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.
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.
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?
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