Tuesday, November 19, 2024
Year : 2, Issue: 12
WANTED by President-elect Donald Trump: ex-Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz for attorney general, ex-Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard for director of national intelligence and South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem for homeland security secretary.
by Albert R. Hunt
Donald Trump is forming an anti-Lincoln government: Instead of a Team of Rivals, it’s going to be a pack of lapdogs.
The president-elect is selecting people whose foremost loyalty is to him, not to the country. John Bolton, one of Trump’s national security advisers in his first term, says Trump wants more than just loyalty; he wants fealty.
Trump’s picks this time have more experience in Washington than some of his choices four years ago. (Remember Rex Tillerson, the former Exxon Mobil CEO who was Trump’s first secretary of state? Or Wilbur Ross, his commerce secretary?) This time, almost all of the appointees are Trump supplicants who long ago cast aside any misgivings and bowed to their leader.
Trump’s picks for attorney general, secretary of defense, secretary of homeland security and director of national intelligence are so wild that they have stunned even some Republicans. To lead the Pentagon, he tapped Fox News host Pete Hegseth. It’s a disgrace to an office once occupied by American heroes like George C. Marshall, Robert Gates, Leon Panetta and Jim Mattis. More shocking still was his choice of Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida as the next attorney general. Gaetz is an extreme MAGA firebrand who is intensely disliked by colleagues on both sides of the aisle.
Gaetz also has been under investigation by the bipartisan House Ethics Committee on charges that he “engaged in sexual misconduct and/or illicit drug use, shared inappropriate images or videos on the House floor, misused state identification records, converted campaign funds to personal use, and/or accepted a bribe, improper gratuity, or impermissible gift.”
Gaetz abruptly resigned from Congress immediately after Trump named him for attorney general – meaning the committee no longer has jurisdiction to investigate him.
So the highest law enforcement official of the land – a post once held by Robert Jackson, Robert F. Kennedy, Elliot Richardson and Edward Levi – is now meant to be an alleged criminal whose greatest qualification is being a Trump toady.
Let’s not forget former-Democratic-Congresswoman-turned-Trump-cheerleader Tulsi Gabbard, tapped for director of national intelligence, a role that oversees the CIA, FBI and the National Security Agency. Gabbard, one of the only House Democrats who did not vote to impeach Trump in 2019 on charges that he abused his power and obstructed Congress, is full of praise for the Russians, a fondness that is reciprocated. She famously promoted Russian propaganda and talking points justifying its invasion of Ukraine, including claiming without any evidence that it was “undeniable fact” that the U.S. had funded biological warfare laboratories in Ukraine that could “release and spread deadly pathogens.”
Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin chronicled what may be the high-water mark of a high-powered presidential Cabinet in her classic book “Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln.” Rather than surrounding himself with loyalists, the supremely secure Lincoln chose his chief political opponents to be his top advisers.
Lincoln tapped the Republicans he defeated – New York Sen. William Seward, Ohio Sen. Salmon Chase and Missouri jurist Edward Bates – to be his secretary of state, secretary of treasury and attorney general.
Leading the country during the Civil War, Lincoln not only tolerated but encouraged differing views. In fairly short order, most of these strong men who once thought themselves more qualified to be president than Lincoln came to see him ”as the strongest of them all,” Kearns Goodwin wrote.
There have been some efforts to replicate this. Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt enlisted leading Republicans into his Cabinet on the eve of World War II. Barack Obama brought in his main rival from the Democratic primaries, Hillary Clinton, as secretary of state, and he retained as defense secretary Robert Gates, who was appointed by Republican George W. Bush.
Let’s contrast that with Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida to be Trump’s secretary of state. Rubio ran for president in 2016, when his only memorable moment was a crude suggestion demeaning Trump’s anatomy. Trump vehemently denied the insult and mocked Rubio mercilessly for nervously drinking water during a rebuttal to Obama’s 2013 State of the Union, tagging him with a disparaging nickname that stuck: “Little Marco.”
Trump has tapped businessman Vivek Ramaswamy – who was a low-polling punch line in the 2024 presidential contest – to join billionaire Elon Musk – who bounced childishly on campaign stages with Trump and dubbed himself “dark MAGA” – in a much-hyped efficiency project to slash $2 trillion from the federal budget. Trump has named South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, best known for shooting her puppy in a ditch, to be secretary of homeland security. No Team of Rivals here.
Most of Trump’s choices were predictable. His migrant deportation zealots, Tom Homan and Stephen Miller, have little concern if children are separated from their parents, which reflects Trump’s position.
If, as I think likely, Gaetz is too far a reach even for accommodating Republican senators, it doesn’t get a lot better. Waiting in line are such tough-talking right-wingers as Mark Paoletta and Mike Davis who’ve signaled they believe Trump can go after anyone, especially Special Counsel Jack Smith, who was investigating Trump’s role in the Jan. 6 Capitol riot and his mishandling of classified documents. Davis has pointedly warned New York Attorney General Letitia James to lay off Trump or “we’ll put your fat ass in prison for conspiracy.”
There is a role model for any newcomers who want to pander to Trump: Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York. She came to Congress a decade ago as a moderate Republican leader. In a few years she saw where the political winds were blowing and morphed into an election-denying, conspiracy-spewing super MAGA believer. She has been tapped to be the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.
With this team of lapdogs, don’t expect any dissent.
Washington columnist Albert R. Hunt has covered U.S. politics and presidential campaigns since 1972, previously for the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg News and the International New York Times/Courtesy by USA Today
