In this New York Times piece on the radicalism of Donald Trump’s early cabinet nominations, I am going to give credit to Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan for trying, but the choices are so bad that even their best efforts can’t keep up.
Take the example of Pete Hegseth, Trump’s selection to run the Pentagon. Haberman and Swan initially only fault him for being “a former Fox News host whose leadership experience has been questioned.” Many paragraphs later, they get around to a bigger problem:
The president-elect’s choice to lead the Defense Department, Pete Hegseth, is facing an allegation that he sexually assaulted a woman, which he has denied…
…The Trump team, people briefed on its activities say, did engage in vetting for some of his choices, such as Mr. Hegseth. But the sexual assault allegation did not show up because it involved a private settlement agreement with the woman in question, the people briefed on it said.
And if the only or even the most serious problems with Hegseth were that he’s ill-equipped to run the Defense Department and is quite possibly a rapist, then Haberman and Swan would have adequately done their jobs.
But there’s this, as reported by the Associated Press:
Pete Hegseth, the Army National Guard veteran and Fox News host nominated by Donald Trump to lead the Department of Defense, was flagged as a possible “Insider Threat” by a fellow service member due to a tattoo on his bicep that’s associated with white supremacist groups.
Hegseth, who has downplayed the role of military members and veterans in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack and railed against the Pentagon’s subsequent efforts to address extremism in the ranks, has said he was pulled by his District of Columbia National Guard unit from guarding Joe Biden’s January 2021 inauguration. He’s said he was unfairly identified as an extremist due to a cross tattoo on his chest.
This week, however, a fellow Guard member who was the unit’s security manager and on an anti-terrorism team at the time, shared with The Associated Press an email he sent to the unit’s leadership flagging a different tattoo reading “Deus Vult” that’s been used by white supremacists, concerned it was an indication of an “Insider Threat.”
He was considered too radical and extreme by the Pentagon to be trusted with guarding the president of the United States. And now Trump is asking us to put him in charge of the Pentagon. That might have been mentioned by Haberman and Swan as a possible impediment to his confirmation. It certainly means he won’t be picking up any Democratic votes.
And here’s another reason he can only be confirmed, if at all, on a strict party line vote. In 2019, Hegseth was instrumental in convincing President Trump to do this:
President Donald Trump has intervened in three high-profile murder cases involving U.S. service members, dismissing charges against a Green Beret accused of killing an Afghan man, pardoning a former Army officer serving 19 years for ordering soldiers to fire on unarmed Afghan men, and promoting a Navy SEAL who was convicted of posing with a dead body but acquitted of more serious charges.
This was one of the darkest days of the first Trump presidency, and Hegseth’s lobbying was responsible for making it happen:
“This is so dangerous, nothing pisses me off more than these pardons,” a retired general officer fumed to ABC News after they were announced. “This undermines everything we have stood for — all my years of service goes up in smoke because we have a dictator who has no respect for the rule of law nor what we stand for.”
Hegseth is a dangerous white nationalist, a possible rapist, and a supporter of the active military murdering Muslims with not only impunity but the stamp of approval of the president. He’s written that Islam “is not a religion of peace, and it never has been” and accuses them of plotting to “conquer” Europe and America by making common cause with secularists to crush “our nation’s Judeo-Christian institutions.”
Now, maybe there will be enough Republican senators willing to overlook all of this, or even acutely sympathetic to it, that Hegseth can be narrowly confirmed. But he comes with a lot more baggage than Haberman and Swan managed to describe.
Then there is Robert Kennedy Jr. who has been nominated to head the Department of Health & Human Services. The concerns with Kennedy’s moral character, judgment and mental health are almost too numerous to document. Haberman and Swan don’t even try, limiting themselves to saying that Kennedy “has made baseless claims about vaccines” and “is not only a vaccine skeptic but also a supporter of abortion rights who has all but declared war on the pharmaceutical and food industries that have long funded the Republican Party.”
There’s nothing in there about Kennedy saying several dozen frankly insane things. There’s nothing in there about his Wilt Chamberlain-level of promiscuity and extramarital relationships. Nothing about dumping a dead bear in Central Park or using a chainsaw to decapitate a whale and then strapping it to “the roof of his minivan for a five-hour drive home.”
Amazingly, there’s not even a mention that RFK Jr. once testified in a deposition that “a worm…got into my brain and ate a portion of it and then died” which caused him “memory loss and mental fogginess so severe that a friend grew concerned he might have a brain tumor.”
His loss of brain matter might help explain why his brain doesn’t function properly, and this actually matters. Just ask American Samoa, where RFK’s influence helped produce a measles outbreak that killed 83 children.
Health officials around the world are alarmed over the likely impact of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — a longtime vaccine skeptic who was tapped for the health secretary role this week — on global health. Experts from Samoa have been particularly vocal in sounding the alarm, citing the destructive impact of Kennedy’s rhetoric on the tiny Polynesian island nation…
…Warning that Kennedy will empower the global anti-vaccine movement and may advocate for reduced funding for international agencies, Aiono Prof Alec Ekeroma, the director general of health for Samoa’s Health Ministry told The Washington Post that Kennedy “will be directly responsible for killing thousands of children around the world by allowing preventable infectious diseases to run rampant.”
“I don’t think it’s a legacy that should be associated with the Kennedy name,” Ekeroma said in an email Friday.
Yeah, the problem with RFK Jr.’s confirmation prospects is hardly just that he’s a vaccine skeptic who supports abortion rights and is an enemy of the pharmaceutical and food industries. He’s a lunatic of low character whose idiotic theories have already caused an epidemic that caused dozens of children their lives. I think even some Republican senators will have reason to pause before confirming this man.
Of course, the bulk of the Haberman/Swan piece relates to the nomination of Florida congressman Matt Gaetz to be attorney general. And it looks like Trump may have to go around the normal Senate confirmation process to get him confirmed, mainly because he’s the most hated man in Congress, with Republicans actually more hostile than Democrats. But in focusing so much on Gaetz, they have precious little space for Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s nominee to head the nation’s intelligence agencies. All Haberman and Swan have to say about her is that she is “a favorite of Russian state media” who “has blamed the United States and NATO for provoking Vladimir V. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.”
There’s nothing about her upbringing in a weird cult led by a surfer Hare Krishna guru who she still considers her spiritual adviser. There’s nothing about her secret visit to Syria to meet with the butcher Bashar al-Assad or her demand that the United States join Russia in helping to prop up his regime. There’s no mention that she is widely suspected of being a Russian asset at best and a useful idiot at worst. Gabbard is easily the most dangerous nominee in the history of the country, since she is auditioning for a role that would give her access to the identities of every spy and agent we have working in Putin’s inner circle, or in Russia in general. This would argue strongly for not taking the risk. I doubt there are Democratic senators who will support her confirmation, and many Republican senators will at least privately have the same misgivings.
The problem here is both on the prospects and merits of these nominees, which simply are not adequately described by Haberman and Swan. Admittedly, their piece aims mainly to describe their prospects rather than their merits, but the two things are too intertwined to be separately treated. Their chances of confirmation are bound up with their lack of merit and the political costs of saying all these shortcomings and scandals are not disqualifying.
But it’s probably true, as they report, that Trump is employing a “flood-the-zone” strategy where even if one or two of his picks don’t make it through the regular confirmation process, the others will.
And, as David Nir capably describes, Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson have a plan for confirming any “appalling MAGA nihilists” the Senate rejects.
Again, I give Haberman and Swan credit for describing the situation in some detail, but they’d need another 3,000 words to really provide an adequate picture for their readers. And this is going to be a challenge for the media for the duration of Trump’s second term.
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