Starting Monday: The
Trump administration’s days of blunder
Talk of tattoos, Jesus,
enemies lists and a war with California mark the week before inauguration.
January
17, 2025 at 7:30 a.m. ESTToday at 7:30 a.m. EST
At a forum this week hosted by Politico, former top Trump
strategist and current MAGA loudmouth Steve Bannon said insiders have a name
for the first days of the incoming Trump administration. “We refer to it right
now as ‘Days of Thunder,’” he said. “And I think these Days of Thunder
starting next week are going to be incredibly, incredibly intense.”
Why would President-elect Donald Trump’s advisers compare
their return to power with a 35-year-old movie
about NASCAR? This can only mean they are expecting a series of
car wrecks. And, in fact, the pileups have already begun — a familiar mix of
incompetence, defiance of the law, infighting and tilting at windmills.
(“Windmills are an economic and environmental disaster. I don’t want even one
built during my administration,” Trump announced on Wednesday.)
Bannon himself is publicly feuding with billionaire Elon Musk, who
has attached himself, barnacle-like, to Trump. Bannon told an Italian newspaper
that Musk is “a truly evil person” who has the “maturity of a child” (fact
check: mostly true), and that “he should go back to South Africa,” where Musk
grew up during apartheid. Musk, in turn, has called his MAGA critics “subtards”
and “contemptible fools” (fact check: well, let’s not go there).
On the same day Bannon spoke about Days of Thunder, I was
in a hearing room in the Dirksen Senate Office Building, watching the most
extravagantly unqualified nominee I have ever seen. Pete Hegseth makes the
closest runner-up, Harriet Miers, George W. Bush’s ill-fated Supreme Court nominee, look like Oliver
Wendell Holmes. Hegseth has faced widespread and credible allegations of
drunkenness on the job, financial mismanagement at the two small charities he
ran, and sexual harassment and assault.
(He paid a woman who accused him of assault
while denying the accusation.) A weekend host for Fox News, Hegseth never ran a
large organization and held a junior rank in the military, and he has said
women shouldn’t serve in combat and disparaged the Geneva Conventions, which
govern the laws of war. He also appears to have no idea what he’s doing.
At Hegseth’s confirmation hearing on Tuesday, Sen. Tammy
Duckworth (D-Illinois) sprung a pop quiz on him, asking the defense
secretary-designate how many nations are in ASEAN, the Association of Southeast
Asian Nations. “I couldn’t tell you the exact amount of nations, but I know we
have allies in South Korea and Japan and in AUKUS with Australia,” Hegseth
ventured.
“None of those three countries that you’ve mentioned are in
ASEAN,” Duckworth informed him.
President Joe Biden’s defense secretary, Lloyd Austin, has
met annually with his counterparts in ASEAN, as did Trump defense secretaries
Jim Mattis and Mark T. Esper before him. This is because ASEAN is crucial to
the United States in its geopolitical struggle against China — and Hegseth
doesn’t even know what it is.
The next day brought the confirmation hearing of Pam Bondi,
whose main qualification to be attorney general is that she’s not Matt Gaetz.
During her ferociously partisan appearance, she refused to acknowledge that
Biden won the 2020 election, left on the table prosecuting Liz Cheney, Jack
Smith and Merrick Garland, and delivered frequent taunts about Trump’s
“overwhelming” victory in November. (He won by 1.5 percentage points and got
less than 50 percent of the vote). “Look at the map of California,” she told
California Democrat Adam Schiff. “It’s bright red, the popular vote, for a
reason.” Trump lost California by 20 points.
The main driver of the car wrecks, of course, is the
president-elect himself. Fresh from his news conference announcing that he
would consider using military force to seize the
Panama Canal and to take Greenland from NATO ally Denmark, he reposted a social
media post this week from right-wing activist Charlie Kirk with a poll
purporting to show that “Greenland wants independence from Denmark.”
Now, he’s getting ready to go to war with California. Trump
fabricated a claim that Los Angeles doesn’t have enough water to fight
wildfires because Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom (whom the president-elect calls
“Gavin Newscum”) diverted water “to protect a tiny little fish,” the delta
smelt: “And for the sake of a smelt, they have no water.” In reality, Los
Angeles has enough water to fight the fires; hydrants have at times run dry
because the city’s water system, like all municipal systems, isn’t equipped to fight forest fires. The state’s
water policies have nothing to do with it.
Yet Trump keeps posting “RELEASE THE WATER” and, now,
congressional Republicans are threatening to withhold disaster relief from
California because of the president-elect’s bogus claims. After Trump’s (phony)
accusation that the Biden administration had refused disaster
assistance to Republican parts of storm-ravaged North Carolina, Republicans are
now proposing to do exactly that to blue California unless it abandons its
unrelated conservation policies. “We will follow the administration’s lead on
this,” House Speaker Mike Johnson declared this week, joining in the false
accusation that the fires came with the state’s “complicity” because of
“deliberative policy choices.”
Trump, never one to stand still, has moved on to blaming
the fires on migrants. He posted a claim this week that taxpayer “funds are
diverted to illegal immigrants,” and then “an illegal immigrant comes and sets
your house on fire and the fire department doesn’t have the resources to put it
out.”
Trump is also considering, as one of his first acts in
office, overturning by fiat a law duly passed by
bipartisan majorities in Congress, signed into law by Biden, and on the verge
of being upheld by the Supreme Court. The people’s representatives determined
that China-owned TikTok poses a threat to national security. Trump’s own choice
to be secretary of state, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Florida), said this week that China is “the most
potent and dangerous near-peer adversary this nation has ever confronted.” But
Trump has a higher priority: himself. He thinks TikTok is good for him
politically. So, he’s getting ready to set aside the law — and he’ll be hosting
TikTok’s CEO at his inauguration Monday.
The incoming administration is also poised to ignore the
law and the Supreme Court on government spending. Congress in 1974 passed the
Impoundment Control Act — which blocks a president from refusing to spend funds
Congress appropriates because he doesn’t like a particular program — after the
abuses of Watergate, and the Supreme Court upheld it. But Russell Vought,
Trump’s pick to run the Office of Management and Budget, declared at his
confirmation hearing this week that “I don’t believe it’s constitutional,” regardless
of what the Supreme Court says. “The president ran on that view,” Vought said,
and “the incoming administration is going to take the president’s view on this”
— the law be damned.
Apparently, rules just won’t apply to the incoming
administration. Extending Trump’s 2017 tax cuts, which Republicans plan to
do, would add $4.6 trillion to the national debt
over the next decade, according to the Congressional Budget Office. But Trump
and Republicans have promised that, once in power, they would cut the national
debt. So, as The Post’s Jacob Bogage reports, they have come
up with a novel solution. They will simply decree, magically, that extending
the tax cuts won’t increase the debt! Saying so doesn’t make it true, of course
— but this is no longer a relevant consideration.
These coming car wrecks are in addition to the routine
fender benders that Trump tends to produce almost hourly. He announced on
social media this week that “I am today announcing that I will create the
EXTERNAL REVENUE SERVICE to collect our Tariffs, Duties, and all Revenue that
come from Foreign sources.” Evidently, he was unaware that Congress had already taken care of this, in 1789.
It’s called “Customs.”
After the Justice Department this week released the final
report of the special counsel investigating Trump’s antics on Jan. 6, 2021, Trump posted: “To show you how
desperate Deranged Jack Smith is, he released his Fake findings at 1 a.m. in
the morning.” Well, yes, 1 a.m. is “in the morning.” So is 1:52 a.m., when
Trump posted his missive. But the report was clearly dated a week earlier, and
Smith had already left the Justice Department. The report was released at that
time because a Trump-allied judge had embargoed its release until midnight.
Such are the musings of the extremely stable genius. One
moment, he was attacking NBC late-night host Seth
Meyers. (“I feel an obligation to say how dumb and untalented he is.”) Another
moment, he was sharing a picture of himself labeled “God’s gift to America.”
And when Israel and Hamas reached their ceasefire deal, he
naturally claimed sole credit. “We have achieved so much without even being in
the White House,” he boasted.
Good point. Israel has reached ceasefires with Hamas and
Hezbollah. Inflation has calmed. Violent crime, border crossings and
opioid-overdose deaths have all plunged. The economy has added jobs for 48 straight months. Interest rates have fallen.
The stock market has hit dozens of record highs. Maybe Trump should simply
declare victory — and stay home at Mar-a-Lago.
After watching Bondi’s confirmation hearing this week, I
must respectfully disagree with The Post’s Editorial Board, which gave her a
thumbs-up and pronounced her qualified to be attorney general. She appeared to
take pride in how little she knows.
What were her thoughts on Trump calling those who attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021,
“hostages” and “patriots”?
“I am not familiar with that statement.”
How about the recording of Trump urging Georgia’s secretary
of state to “find” him 11,780 votes?
“I’ve not heard it.”
Trump’s nominee to head the FBI, Kash Patel, saying he
would “come after” journalists “who helped Joe Biden rig
presidential elections”?
“I am not familiar with all those comments.”
Patel’s threats to prosecute political opponents, including
some from the five-dozen-name enemies list published in an
appendix to his book that labels them members of a “deep state”?
“I don’t believe he has an enemies list. He made a quote on
TV, which I have not heard.”
Her feigned ignorance did not extend to the supposed
“weaponization” of the government by Democrats, of which she was most certain.
She and her Republican questioners brought it up two dozen times. Sen. Ted Cruz
(R-Texas) observed to her that “no president had previously been prosecuted
until the Biden-Harris White House came along, and in the last four years we’ve
seen Donald Trump indicted and prosecuted not once, not twice, not three times,
but four separate times.”
“And two assassination attempts,” Bondi added.
Thus did the incoming attorney general implicate the Biden
White House in the attempted murder of Trump.
But if Bondi was only playing dumb, Hegseth seemed to come
by this trait more earnestly. Even his supporters (which, thanks to Trump’s
threats, include virtually every Senate Republican) felt a need to acknowledge
his lack of credentials.
“Admittedly, this nomination is unconventional,” the Armed
Services Committee chairman, Roger Wicker (R-Mississippi) allowed.
“Pete Hegseth is an out-of-the-box nominee,” submitted
former senator Norm Coleman, introducing Hegseth.
Freshman Sen. Tim Sheehy (R-Montana) defended Hegseth’s
thin résumé by saying “I don’t think any board in the world would’ve hired
Steve Jobs or Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg when they founded their companies
either.”
So now, we’re treating the 3-million-person U.S. military
like a garage start-up?
Hegseth came armed with two strategies. The first was to
say that all of the accusations of alcohol abuse and sexual and financial
impropriety were fabricated by left-wing partisans. “What became very evident
to us from the beginning: There was a coordinated smear campaign orchestrated
in the media against us,” he spoke, using the royal “we.”
The second was to say that he has been “redeemed by my Lord
and Savior, Jesus Christ” for all of the bad things he was falsely accused of
doing by this left-wing smear campaign.
After the nominee’s third mention of Jesus, Sen. Markwayne
Mullin, an Oklahoma Republican, informed the committee that “our Lord and
Savior forgave me” — too, as did Mrs. Mullin. In fact, “the only reason why I’m
here and not in prison is because my wife loved me, too,” he disclosed.
Mullin condemned Democrats as hypocrites, accusing his
fellow senators of cheating on their wives and showing up drunk for votes. “The
man’s made a mistake and you want to sit there and say that he’s not qualified?
Give me a joke!” Mullin challenged.
Okay, Senator. A priest and a rabbi walk into a bar …
The real joke is going to be on the brave men and women of
the military, who will soon be led by a man who has referred to military
lawyers as “jagoffs” and who, at the hearing, left open the possibility that he
would use the 82nd Airborne to conduct law enforcement in D.C. Hegseth was
contemptuous of his questioners; he refused to meet with all but one of the
Democrats, and Wicker restricted the questioning time over Democratic
objections.
Instead, the secretary-designate engaged his bros on the
GOP side in high-testosterone talk.
“How many push-ups can you do?” Sheehy asked.
“I did five sets of 47 this morning,” the nominee replied,
in apparent homage to the 47th president.
He repeatedly vowed to return the “warrior ethos” and
“warrior culture” and to rebuild the military after the “defense cuts under the
Biden administration.” Defense spending grew nearly 15 percent under Biden from
Trump’s final year in office, and the men and women of the military never
stopped being the most powerful warriors on the planet.
But you wouldn’t know that from Hegseth and his Republican
interlocutors, who spoke endlessly about the supposed “wokeness” in the
military.
As an example of this wokeness, Hegseth claimed that he was not allowed to offer
protection during Biden’s inauguration in 2021 because he has a Christian
tattoo. Pointing to his chest, he said “it’s called the Jerusalem Cross,” or
Crusader’s Cross. He did not mention that he also has a tattoo proclaiming “Deus Vult” —
“God wills it” — which was displayed during the white supremacist rally in
Charlottesville in 2017 and during the Jan. 6 insurrection.
It’s not clear whether the tattoos caused Hegseth to be
rejected from security duty. But if they did, that happened before Biden
took office, during the woke Trump administration.
Days of Thunder? More like days of blunder.
