission, and his goals and objectives, whatever that is, we need to embrace it.
All of it. Every single word,” Rep. Troy E. Nehls (R-Texas) told reporters.
“If Donald Trump says jump three feet high and scratch your head, we all jump
three feet and scratch our heads.”
Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Alabama) said the next Senate
majority leader, John Thune (R-South Dakota), has “no choice” but to push
Trump’s agenda because “President Trump and JD Vance are going to be running
the Senate.”
And the man sowing all this chaos? He is as erratic as he
has ever been. On social media this week, Trump has attacked former aide
Anthony Scaramucci (“a major loser”) and “Crazy Liz Chaney” (sic), while
continuing his personal enrichment schemes (“Get a copy of my newest book, SAVE
AMERICA today!”), reposting a demonic image of Harris along with a claim that
he won a “historic landslide,” and expressing whatever else pops into his
disordered mind (“The NFL should get rid of the ridiculous new Kickoff Rule!”).
It’s all deeply unsettling, yet at the same time it offers
a kernel of hope: The man is just too unstable to be competent.
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Welcome to the Donald Trump Amateur Hour. Can democracy survive it?
Trump is stocking his Cabinet with amateurs and pranksters. Can democracy
survive it?
By Ruth
Marcus
November 15, 2024 at 7:45 a.m. EST
It took Donald Trump scarcely a week to demonstrate his
utter contempt for the government he is about to lead, culminating in his
choice of Matt Gaetz to be attorney
general. The Senate cannot allow this
dangerous man to become the nation’s chief law enforcement officer.
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Trump’s appointments briefly looked fine, normal even,
with Marco Rubio to be secretary of state and Elise Stefanik to be ambassador to the United Nations.
They went downhill from
there, with candidates manifestly
underqualified for the positions for which they were selected — former New York
congressman Lee Zeldin, who has no real experience on environmental issues, to
lead the Environmental Protection Agency; South Dakota Gov. Kristi L. Noem to
head the sprawling Department of Homeland Security; and Fox News host Pete
Hegseth to serve as defense secretary, despite his absence of serious
management or defense policy experience.
Then things went from insulting to untenable. Trump tapped
former representative Tulsi Gabbard to be the director of national
intelligence. It’s bad enough that Gabbard lacks
any experience on intelligence matters, but even more scary that she has cozied
up to Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad and Russian President Vladimir
Putin. As Tom Nichols wrote in the Atlantic, “A person with Gabbard’s views
should not be allowed anywhere near the crown jewels of American intelligence.”
Thursday’s news — Trump’s choice of
anti-vaxxer Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to be
secretary of health and human services — was more of the shocking same.
But nothing in the history of presidential Cabinet choices
compares with Trump’s selection of Gaetz. Trump’s former national security
adviser John Bolton called it “the worst nomination for a Cabinet secretary in
American history,” and that doesn’t seem like an overstatement.
The choice of Gaetz reflects Trump unleashed. I’m told
Gaetz was not even among the candidates vetted for the attorney general post —
those names included Clarence Thomas ally Mark Paoletta and Missouri Attorney
General Andrew Bailey. They would have been bad enough.
But the toddler wants what the toddler wants, and in
Trump’s case that is someone willing to indulge his desires to exact
retribution, someone unconcerned about barreling through department rules and
norms against politicizing prosecutions, someone who would not resist a Trump
edict no matter how out of line.
Here, the very antics that so repelled even his Republican
colleagues — Gaetz’s performative histrionics in the service of Trump, his
embrace of conspiracy theories no matter how outlandish (antifa was responsible
for the Jan. 6 insurrection) — were a plus-up for the president-elect.
Before the election, Trump’s choice for vice president, JD
Vance, termed the attorney general
post “the most important job after
president of the United States,” adding, “We really want the American people to
believe that we have a fair and equitable administration of justice. If not,
the entire sort of system falls apart. You need people to believe that if the
attorney general prosecutes somebody, it’s motivated by justice and law and not
by politics.”
And this is who they came up with?
The Judiciary Act of 1789 created the post of attorney general, calling for “a
meet person, learned in the law.” No sane person would argue Gaetz fits that
description. Most candidates for attorney general don’t feel compelled to seek preemptive pardons from a departing president.
Leaving aside his repellent behavior in Congress, Gaetz was the subject of a Justice Department — yes, that Justice Department —
probe into sex trafficking of minors. (The department ultimately didn’t bring
charges and Gaetz denied wrongdoing.) Gaetz resigned just two days before the
House Ethics Committee, which has been investigating allegations that Gaetz
engaged in sexual misconduct, used drugs and accepted improper gifts, was
planning to issue a damning report. Put it this way: No mother says to her son, “Why can’t
you be more like Matt Gaetz.”
Some see method to Trump’s madness, a you-scratch-my-back
play that goes like this: Gaetz knew he wouldn’t get confirmed as attorney
general but seized on the opportunity to get out of Congress before the ethics
report was released. Trump doesn’t mind having a nominee go up in flames,
because Gaetz’s demise will clear the way for other controversial nominees who
might otherwise have failed. Senate rebellion, such as it is, only goes so far.
Maybe. But. Trump is a man who hates losing. When has he
ever engaged in a tactical loss that would be seen as a personal humiliation to
reap a benefit down the road?
My fear is twofold. One possibility is that not enough
Senate Republicans, despite their revulsion for Gaetz, will have the guts to
stand up to Trump. History does not augur well for backbone on the part of
elected officials defying Trump.
A second, even scarier, is that Trump, if senators defy
him, will employ a never before used option, outlined in the Constitution, that
grants the president power to unilaterally adjourn congress if the two houses
are unable to agree on a time for adjournment. If Trump were to do so, he could
then use his constitutional authority to grant recess appointments during that period.
And a man with the power of an attorney general and the
character of a Gaetz would be enormously dangerous. Imagine: A Trump-Gaetz
Justice Department concocting charges against, say, Liz Cheney. It is close to
impossible to imagine such a prosecution succeeding, but it is also true that a
federal judge assigned to oversee such a case would find it difficult to throw
out such a case before it came before a jury. From the Trump-Gaetz point of
view, forcing Cheney to endure the expense and indignity of a trial might be
punishment enough.
Taking office in 1975 in the aftermath of Watergate, a
scandal that claimed Richard M. Nixon and his attorney general and tarnished
the department, Gerald Ford’s straight-arrow attorney general, Edward H. Levi,
emphasized the importance of the rule of law.
“We have lived in a time of change and corrosive skepticism
and cynicism concerning the administration of justice,” Levi said at his swearing
in. “Nothing can more weaken the quality
of life or more imperil the realization of those goals we all hold dear than
our failure to make clear by word and deed that our law is not an instrument of
partisan purpose, and it is not an instrument to be used in ways which are
careless of the higher values which are within all of us.”
What would Levi say now? There is something worse than a
clown in Congress. That is a clown invested with subpoena power and the
authority to convene a federal grand jury.
