I Told You So
President Joe Biden meets with President-elect Donald Trump, Wednesday, November 13, 2024, in the Oval Office. Also in attendance are , left, and Chief of Staff Jeff Zients. (Official White House Photo by Adam Schultz)
This is Thanksgiving week and I don’t plan to do a lot of writing since we will be having a house full of guests, but I did want to take a few minutes to say, “I told you so.”
Over the past few days, I’ve seen several conservative pundits who supported Trump lamenting the president-elect’s appointments. For instance, Erick Erickson recently wrote on his Substack, “Well, I have bad news. Donald Trump has picked a George Soros employee to be Treasury Secretary. Is this draining the swamp?”
My question to Erickson is “What did you expect?”
Erickson supported Trump despite pointing out himself in the past that Trump was no conservative. Trump really has no consistent ideology except for being anti-immigrant, pro-tariff, and favoring whatever is best for Donald Trump. Therefore, it shouldn’t come as a surprise when he nominates Scott Bessent, a high-ranking officer in George Soros’s Soros Fund Management, as Treasury Secretary, liberal one-term Republican congresswoman Lori Chavez-DeRemer as Labor Secretary, or Democrat Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. as Secretary of Health and Human Services.
Since the election, one thing that has been very apparent is that we are not dealing with the first-term Trump who listens to expert advice and is content to fulfill the ceremonial duties of president and play golf while traditional Republicans run things.
Trump-47 is shaping up to be a hands-on executive who is heavily influenced by right-wing punditry and social media. If you think that Trump is a competent leader, you may be cheering for that, but what it actually means is that America is getting a hodgepodge of faux expert talking heads and influencers. This is not going to be a conservative utopia. It’s going to be government by the comments section.
There is nothing unlawful or unconstitutional about this. As Chris Karr wrote earlier this week in his excellent and interesting piece on the spoils system of appointments, presidents get to choose pretty much who they want as officials in their Administrations. The onus is really on the voters to make sure possible Russian assets like Tulsi Gabbard by electing officials who will exercise good judgment in staffing the federal government. From time to time, the Senate rejects nominees or, like Matt Gaetz, a nominee withdraws when the lack of support becomes apparent, but for the most part Congress is a rubber stamp for the president’s appointments.
And on top of that, Project 2025 is rearing its head once again. Trump disavowed Project 2025 during the campaign but has appointed several contributing writers from the project to his new Administration. These appointments include Russ Vought, one of the chief architects of Project 2025, to head the Office of Management and Budget.
Political campaigns are not known for their honesty, but Trump’s 2024 campaign (and Trump himself in general) was far removed from integrity and transparency. That’s not a great way to start a four-year relationship with the American people.
The icing m the cake is that Trump, the purported peace candidate, is actually considering military action against Mexico. World Politics Review reports that sources in the Trump campaign are seriously considering bombing or sending troops to attack drug cartel targets south of the border. This would be an act of war against a friendly nation.
If it isn’t apparent yet that voters did not choose wisely in 2024, just wait. Trump hasn’t even begun to implement policy and his neophyte picks to head government agencies haven’t even begun to throw wrenches into the gears of government. I don’t think that giving internet and cable news hotheads the reins of government will prove to be a good idea, but America has chosen to embark on that experiment so we’ll see.
“If I wanted George Soros and Randi Weingarten to be cheering on the presidential administration, I’d have voted for Kamala Harris,” Erickson continues.
Maybe not, but that’s what you’ve got. And with Kamala Harris, you’d probably at least have competent and proven administrators to head these departments.
We get the government we deserve, and to use an H.L. Mencken phrase I’ve used before and will probably use again, we are about to get it good and hard. For the 51.1 percent of the country that did not vote for Donald Trump, that is unfortunate but those are the joys of democracy.
For those who did vote for Trump thinking that The Former Guy’s return would bring peace, prosperity, and competence, it’s sad to say but he made you his Thanksgiving turkey.
Great perspective.
Can’t wait for the dude on here who penned “The Case for Trump” to chime in.Report
My main take is that he could have named every single member of the Cheney family down to the 2nd and 3rd cousins to the administration and NeverTrumpers would complain about it.
You could ask the NeverTrumpers for a list of names and then if Trump nominated that list of names, they’d explain that it was indicative of Trump’s mendacity somehow.
“He’s trying to lull *REAL* conservatives into a sense of complacency! How come he hasn’t banned abortion entirely and called for the death penalty for unmarried women who have sex under the charge of conspiracy to commit attempted murder?!?”
So Donald Trump’s picks are too liberal, it seems?
Are they “reaching across the aisle” too liberal or just “too liberal for people who created RedState” too liberal?
Because I’ve met people who would complain if you brought donuts into work because they weren’t breakfast burritos.Report
Sure, I mean the never Trumpers aren’t placatable because they have good reason to think Trump will be a disaster (especially for conservativism as they conceive of it) regardless of Trumps surface actions and based on his past performance.
That being said let us not make the repeated mistake of thinking that never Trumpers matter which is, actually, a much deeper statement then it seems at first blush since it’s a mistake that Dems have been making since Obama’s first term. To elaborate in 2011 when Obama was negotiating with the GOP over their debt limit hostage taking his operating theory was that the neocons (who would become the never Trumpers) were both serious, influential and spoke for a material voting constituency. Based on that misconception Obama made a deal that’d set up negotiations for a balanced budget and impose across the board cuts if those negotiations failed. The theory was that the neocons would never permit the negotiations to fail because blanket cuts would hit defense spending, neocons sine qua non. Of course if the neocons ever did command a constituency it was destroyed by W and the right merrily blew through those negotiations and the sequester was imposed.
This story repeats in 2016 when Hillary, among her various missteps, tried appealing to neocons on trade and security grounds along with repeatedly incredulously saying “Trump is awful!” much the way the neocons did in the primary in 2015. The neocons, generally, either endorsed HRC over Trump or forswore their former neocon positions. That didn’t, however, deliver any significant votes. This story repeats again in 2024 when Kamela embraced Liz Cheney and emphasized her support and doubled down on the “Trump is a menace” themes in an effort to reach out to the Nikki Haley/Neocon voters and, again, came up empty in terms of actual voters.
The moral of the story is pretty straight forward: neocons don’t command a significant voting constituency. Yes, they have lots of monied supporters and an outsized presence in online fora and media discourse but they, like their libertarian cousins, command virtually no actual voters. You can’t get blood from a turnip and you can’t get material quantities of votes by appealing to neocons. It’s a mirage. It is invoked by the right oppositionally as a stick to beat anyone not on the right with but there’s no devotion there, no votes. It’s just a phantom.Report
Yea, I would build off this and say there’s really two things going on. Part of it is that the neocons, the never Trumpers, etc. are an on paper (or online) only phenomena. And as much as I appreciate David’s posts a lot of them rest on the false premise that there is a conservative opposition to Trump of any significance. There isn’t, no one has buyer’s remorse (yet). The people saying these things are in a separate sort of wilderness they may never emerge from and no one cares one way or the other if they do.
The second piece of this is that there really still is a bipartisan failure to grapple with the disastrous GWOT. There are some really serious things wrong with the intelligence agencies, the blob, etc.
It’s a strange set of circumstances that has made them a de facto Democratic constituency, and a really difficult one to take on at that. At the same time the Trumpian response to the situation is to say ‘Yea they’re failures, and you know what we do with failures? We put f*cking idiots in charge of them.’
It’s a bad dynamic and I’m not sure how we break it with the current alignment.Report
Well how we break it is to recognize it for what it is. The neocons have to be treated like, say, libertarians or other experts who represent no voting constituency. So you can listen to their opinions in their areas of expertise but you don’t treat them as representing significant voting constituency so you only use their expertise instrumentally rather than ideologically. Biden didn’t actually do badly foreign policy wise, I don’t think one can easily make the case that the neocons were actually dictating policy in his administration.
Where their influence is malign is in that trying to appeal to their imaginary constituency ate up far too much campaign time, language and bandwidth. It’s political opportunity cost more than anything.
But yeah, grappling with the GWOT is an interesting subject because everyone left of center feels it’s viscerally unfair. We all remember being opposed to W in his idiocy and getting flamed for it in the aughts. So the idea that we, his opponents, have to answer for his idiocy feels fundamentally unjust. That Bush’s people were punished by quite literally losing their party, voters and becoming politically homeless is cold comfort to us, his former opponents. But the GWOT is just the largest example of a more blanket failure of expertise to both screen for ideological blind spots and to handle communicating with constituents correctly and that’s not something we on the left can plead innocent on.Report
I agree with you. I also think Biden’s foreign policy was overall solid, and a Biden that was 10 years younger may have been able to kick the ball in a very constructive post GWOT direction.
The needle that I think is tough to thread is distinguishing the neocon pundits and writers from the permanent bureaucracy in the pentagon, the CIA, etc. To me we are the side for whom skepticism of these organs of the state should come most naturally. Yet trying to both give them the aggressive reform they need while also defending the larger principles of rule of law, democratic norms, the need for institutions to work in certain non partisan ways across transitions of partisan power ends up coming off as incoherent. Or at least it is really easy to paint that way, despite there being no inherent contradiction between our basic system being good and certain actors within it being in pressing need of reform.Report
Yep, well stated, It’s tough. And yeah if Biden hadn’t been so fishin old. I’m still going around and around in my head on if he was a blessing or a curse in 2020.Report
Surely I can’t be the only one who has noticed that we’ve moved from Trump being Hitler and Democracy Itself being on the ballot to Trump being too much like Harris, right?
I mean, I wouldn’t mind doing the whole transitive property thing and saying that Harris is also Hitler (seriously, I’d have a blast!) but I think it’s a lot more likely that people are just saying things.Report
Who is this “we” who have actually “moved?” A bunch of different people are saying a bunch of different stuff, but I don’t see many people moving from A to B, just a lot of people who have decided to talk about B without ever having talked about A.Report
So now we’re talking about “B”.
Where “B” is… “Trump isn’t as Republican as we’d like”?
“Trump is showing his True Colors: He’s a New York Democrat from the 90’s”?
“So-called ‘Conservatives’ should be really upset with Trump”?Report
You didn’t answer the question, you just restated your original point.
To recap: Who is “we” and did whoever this we is or are previously talk about A and have now “moved” to B, or is it just a different bunch of people talking about a different bunch of stuff?Report
Who’s we? And, frankly, after my entire life being spent listening to righties say that every opponent was both Hitler and Stalin and Democracy itself being on the ballot why on God(ess?)’s green earth is it at all interesting if some similar language flew from left to right?Report
It’s like Spinoza. Substance monism, just with Hitler.Report
Tried googling Spinoza and Substance monism but came up empty in terms of it being relevant as far as I could tell; so still have no idea what you just said or if one of your kitties just walked across your keyboard and hit enter.
Or is this just an oblique way of saying that only non-republicans have agency?Report