Gaetz, Gabbard, Hegseth, RFK2? Seriously?

Harris-Walz 'obviously'

The White House complex and vicinity, viewed from the north with the Potomac River, Jefferson Memorial, and Washington Monument visible to the south. -Wikipedia

When Donald Trump announced his first few cabinet and high-profile staff picks, like most observers, I shrugged. Many of them were “normie” Republican types: Susie Wiles, John Ratcliffe, Marco Rubio, Mike Waltz. They were in many ways predictable and qualified. It was a relief, considering the kinds of bizarre moves Trump had been famous for in his first term. I took it as a possible sign of Trump’s newfound maturity.

Even when Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy were tapped to head the new Department of Government Efficiency, it wasn’t a surprise. But it was fun nonetheless to see some Democrats trolling Trump and his supporters by noting the ironic manpower redundancy:

How naive I was. A blizzard of grotesque nominees was announced, quickly dispelling any hopes I had of Trump actually taking his job seriously. There are too many to examine in this space, so let’s take a look at the three very worst examples.

Matt Gaetz

Leading the pack is Attorney General-designate Matt Gaetz, the clownish congressman from Florida’s Redneck Riviera who was under federal investigation for sex trafficking and bragged to colleagues in the House of Representatives about having all-night sex parties fueled by crushed Viagra mixed with Red Bull. Witnesses said he attended one of the parties with a 17-year-old girl he professed not to know. Though federal charges were never filed, the House Ethics Committee has been investigating Gaetz and was ready to release a report on it when Gaetz abruptly resigned yesterday. We can only hope the report is eventually leaked.

Gaetz is a graduate of William & Mary Law School and worked briefly in private practice, but has never prosecuted a case, worked in law enforcement or run anything larger than his own congressional office of about a dozen people. So let’s put him in charge of the Justice Department, the FBI, the ATF, the DEA and the Bureau of Prisons. Makes sense to me.

Tulsi Gabbard

Tulsi Gabbard, a former Democratic congresswoman from Hawaii, was nominated to be the Director of National Intelligence. Gabbard, you may recall, has a history of sympathy with Russian President Vladimir Putin and his invasion of Ukraine, arguing in part that the United States prompted the violent occupation.

Gabbard also visited Syria in 2017, met with President Bashar al-Assad and pronounced him “not the enemy of the United States because Syria does not pose a direct threat to the United States.” Assad, you may recall, used chemical weapons on his own people during a rebellion against his tyrannical rule. His regime is backed by U.S. enemies Iran and Russia and is likely responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Syrian civilians.

A common question among her antagonists: “Is Tulsi Gabbard a Russian asset or merely a dupe?”

Pete Hegseth

Nominated as secretary of defense, Hegseth is a Fox News host, and a former Minnesota National Guardsman who served tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan. He had become active in Republican circles before Trump nominated him. Like many Trump nominees, he has a messy personal life that involves multiple romantic affairs and, while married to his second wife, fathering the child of his mistress, a Fox News producer. With that kind of history, could Hegseth even obtain the level of security clearance need to become defense secretary?

The Defense Department has nearly three million employees and an annual budget of $842 billion. It is easily one of the largest bureaucracies in the world. His personal shortcomings aside, what has Hegseth ever run? Nothing of any size.

Oh, and he bizarrely refuses to wash his hands:

This just in before I was ready hit “send”:

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a well known conspiracy theorist, was nominated to head the Department of Health and Human Services. From Politico:

Kennedy, 70, may still face a steep slope to confirmation after his years of touting debunked claims that vaccines cause autism, written a book accusing former National Institutes of Health official Anthony Fauci of conspiring with tech mogul Bill Gates and drugmakers to sell Covid-19 vaccines and said regulatory officials are industry puppets who should be removed.

If ever there was any doubt whether Trump would act like grown-up in his second term, it is hereby removed. He is not a serious person. You get what you vote for.

With these bizarre moves, Trump has given a gift to the industry he likes to call the “fake news” media. The Senate confirmation hearings for this cast of characters will be a ratings dream for cable news executives.

Rumors are swirling around Washington that Trump might solve the confirmation problems by using recess appointments — a process the Wall Street Journal editorial board has branded “anti-constitutional.”

Harris-Walz ‘obviously’

A Harris-Waltz campaign sign announcing to reluctant voters that they’re not very bright. -Amazon

If you’re the victim of what you think is an unfair stereotype, then don’t do anything that advances that stereotype. -Unknown

Actually, we know who said the above: it was yours truly. He also said this:

It’s official: the Democratic Party has become the party of college-educated elites with higher incomes. And even as someone who hates Trump and reluctantly voted for Harris, I derive great satisfaction from one thing: the little people have risen up unexpectedly to stick it to those who look down on them. That part is delicious. There is also an extremely distasteful part, which we will get to in a moment.

Prior to Donald Trump’s first victory as a candidate for president in 2016, many of us dismissed his win by insisting his voters didn’t really know who he was or what they would be getting in exchange for their votes. Four years later, his loss to Joe Biden in the wake of a worldwide pandemic that Trump mismanaged convinced many of us that the reality TV show personality and failed businessman was washed up and did not reflect the values most of us hold dear.

Eight years later, his reelection to a second non-consecutive term has changed the narrative. After all the angst and pearl-clutching, it turns out that Trump is who we are. We are now firmly ensconced in the Trump Era. To wit:

It is the Trump era because Trump has captured not just a national party but also a national mood, or at least enough of it. And when Democrats presented the choice this year as a referendum on Trumpism more than an affirmative case for Harris, they kept their rival at the center of American politics.

- Carlos Lozada, New York Times (free link)

So there you have it. Trump is now normal. Perhaps the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s famous quote about “defining deviancy down” (and the resulting breakdown in social values) applies here.

If you’d like to learn more about why Trump won, watch NYU business Prof. Scott Galloway’s interview with CNN’s Michael Smerconish over the weekend. Galloway’s theory is that younger males made all the difference in this election and that it was never going to be won or lost on abortion rights — an issue Democrats had banked on:

“Essentially, this was supposed to be the … referendum on bodily autonomy,” Galloway said. But Trump doubled down on the male vote, or as Galloway put it, “Trump went all in on crypto, Elon Musk, cars.” Trump’s support among young men surged over the course of the campaign.

Trump went on Joe Rogan’s podcast, which is heard by more than 11 million podcast listeners and subscribed to by 16.4 million followers on YouTube. Rogan’s podcast skews heavily male with an average age of 34. My 28-year-old son listens to it in his truck. By contrast, a highly rated show on a legacy cable news channel, such as CNN, might have a million viewers, with the average viewer age into the 70s. Kamala Harris’ appearance on CBS’s 60 Minutes was watched by 5.7 million viewers for the hour (more, I’m sure, caught the edited replays on social media). The age of the average 60 Minutes viewer is 65.

Harris did not appear on the Rogan podcast because the host would not agree to the terms of the her campaign. An appearance would have allowed Harris to make her case to a demographic that would have been key to her success.

“It all comes down to the same thing: a 30 year old male isn’t doing as well as his parents were at 30 for the first time America’s history,” Galloway continued. “This was the testosterone podcast election … Trump flew right into the storm and he embraced the manosphere.”