Nichols on Patel, et al.
Some quotes to ponder.
Tom Nichols has a piece in The Atlantic on the Kash Patel nomination that is worth a read, The Kash Patel Principle. Let me focus on two paragraphs.
The Russians speak of “power ministries,” the departments that have significant legal and coercive capacity. In the United States, those include the Justice Department, the Defense Department, the FBI, and the intelligence community. Trump has now named sycophants to lead each of these institutions, a move that eliminates important obstacles to his frequently expressed desires to use the armed forces, federal law-enforcement agents, intelligence professionals, and government lawyers as he chooses, unbounded by the law or the Constitution.
Let’s do a quick rundown beyond Patel.
The Department of Justice. For the head of Justice, he first chose Matt Gaetz who is known to have had sex with multiple 17-year-olds and done illegal drugs on multiple occasions. He was utterly unqualified to boot save that he did go to law school and practiced for a couple of years. His main qualification was personal fealty to Trump and a clear willingness to flaunt the law, own the libs, and do whatever was needed for more power (and to avoid the consequences of his actions).
Trump replaced Gaetz with Pam Bondi, who is also known for her personal loyalty to Trump, likely did not go after Trump University because of a contribution to her re-election campaign, and is an election denier. She is infinitely more qualified than Gaetz, for whatever that is worth.
Both nominees appear more than willing to politicize DoJ and use it however Trump wants. I would underscore that this is a massive deviation from the independence that DoJ has exercised in the past.
The Department of Defense. Pete Hegseth is a TV host and author who says things Trump likes. He is credibly accused of sexual assault and is a serial adulterer. He is utterly unqualified for the job.
Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Tulsi Gabbard is a former member of Congress who has spent the last several years cultivating a talking head career that has made her a favorite of Trump. She was a Democrat in the House, so this will be hailed as a “bipartisan pick” as if that matters in this context. Her talking head career has been replete with pro-Russian, pro-Putin, and pro-Assad (Syria) rhetoric. She is clearly personally loyal to Trump and has no significant experience for the position.
I will throw in the Department of Homeland Security, even though Nichols does not mention it because it plays an important role in border security and any deportation process. Kristi Noem is the most qualified of the names I have typed in this post, but that is damning with faint praise. I will note, simply, that when she was angling for the vice presidency she included animal cruelty anecdotes in her book in what appears to have been an attempt to impress Trump with how decisive and tough she can be. To me, that is the kind of psychopathic behavior that would make me reject a person. For Trump, it has helped put her in a position of power.
It is hard to ignore the degree to which Trump is populating very important positions with hacks will do his bidding. I will note that one of his more normal picks, Rubio for State, is a position wherein as president it is far easier to override and control foreign policy as opposed to, say, Justice where he needs a loyalist in place to actually do the work. And even there let’s not forget how Trump insulted Rubio into beta status.
I am reminded of this quote from Hannah Arendt from On the Origins of Totalitarianism, which James quoted the other day from The Ezra Klein Show, but that I have also seen emerge in various places. It is chillingly apt.
Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.
I know that the default is to think of Trump as a buffoon who operates on instincts and that all of these picks will fail in one way or the other due to incompetence. However, incompetent people can do a lot of damage because of their incompetence. Further, just because they are inexperienced, unqualified, and even incompetent doesn’t mean that they can’t do some significant percentage of what Trump and his inner circle want whether that is weaponizing the FBI and DoJ or some level of cruel deportations.
I will note for defenders of the incoming administration, these critiques are not the normal partisan criticisms of appointees. First, if one has been paying attention, usually nominations are met with minimal resistance. Yes, there are usually a handful that get a lot of scrutiny, but if anyone thinks that concerns over most of these nominations are just partisan grousing, they are simply wrong. Second, if one thinks that these are good and acceptable picks, help us all out and tell us why.
In regards to the FBI and DoJ, I will leave you with Nichols’ final paragraph:
The early-20th-century Peruvian strongman Óscar R. Benavides once stated a simple principle that Trump now appears to be pursuing when he said: “For my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law.” It falls now to the Republican members of the Senate to decide whether Trump can impose this formula on the United States.
As he notes in the piece, and as I also continue to harp on: the real test for how far the GOP has fallen is how many of these picks make it through.
To date the only thing that has proven disqualifying is participating in orgies that included drugs, prostitutes, and 17-year-olds. The bar is not very high (even if Gaetz was).
Oop! *rimshot* lolol
Gaetz might’ve survived but not for the fued with McCarthy and his many Capitol Hill allies. Scary!
This.
Proof: over one million deaths largely due to the felon’s incompetence handling a pandemic.
I will repeat myself. These picks are just another form of flooding the zone with shit.
I always remember Tom Nichols saying the police understand the law better than judges and lawyers as they practice it every day. He got upset when I mentioned granting qualified immunity when the police make a mistake in the law.
@Kathy:
They predicted 1.5 million Covid if we did nothing. We got 1.3. How many of those Covid deaths that occurred under Biden “shutting down the virus” do you put the blame on adjudicated rapist and convicted felon Trump?
I’d like to know who these “defenders of the incoming administration” are. I haven’t heard anyone other than Trump defending any of his choices. And even I am only defending the right of an election winner to have the government he wants, paired with the right of the people to get what they voted for–good and hard, as Mencken is ascribed to have said.
@just nutha: Our resident pro-Trump commenter, Jack, comes to mind.
Or, really, any of the handful of MAGAists on the site.
BTW, I just checked myself and deleted a response to Paul L. about Covid. This threat is not about Covid or the Biden administration.
@just nutha:
Gotta admit that not only am I not a fan of that quote, I can’t revel in the notion that all of us are about to get punished for what a plurality (or even a majority) allegedly voted for.
@Paul L: I would agree that Nichols is wrong on that point. Alas being wrong once is not a standard freeing people to reject what one says in the future.* Each subsequent statement must be judged on its own merits.
Additionally, if there was a significant reduction in actual deaths (?) compared to projections in COVID following Biden’s “shutting down the virus,” it should be investigated as a contributing factor in that reduction. Thanks for pointing that out. Good work!
*A situation that very much favors you, I would add.
[Deleted by the post author to avoid Rickrolling the thread, sorry Dr. Taylor!]
@Steven L. Taylor: Yes, Andrew Sullivan used that quote on Maher’s show and got quite a laugh from the crowd. Not all that funny now.
Luckily, I’m not seeing Sullivan around as much. I must be doing something right.
@Steven L. Taylor: I don’t see myself as “reveling in it.” If you do, please accept my apologies for bringing the attribution up. But my entire life has been spent listening to conservatives braying about “believing in consequences” while hoping against the odds for liberals to ride to their rescue in preventing the worst of their depredations. A clear majority voted either specifically for this or against the one alternative in what is a binary system no matter how many independent groups disguise that fact. I’m old, and I’m tired of the show. To reuse Eddie in LA’s thoughts on Hamas, “f*** ’em.”
The Senate Republicans are thinking “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” when it comes to approving these nominees. “Enemy” meaning Democrats, of course. That’s all the qualification needed.
I have a friend who regularly chats with a group of older indigenous women (not just from the US, but spread across the world). Their consensus is that Trump is The Trickster and will create absolute chaos, but in that process some things that need to be broken, and which had no other way of being broken, will be broken.
This is not something to celebrate. It is something to anticipate. To preserve the people and institutions we care about, and to try to see how we might rebuild after Trump exits the scene, which will happen in some way or another.
Jane Mayer just dropped a piece about Hegseth’s amazing work with several non-profits.
A previously undisclosed whistle-blower report on Hegseth’s tenure as the president of Concerned Veterans for America, from 2013 until 2016, describes him as being repeatedly intoxicated while acting in his official capacity—to the point of needing to be carried out of the organization’s events. The detailed seven-page report—which was compiled by multiple former C.V.A. employees and sent to the organization’s senior management in February, 2015—states that, at one point, Hegseth had to be restrained while drunk from joining the dancers on the stage of a Louisiana strip club, where he had brought his team. The report also says that Hegseth, who was married at the time, and other members of his management team sexually pursued the organization’s female staffers, whom they divided into two groups—the “party girls” and the “not party girls.” In addition, the report asserts that, under Hegseth’s leadership, the organization became a hostile workplace that ignored serious accusations of impropriety, including an allegation made by a female employee that another employee on Hegseth’s staff had attempted to sexually assault her at the Louisiana strip club. In a separate letter of complaint, which was sent to the organization in late 2015, a different former employee described Hegseth being at a bar in the early-morning hours of May 29, 2015, while on an official tour through Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, drunkenly chanting “Kill All Muslims! Kill All Muslims!”
I do think Trump has a problem with bad drunks, so this might be it.
@Modulo Myself:
Oh, Hegseth is a prince among men, all right:
http://www.thebulwark.com/p/pete-hegseth-christian-nationalism-networks
@just nutha: I was really just reacting to that quote rather than accusing you of anything, so my apologies.
@Modulo Myself: I saw that headline, but hadn’t had a chance to read the piece. Yikes.
Surely, Hegseth will withdraw, as the Senate hearings will be brutal.
There is this recurring theme of testing the elected Republicans to see whether they’ve fallen to irredeemable depths or whether they can still provide some guardrails to prevent Trumpism from taking us over a cliff. I think this is an insane expectation.
Republicans are not going to protect the country from the worst outcomes of Trumpism. Full. Stop. And it’s not weakness or cowardice; it’s complicity. Some of the people who voted for Trump may not know what the Trump agenda truly is, but Republicans congresspeople sure as hell do. And they have ALL bent the knee. Any meek words of reticence are for show.
If any of Trump’s picks don’t make it through, it will be by design. Not due to any canny political maneuvering from Trump, but through partnership. Trump’s cabinet choices are being shared on Truth Social and he is still months from taking office. Plenty of time to throw ketchup at the wall to see what sticks and gets the kind of attention Trumpism thrives on. Gaetz’ nom owns the libs for several news cycles, then Bondi looks good in comparison while Trump AND the Republicans get the sycophant they want in the AG’s post. Rinse and repeat until at least January 20th, though likely for the next four years knowing that Trump’s cabinet will be a revolving door.
TL; DR – the Republican won’t be any kind of guardrail preventing destruction of our institutions. They are in on it.
Deleted for being off-topic. As explicitly noted above.
I’m thinking that even the Bolsheviks, who had little idea how to run a government and were obsessed with loyalty to the party, more or less tried to appoint people who had some relevant knowledge and experience at the ministries they were filling.
But then, they also knew how to seize power. Lenin* did not send an unruly mob to yell slogans at the Petrograd Soviet and threaten to hang Kerensky (or whoever was in charge at the time).
*The earlier Mad Vlad.
It occurs to me how many of the people Trump had in his first administration turned on him after he lost the office. Nearly his entire old cabinet came out publicly against him. So many others in the conservative world as well. Not a heck of a lot of the people who are qualified will be willing to accept his nomination and have to serve under the expected conditions either. Slim pickings.
When these clowns fail the bottom of the barrel will have already been well-scraped.
Assumes facts not in evidence. The GOP is fine with Trump being an Epstein bestie; I see no reason to assume that they would quibble with anyone else on those grounds. Gaetz may well have been unacceptable for being personally loathed by his own party, not for being a sleazy hophead ephebophile.
@dazedandconfused:
This is the point that I kept yelling at the TV about, during the campaign. Harris should have hammered this point ’til it rang like Big Ben. Trump, the alleged businessman / manager / dealer, was entirely incapable of naming anyone to a position of responsibility who did not end up some combination of indicted, resigned, disgraced, and openly contemptuous of Trump — and the ones who never made it to last category were the most pathetic. (Rudy Giuliani, we’re looking at you.) If you can’t make people realize that he’s evil, you can at least make it clear that he’s inept.
I’m not convinced Gabbard will be a loyal Trump servant. I suspect she has her own agenda, although I don’t pretend to know what it might be. In the space of eight years she’s gone from enthusiastically endorsing and campaigning for Bernie Sanders for president, to running herself as a Democrat, to endorsing and campaigning for Trump. That is not the track record of a person with a solid core of values and beliefs, but of someone who subconsciously needs to reinvent themselves every once in a while on their “personal journey”. It would not surprise me if she finds issues on which she disagrees with the majority view in the intelligence agencies, because her thinking has “evolved” and she now sees problems in a different light.