All the President’s Nominees: The Legion of Groom

With Donald Trump having won the election, we are getting a trickle of cabinet nominations. While a few are bog-standard Trump loyalists (e.g., Rubio as Secretary of State), there have been a few head-scratchers. And a lot of attention has focused on what I have started to call the Four Horsemen:

Pete Hegseth, the nominee for Secretary of Defense, has served but has no experience running a popsicle stand, let alone the largest bureaucracy in the world. He has a history of alarming statements such as advocating that the military be turned on left wing groups and that germs don’t exist because he can’t see them.¹ He also has tattoos that he claims are religious but also have a connection to modern White Supremacist and Christian Nationalist groups.

Tulsi Gabbard, the nominee for Director of National Intelligence, has a long history of appearing on Russian state TV spouting Putin talking points. She is also an apologist for Bashar Al-Assad, one of most murderous tyrants in the world. She accused the US of provoking the Ukraine war, promulgated the conspiracy theory that we had bioweapons facilities in the country and blamed us for cutting the Nord Stream pipeline.

While I doubt that Gabbard is some kind of Russian agent, she has made it clear who she sides with and it is not with nations fighting for freedom. Her selection harbingers what I fear will be a massive shift in global power — away from supporting freedom and toward a Russia/China hegemony with the US either abandoning the free countries of the world or actively supporting authoritarian regimes.

RFK, Jr. has been nominated to head Health and Human Services, one of the largest and most powerful agencies in the federal government. I’ll have a lot more to say on this in a future Throughput, but this would put a deranged lying conspiracy theorist in charge of public health. He has already promised to fire thousands of HHS employees and shift a huge amount of federal funding away from contagious disease and mainstream science into “alternative medicine”. The impact on health science could be catastrophic. It’s not just the research that will be shelved in favor of alternative medicine quacks slurping at the federal trough. It’s that this would end careers. Without HHS funding, thousands of grant-supported scientists will have to leave research. Or, just as likely, move to a country that actually values science.

In perhaps the most stunning selection, he tapped Matt Gaetz to be Attorney General. Gaetz, whose legal experience consists of a few years doing HOA work, was the subject of a House ethics investigation into accusations of sex trafficking and drug use.

Defenders of these choices are making the … not entirely unreasonable point that the agencies in question badly need reform. I kind of agree.² But these are not the people to do that. If you’re going to dig up the cemetery, you need to know where the bodies are buried. None of these four are knowledgeable enough, independent enough and competent enough to overhaul their respective agencies. At best, they will give us incompetent leadership that lets the federal government drift like a car without a driver at the wheel. At worst, they will make these agencies far more dysfunctional by riddling them with incompetent staff and setting their agendas to whatever random neuron firing shows up on Trump’s Truth Social account.

There are, however, two very important things to say about these massively unqualified nominees:

First, Trump is serious about them. He is not playing 4-D chess and planning to withdraw them so that he can nominate someone else. He is forcing the Republican Party to play 1-D Twister, tying themselves into knots of blind obedience. If there is any strategy here beyond pushing forward people who kiss his giant orange backside, it’s to see just how compliant Congress is going to be. He has placed a giant plate of feces in front of them and demanded that they not only eat it, but tell him how delicious it is. If the GOP does so, he will feel free to do whatever he wants. And the Imperial Presidency will finally reach its apotheosis.

Second, I expect all four to be approved. What has 106 legs and no spine? The Republican Senate. With 53 seats, the Republicans would need four defections to stop a nomination. They will not get them. Not even for Matt Gaetz. Already, they are making noises about how their job is to advance Trump’s “mandate”.³ In a functional country, any Senator who talked like that would be hounded out of office. A Senator’s duty is to the Constitution, the nation and their state, in that order (and maybe with the last two flipped). Advancing the agenda of any President — let alone this one — is a distant fourth at best. But the Republicans are so terrified of being primaried or, at least, being the subject of a mean tweet, that they will probably cave before Boxing Day.

And, to be honest, why would they oppose these nominees? With the four people above, you have a man who associates with White Supremacists, a dictator-hugging patsy, a deranged conspiracy theorist and an accused rapist. All of those descriptions apply to the incoming President of the United States. If an adjudicated rapist can sit at the Resolute Desk, why wouldn’t an accused one sit to his right? If a man whose entry into politics was claiming Barack Obama wasn’t a citizen can stand over the nuclear button, why can’t a man who thinks chemtrails turn frogs gay sit to his left? We’ve already debased our standards by putting Donald Trump back into the White House. There’s nothing left to keep this Legion of Doom out.

1. The latter isn’t just a throwaway concern. Our soldiers get copious inoculations to protect them from disease when they go overseas. Historically, disease has killed more soldiers than bullets or swords.
2. Although I noted that the support for RFK in particular comes from both people who think the FDA is too eager to approve new drugs and people who think it’s too slow to do so.
3. The GOP has an odd conception of a mandate. Trump’s 49% of the vote means he has a mandate but Biden, Obama and Clinton getting 52-57% of the vote doesn’t.