The Weekly Sift

Some of Trump’s cabinet picks are merely unorthodox, but others are expressions of dominance.

---

The Roman historian Cassius Dio told this story about the Emperor Caligula and his horse Incitatus:

[Caligula] used to invite [Incitatus] to dinner, where he would offer him golden barley and drink his health in wine from golden goblets; he swore by the animal’s life and fortune and even promised to appoint him consul, a promise that he would certainly have carried out if he had lived longer.

Modern historians generally believe that if he made this promise at all, Caligula was joking.

Caligula once said that he would appoint his horse Incitatus consul, which was probably a joke intended to belittle the Senate’s authority.

In the old Roman Republic, the consulship had been the top executive office and was anything but a joke. When Caligula’s great-grandfather Augustus established the imperial system, he preserved the forms and rituals of the Republic and ruled from behind the scenes, not as consul or dictator (as his own uncle Julius Caesar had done) but as “First Citizen”. (In Latin, princeps, the origin of the word “prince”.) Caligula, on the other hand, had no patience with such niceties and wanted to rub senators’ noses in the emptiness of their formal titles. “You want to be consul? So does my horse.”

Matt Gaetz. The Incitatus story came to mind Wednesday after President-elect Trump announced that he would nominate Rep. Matt Gaetz to be attorney general, a possibility only slightly less absurd than Incitatus’ consulship.

Gasps were heard during a meeting of Republican lawmakers when the nomination for America’s top US prosecutor was announced, Axios reported, citing sources in the room.

Republican Congressman Mike Simpson of Idaho reportedly responded with an expletive.

“I don’t think it’s a serious nomination for the attorney general,” Alaska Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski said.

Gaetz has a law degree, but no experience in law enforcement or the judiciary. He has been dogged by persistent accusations of sex trafficking and relationships with underage girls, though the Justice Department declined to file charges. [1] The House Ethics Committee had been about to publish a report of their investigation into his sexual misconduct, but Gaetz has avoided this by resigning his House seat to accept Trump’s offer. (Typically, members of Congress who take cabinet seats wait to resign until after the Senate confirms them.) Republican Senators have said they’d like to see the report, but Speaker Johnson is against releasing it to them — something he would obviously do if it cleared Gaetz.

Gaetz is also very unpopular in Congress, even among his Republican colleagues. He is generally regarded a bomb-thrower who makes problems rather than solves them. Remember those endless votes to remove Kevin McCarthy from the speakership and install somebody else? The ones that shut the House down for weeks? Former Speaker Kevin McCarthy explains why they happened:

I’ll give you the truth why I’m not speaker. It’s because one person, a member of Congress, wanted me to stop an ethics complaint because he slept with a 17-year-old.

Like Incitatus, though, Gaetz knows who his master is. He has been abjectly loyal to Donald Trump, and has said his is “proud of the work we did” on January 6. [2]

Republicans will start the next term with a 53-47 majority (assuming Dave McCormick’s victory over Bob Casey in Pennsylvania holds up). So the party has the votes to confirm anyone they want. Two things are clear:

• Most Republicans senators don’t want to confirm Gaetz.
• They may anyway.

Senator Tommy Tuberville of Alabama laid it out for the reluctant senators:

This is the last chance we’re gonna have of saving this country. And if you wanna get in the way, fine. But we’re gonna try to get you out of the Senate, too if you try to do that.

As for the mainstream media, sanewashing is still the order of the day. The NYT describes the Gaetz nomination as a “loyalist” and WaPo characterizes Gaetz as “outspoken“.

Confirming Gaetz will verify that two significant American institutions have lost their independence: not just the Justice Department, but the Senate also. It will be a major step in the direction of autocracy. Democratic Senator Sheldon Whitehouse refers to this as “the crawl test“, and Ezra Klein writes:

Demanding Senate Republicans back Gaetz as attorney general and Hegseth as Defense Secretary is the 2024 version of forcing Sean Spicer to say it was the largest inauguration crowd ever. These aren’t just appointments. They’re loyalty tests. The absurdity is the point.

Pete Hegseth. And that brings us to our next horse, Pete Hegseth.

Let’s start with the good: He has a strong academic record, receiving a bachelors degree in politics from Princeton (where he wrote for the conservative Princeton Tory and played on the school’s varsity basketball team), and then a masters in public policy from the Kennedy School at Harvard. [3] He was an infantry officer in the Minnesota National Guard, volunteered to be posted to Baghdad, and received a bronze star. He also served in Afghanistan and was promoted to major.

From there things go downhill. He was at first chosen to be one of the 25,000 National Guard troops protecting Joe Biden’s 2021 inauguration (which needed protection given the post-January-6 threats of right-wing violence), but was removed as a possible “insider threat” in view of two tattoos: a Jerusalem cross and “Deus Vult” (“God wills it” an 11th-century Crusader battle cry). Either might be a simple expression of Christian devotion, but they are also associated with Christian nationalism and even neo-Nazism. [4]

Hegseth’s political positions have been described as Christian nationalist. In his book, American Crusade: Our Fight to Stay Free, he said he believes there are “irreconcilable differences between the Left and the Right in America leading to perpetual conflict that cannot be resolved through the political process”. He furthermore called for an “American crusade”, which he described as “a holy war for the righteous cause of human freedom”.

In short, the Crusades — a Christian war against infidels, particularly Muslims — figure prominently in his thinking.

His business career was undistinguished, and his time managing conservative political action groups raises more red flags without any proven wrong-doing. He ran a Minnesota PAC that spent 1/3 of its funds on Christmas parties, and as director of Concerned Veterans for America he hired his brother and paid him over $100K.

Hegseth was investigated for a sexual assault in 2017, but (like Gaetz) was not charged. [5]

But the reason he’s been nominated is that Trump liked him as a weekend contributor to Fox & Friends. He joined Fox News in 2014, and is best known for advocating pardons for war criminals, including Eddie Gallagher. (Gallagher was pardoned by Trump and had his rank restored, despite testimony against him from seven of his 21 platoon members, one of whom said “The guy is freaking evil.”)

Nothing in Hegseth’s background qualifies him to run a department with nearly three million employees and an $842 billion annual budget. But he does bring to the job an anti-LGBTQ and patriarchal zeal that fits well with Trump’s criticisms of the “woke” military.

Given his past pronouncements, and those of President-elect Trump, Hegseth is expected to end any diversity programs in the U.S. military, and perhaps retire or replace senior officers he sees as “woke” or who did not get the position through what he sees as merit alone.

His view of war crimes also aligns with Trump, who said after pardoning a different war criminal that “We train our boys to be killing machines, then prosecute them when they kill!”

Tulsi Gabbard. This former Democratic congresswoman has been nominated to be Director of National Intelligence. The DNI is the primary liaison between the 17 US intelligence agencies and the President. The DNI’s office (ODNI) produces the Presidential Daily Brief, which integrates and distills reports from all the agencies.

Democratic Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz probably went too far by characterizing Gabbard as “likely a Russian asset“, but some hosts on Russian state TV appear to agree, referring to her as “our girlfriend Tulsi“. Gabbard has often echoed Russian propaganda about the Ukraine War. During her unsuccessful 2020 presidential campaign, she received favorable coverage from Russian state media.

Less than one month into her presidential campaign, there were at least 20 Gabbard stories on three major Moscow-based English-language websites affiliated with or supportive of the Russian government — all of which celebrated her candidacy.

She has also been a defender of the Assad regime in Syria, a Russian ally.

Our allies are reported to be alarmed by her nomination, and there is talk that the other Five Eyes countries — Australia, Britain, Canada, and New Zealand — may stop sharing information with us, for fear of where that information might go next.

Gabbard has no previous experience in intelligence. She has not worked for a US intelligence agency and was not a member of the Intelligence Committee when she was in Congress.

RFK Jr. It’s possible to describe RFK Jr. in glowing terms: He wants to Make America Healthy Again. He wants to take on the Big Pharma and Big Food oligopolies, and fight the forces that make Americans prone to chronic diseases.

But then you get down to the details. He has latched on to any number of medical and environmental conspiracy theories, and said outrageous things like “No vaccine is safe and effective.” A 2021 study in the Journal of Medical Internet Research found

Throughout the year, we observed an increasing trend in the prevalence of low-credibility news about vaccines. We also observed a considerable amount of suspicious YouTube videos shared on Twitter. Tweets by a small group of approximately 800 “superspreaders” verified by Twitter accounted for approximately 35% of all reshares of misinformation on an average day, with the top superspreader (@RobertKennedyJr) responsible for over 13% of retweets.

Then there’s the danger of fluoridated water, which is a John Birch Society conspiracy theory I remember from childhood. RFK would like to eliminate water fluoridation, due to various health problems that overexposure to fluoride can cause. But like so many of his causes, his anti-fluoride case is overstated and full of misinformation. Fluoridated water has proven cavity-prevention benefits, and local monitoring should be sufficient to prevent over-exposure.

Kennedy denies responsibility for a measles outbreak in Samoa that killed 83 people, but he did play a role.

Children’s Health Defense, the nonprofit anti-vax outfit he led until becoming a presidential candidate, had helped spread misinformation that contributed to the decline in measles vaccination that preceded the lethal eruption. And during his trip to Samoa, Kennedy had publicly supported leading vaccination opponents there, lending credibility to anti-vaxxers who were succeeding in increasing vaccine hesitation among Samoans.

That, in a nutshell, is the main thing to fear about Kennedy heading HHS: He’ll encourage public doubts about vaccines that have all but eliminated various once-common diseases. If vaccination levels fall below what is necessary to maintain herd immunity, those disease can make a comeback.

The U.S. is already seeing an uptick in some vaccine-preventable childhood diseases, says Dr. Adam Ratner, a pediatric infectious disease specialist in New York City and author of a forthcoming book about the resurgence of measles and the growing anti-vaccine movement.

Measles outbreaks and cases of chickenpox and pneumococcal disease are on the rise in the U.S., he notes.

“When we see children in the hospital with complications of these things that we can prevent or at least decrease the risk of by using vaccines, it’s very frustrating,” he says.

As vaccine hesitancy continues to spread, Alissa and other pediatricians worry that other devastating childhood diseases like polio could re-emerge.

And God help us if we have another pandemic.

As for sticking it to Big Pharma and Big Food, I have a theory about that: I deeply disbelieve in Trump’s populism, and think that fundamentally he is on the side of Big Whatever. But RFK Jr. could still be useful to him by creating a threat Trump could use to shake the big companies down.

What’s next? These particular picks were so outrageous that many other nominees are passing without comment, like Mike Huckabee as ambassador to Israel, Steven Miller as deputy chief of staff for policy, and Kristi Noem as Secretary of Homeland Security. And I’ve seen many people use the Simpsons’ worst [blank] SO FAR meme. (We’re still waiting for a Treasury secretary.)

It’s been hard to parody Trump’s team, because anything you suggest could become tomorrow’s reality. (Last week, Gaetz becoming attorney general might have gotten a good laugh.) The only real way to stay ahead of the game is to propose fictional characters:

Donald Trump picks Baltimore based developer Russell “Stringer” Bell as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development.

But to repeat a previous point: The question is what the Senate will do. It’s encouraging that Republican senators stuck by their own choice (John Thune) for majority leader, and didn’t give in to Trump’s choice (Rick Scott). Maybe that means the Senate will play the role the Founders intended, checking and balancing the President. At least sometimes.

---

[1] Not filing an indictment isn’t actually a ringing endorsement. It means only prosecutors didn’t think they could convince a jury beyond a reasonable doubt. But according to Gaetz’ defenders, if there’s not enough evidence to send you to jail, you might as well be attorney general.

[2] Trump’s tweet announcing Gaetz calls him “a Champion for the Constitution and the Rule of Law”, which is the kind of up-is-down statement we’re going to see a lot of.

The rest of the new DoJ management team will also be compromised: Trump has nominated his personal attorneys, Todd Blanche and John Sauer, as Deputy Attorney General and Solicitor General. At least they have some relevant experience: Blanche was once a federal prosecutor and Sauer was solicitor general for Missouri.

[3] In 2022 he announced on Fox & Friends that he was returning his diploma to Harvard.

[4] At a minimum these are anti-Islam symbols. The Jerusalem Cross goes back to the Crusades, and is also known as the Crusaders’ Cross. If I were a senator vetting Hegseth, I’d point to Deus Vult and ask him precisely what he thinks God wills in the 21st century.

[5] The Washington Post published more details about the assault Saturday, including that Hegseth paid the accuser to sign a nondisclosure agreement.

[A] detailed memo was sent to the Trump transition team this week by a woman who said she is a friend of the accuser. The memo, a copy of which was obtained by The Post, alleged he raped the then-30-year-old conservative group staffer in his room after drinking at a hotel bar. … The accuser, whose identity has not been made public, filed a complaint with the police alleging she was sexually assaulted days after the Oct. 7, 2017, encounter in Monterey, California, but the local district attorney did not bring charges. Police confirmed that they investigated the incident. After she threatened litigation in 2020, Hegseth made the payment and she signed the nondisclosure agreement, his attorney said.

Once again, not being formally indicted for a crime seems to be the gold standard for Trump nominees.