Friends don’t let friends drive drunk. Similarly, supporters of the next president should not let him drive the nominations process for his new administration while he is drunk with the power he feels November’s election outcome has conferred upon him.
While many of Donald Trump’s nominees for senior positions in his cabinet and other top government posts fall well within the bounds of accepted practice and suitable backgrounds for the job, a growing list do not.
They are so egregiously ill-suited to the posts for which they have been proposed that the president’s supporters would help him more by blocking them than rubber stamping them. That is because the worst of Trump’s nominees contain within their malformed characters and their void of applicable experience the potential to derail Trump and lead to serial future defeats for the GOP.
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Needless to say, they also pose an enormous risk to the United States of America. And if ultimately, that is the reason that Republicans do as they did with the nomination of Matt Gaetz and just say “no” to their party’s leader, great. That is as it should be.
But even if the reason a sufficient number of Republicans oppose the worst of Trump’s nominees—such as the spectacularly ugly and wrong-headed choices of Kash Patel to head the FBI and Charles Kushner to be Ambassador to France—is an instinct to protect Trump from himself or just a base instinct for self-preservation, we should encourage it.
Republicans should act aggressively to stop these nominations regardless of how it may make the next president feel right now. What’s a little ketchup on the wall between friends, after all?
As for Democrats in the Senate, they should use whatever tools they may find among the arcana of Senate traditions to block, hold, impeded, cross-examine, and otherwise challenge the worst of Trump nominees, the ones that truly pose a grave threat to the nation. This is no time for traditional Senate Democrat hesitation to play rough. Do as the GOP would have done…as they have been doing for the past couple of decades. Make good trouble.
The no-fly list of nominees who are so egregiously bad they pose a deep risk to our nation, our security, our international standing, our institutions or the well-being of the American people is getting longer, as I noted, with the addition of Patel and Kushner.
Patel has threatened to gut the FBI and transform it from the country’s premier law enforcement agency into an engine of Trumpian retribution and political warfare. Kushner’s nomination is a blow to our international standing, a perfect Trumpian trifecta of incompetence, criminality and nepotism.
But in recent days, we have learned more about others among Trump’s most ill-considered nominations that only makes the cases against them stronger.
Take for example, Pete Hegseth, Trump’s nominee to head the Department of Defense. We already knew he had no management experience, no defense policy experience, and was affiliated with extreme Christian nationalist and misogynistic views. Oh, and we also knew he had been credibly accused of sex abuse in a case that he later settled out of court with a cash payout. But a recent piece about him that appeared in The New Yorker by Jane Mayer, made the already powerful case against his nomination even stronger.
Mayer wrote, “A trail of documents, corroborated by the accounts of former colleagues, indicates that Hegseth was forced to step down by both of the two nonprofit advocacy groups that he ran—Veterans for Freedom and Concerned Veterans for America—in the face of serious allegations of financial mismanagement, sexual impropriety, and personal misconduct.”
The rest of the picks to join what would be a cabinet of deplorables, have also been the subject of new revelations that underscore their unsuitability for the jobs Trump wants them to occupy. They vary in seriousness but in every case they make someone who was already hugely inappropriate for a senior level government job an even weaker candidate.
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has no experience managing a large organization, a past of sexual impropriety and views that range between nutso and cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs. But as if that were not enough, it has been revealed that some of those whacky views are also deeply hypocritical. Take for example the time that Kennedy, critic of water fluoridization, sold bottled water “flush with the very stuff he imagines is toxic.” Interestingly, some of his views on the nature of food products are also generating concerns on the Republican side of the aisle on the Hill.
A nominee to work with RFK, Jr., Dr. Mehmet Oz, has also seen more stories breaking during the past few days detailing his conflicts of interests.
Tulsi Gabbard, nominated by Trump to head up America’s vast intelligence bureaucracy, was always a candidate who had intelligence professionals deeply concerned—because of her lack of experience but also because of her embrace of war criminals Bashar al Assad and Vladimir Putin (whose anti-Ukraine talking points, laden with fabrications, she happily parroted).
Fortunately, she is so out there that observers are already calling her, “The cabinet pick most likely to fail.” Her views on Assad are also coming under increasing scrutiny as Syria is wracked with new unrest and an insurgency to unseat the strongman is gaining ground. Even the right-leaning National Review has recently come out with a column asserting “Tulsi Gabbard’s Syria Stance is a Stain on Her Record.”
Such nominees, like that of Matt Gaetz, are so off-the-wall and are sources of such potential danger, that they distract from the fact that most of Trump’s cabinet is pretty standard issue. They may all be Trump loyalists, but most are qualified. You may not agree with them on policy matters. But the American people elected Trump and he is entitled to surround himself with the team he wants. Elections, as we are often told, do have consequences.
But in a number of cases, Trump is putting his potential legacy and the country in jeopardy. His first term was wracked by upheaval and scandal. It had the highest turnover of any administration in history. Some scandals proved not only to be huge distractions but no doubt they contributed to GOP losses in 2018 and 2020. Republicans should remember this.
Yes, it is unlikely that Trump’s Department of Justice or FBI will target anyone in his administration. Similarly, for the next two years, with GOP control of the Senate and House, major investigations into potential wrong-doing by Team Trump are unlucky. But reckless actions of unqualified officials do produce consequences—from markets, from allies, and from enemies.
Further, as long as we have something resembling a free press in the U.S., these officials will not be able to act with the impunity their president enjoys thanks to the gift of immunity given him by the Supreme Court. Further, it would be a mistake to think that many of the extreme policies some Trump nominees advocate will not have negative consequences for Republican legislators or state and local officials…including at the polls in two or four years.
Republicans control the Senate, the House, the White House and the Supreme Court. But the most extreme or ill-qualified of Trump’s choices could still produce consequences that in the end will not only be bad for the country, they will create deep problems for many in the GOP.
That is why, even if they want to be loyal to the incoming president, even if they do not want to rock the boat, the most extreme, unqualified and dangerous of the Trump nominees should be opposed by enough Republicans to block their confirmation.
It doesn’t have to be the same people each time. It only takes four in the Senate to block the worst of these. But the consequences for the GOP of rubber stamping the worst of Trump’s nominees will be almost as bad as the consequences of confirming them would be for the rest of the country.
Remember, if you surround yourself with mad dogs, someone is going to get bitten.
