I told you so

 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?”

Photo by Dan Burton on Unsplash

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.

From the Racket News

The mandate that wasn’t

 Donald Trump won this year’s presidential election. The Former and Future Guy is true to form in acting as though his victory is an overwhelming mandate from the people for radical (and I do mean radical) change. But while Trump’s victory was decisive, a landslide it wasn’t. And claiming a mandate that doesn’t exist is not going to end well for Republicans.

Consider these facts:

• CNN now places Trump’s share of the popular vote at 49.9 percent. While still a popular vote win, Trump apparently did not win a majority.

• Trump’s current margin of victory is only 1.6 percent.

• The current count has Trump leading by only 2,592,489 votes out of more than 150 million nationwide. 

• Trump won the swing states by less than 120,000 votes.

Photo credit: alexpadurariu Unsplash.com

None of this means that Trump’s victory was not legitimate, but it does mean that it was razor thin. A different decision by fewer than one percent of the nation’s (or swing state) voters would have put Kamala Harris in the White House.

A prudent politician would factor this narrow margin into his agenda. The American people are not sold on Donald Trump or his Agenda 47. Statistically speaking, half of the country didn’t want him back. The election did not give him a carte blanche to drastically change the country. He was not given the all clear to make power grabs, eviscerate the federal government, or generally abuse the powers of his office.

But Donald Trump is not a prudent politician. He is also a lame duck before he enters office since he is constitutionally limited even though he has referred to a possible third term. Trump cares nothing for the Republican Party he will leave behind and thus he has very little reason to exercise power responsibly. 

That isn’t true for many of the people who will staff his Administration. A great many people who will work in the Trump Administration have political aspirations of their own. Whether these aspirations will be enough to rein in the majority tendency to overreach remains to be seen, but I’ve seen little reason to hope that they will.

If Trump and the Republican overreach, it will follow a pattern that goes back at least as far as the first Trump Administration (and a lot further in reality) when the former president took office with less of a mandate than he has now and proceeded to enact a very partisan agenda with no regard for winning over moderates and independents. This was particularly short sighted since Trump lost the popular vote in 2016.

The Biden Administration followed and made the same mistake. Biden had a mandate to not be Trump but progressives interpreted that as a mandate to try to ram through a left-wing wish list rather than addressing concerns of swing voters. Democrats just paid a heavy price for their policy errors, particularly when it came to culture war issues. One of the most devastating ads of the cycle attacked Harris’s support for transgender treatments for prisoners and transgender athletes in school sports, saying, “Kamala is for they/them, Donald Trump is for you.”

Now Trump seems poised to perpetuate the cycle with appointees from the MAGA lunatic fringe and poorly conceived policies. Trump recently posted confirmation that he planned to declare a national emergency and use the military for mass arrests and deportations of illegal immigrants, but polling shows that majorities of Americans that would include a sizable number of Trump swing voters favor a pathway to legalization and oppose mass deportations. Public opinion will probably become even more opposed to deportations as Americans see first hand what such a policy looks like.

Tariffs are a more popular policy at the moment, but this may change as the policy is put into place. When voters start to understand that they, not foreign companies, are paying the tariffs through higher prices, see American companies suffering from Trump’s trade war, and feel the affects of a slowing economy, tariffs will probably lose popularity. High consumer prices were a major reason that Harris lost so enacting a policy that will raise them higher seems particularly tone deaf.

Some Trump voters are already having second thoughts based on what they’ve seen so far. Among those are Muslim voters in Michigan who backed Trump because of Biden’s support for Israel. CBS News reported that Trump’s Arab backers are disappointed over both Trump’s appointment of staunchly pro-Israel Republicans such as Mike Huckabee, Marco Rubio, and Elise Stefanik as well Trump’s failure so far to appoint prominent Muslim supporters to his Administration. The Arab voters hope that Trump would push for a ceasefire in Gaza and Lebanon, but that seems unlikely.

Donald Trump may not be concerned about electoral blowback from unpopular policies and alienating voters, but other Republicans should be. The GOP is going to have to find a way forward after Trump, and that task will be much more difficult if Trump leaves the country in economic decline and filled with ticked-off voters. 

Democrats may be learning the lesson that Trump failed to grasp. Kamala Harris ran a somewhat centrist campaign and the Democratic Party is currently in the throes of navel gazing after the red wave. They might well decide that the progressive left is an albatross that needs to be dumped in order to make a play for the middle. If the Democrats become a sane, centrist alternative to MAGA Republican wingnuts, the party might stage a comeback much quicker than Republicans expect. There’s suburbs have been a key to recent elections and the suburbs don’t like crazy.

So far, neither side has learned from the repeated mistake of trying to do too much too quickly and getting rebuked by the voters. The first team that does learn from the past may be able to usher in a long term majority, but one that won’t enact radical change as much as preserve the status quo.

It’s far from a sure thing but if either side is going to internalize the truth that a two-percent win is not a blank check, my money would be on Democrats after their recent “shellacking.” Since Trump has been on the scene, Republicans seem incapable of learning anything.

From the Racket News 

Welcome to the Idiocracy

 If you haven’t watched the 2006 movie, “Idiocracy,” that’s your homework assignment for the weekend. On second thought, don’t bother. It looks like we’ll be living out a version of the movie for the next several years and you may not want to get your hopes up for a happy ending.

My friend Steve Berman can be forgiven for being optimistic about the appointments by President-elect Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho… er, I mean Donald Trump earlier this week. But Steve wrote his piece when Marco Rubio was in the news as the next Secretary of State and Pete Hegspeth at the DOD, a man who advocated war crimes such as bombing Iranian mosques and cultural sites, was the questionable one.

Photo by Nong on Unsplash

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As I write this, Rubio (who I volunteered for in 2016) is now defending Trump’s newest appointments of Matt Gaetz and Tulsi Gabbard as attorney general and director of national intelligence respectively. Recall that Gaetz was recently in legal hot water and was the target of a House ethics probe regarding alleged sex with minors and drug use. Gabbard was recently a Democrat, the first Hindu elected to Congress, and a veteran. More recently she has spouted Russian conspiracy theories, been called a “friend” and Russian agent” on Russian television, and campaigned with RFKJR, who is still awaiting his appointment to Health and Human Services.

As Twitter user 

annanimiddy

 speculated, “I wonder if he intentionally ordered the nominations in order of sanity and RFK will be the crescendo.”

But back to Rubio. The senator reportedly said, “I’ve known Matt for a very long time, I think he’d do a great job.”

Rubio added, “The President deserves great deference as a president with a mandate, and he has a right to surround herself with people he trusts.”

Aside from questioning whether anyone trusts Gaetz, I think this is a preview of Rubio as Secretary of State responding to some inane Trump idea like buying Greenland or blowing up Iran: “Yes, Mr. President, you won a great victory and have a mandate to do whatever you want.”

There is a lot of speculation that some of these appointments will be too much even for Republicans to stomach, but very few Republicans seem willing to stand up to Donald Trump. Like Rubio, most GOP senators will defer to The Former and Future Guy’s dubious judgment if Gaetz and Gabbard come up for a vote. There aren’t many Republicans beyond Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins who will be willing to break from the pack.

There may not even be a vote in the near term. Trump has demanded that the Republican Senate accept recess appointments. This unprecedented request for the Senate to abdicate its duty to confirm appointments would mean that Trump could appoint people like Gaetz to federal leadership positions and they would not have to be confirmed until the end of the session two years from now.

It hasn’t been determined how Republicans will react to this demand, but the selection of John Thune as Senate Majority Leader is a good sign. The South Dakota senator was not Trump’s choice for the post.

Nevertheless, Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) described to The Hill how Thune had pledged to work closely with Trump, saying, “Sen. Thune emphasized repeatedly — repeatedly — that he was for President Trump, that he understood that we had won a majority now and had to deliver on it, that there’s no daylight between him and Trump and that he will make the Senate work.”

It may be that for Thune, like Rubio, the price of power is in surrendering his independence and principles. Thune probably understands that his position won't last long if he doesn’t stick closely to Trump. I think we’ll know the answer soon enough.

Beyond the wackadoo appointments, there are other reasons to be concerned as well. Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency is a proposed private organization that would function outside of Congress’s control. It isn’t clear exactly what the new layer of bureaucracy would do to make government more efficient, but I envision it like the two consultants in “Office Space” who ask employees, “What would you say you do here?”

Unlike the consultants in the movie, I’m not sure Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy will have the power to fire government employees or close organizations. For the most part, it seems Congress will have to do that. We have seen how difficult defunding is.

But Trump has said that he will revive Schedule F, a controversial Executive Order that he tried to implement in October 2020. The Order would revoke civil service protections for tens or hundreds of thousands of federal employees and make it possible for the president to fire them at the stroke of a pen.

Project 2025 and Trump’s Agenda 47 both hinted at reinstituting Schedule F as a way to dismantle the “Deep State.” More accurately, it would allow Trump to build his own Deep State. In practice, this would probably mean replacing experienced government workers with people loyal to Trump who have no idea what their new jobs entail.

Even more ominous is the possibility that the new Trump Administration would fire a bevy of top generals and military leaders. The Wall Street Journal reported that Trump is drafting an Executive Order that would create a “warrior board” of retired military officers to review and recommend the dismissal of military leaders. Leaders who are seen as too “woke” or involved in DEI would likely be the first targets. There is little doubt that this board would not contain retired generals who were critical of Trump.

As Pete Hegseth, the designate to head the DOD said in a Hill report, “Any general that was involved, general, admiral, whatever that was involved in any of the DEI woke shit, it’s got to go.”

There will be legal challenges to some of these power grabs, but ultimately, the people voted for this. To paraphrase H.L. Mencken, Americans voted for Trumpism and they deserve to get it good and hard. Maybe four years of government of Fox News for Fox News and by Fox News will persuade Americans to look deeper and closer at candidates in future elections.

The worst is yet to come, and I’d like to take a moment to say to the tepid Trump supporters and people who thought that Kamala Harris was just as bad as Trump, don’t look away. Watch the train wreck because you helped to make it.

One bright side may be that Trump is already eroding his slim congressional majority as he pulls senators and congressmen to work in his Administration. While those officials won elections in their states and districts, the odds might not be as good for Republicans running in special elections as the idiocracy unfolds. Trump may be sowing the seeds to limit his own power.

God willing, we will come through the next four years with minimal damage and sadder but wiser. After the abuses of power that we are about to see, we will hopefully be ready to reform the system and limit the president’s executive power, restoring authority to Congress that has been delegated over the years.

But first, we have to survive four years of Trump’s idiocracy (“kakistocracy,” government by the least competent and suitable citizens, may be a more technically accurate term) in a dangerous and hostile world. What could go wrong?

From the Racket News