The Emperor's New Cabinet

Like the old one wasn't bad enough?

Artist oddly unnamed. Via Red Cheeks Factory Shop.

So I guess you've heard that Health and Human Services Secretary-Designate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is planning to devote himself to the crusade against unhealthy snacks, which sounds more like a First Lady gig than a cabinet position, but what do I know? I certainly agree that unhealthy snacks are unhealthy, choosing to go with the science on that as well as on vaccines, in contrast to whatever it is he's doing.

At first I thought it was funny that he appeared to be going with the liberal side on this issue, since we're all down on Doritos and Mountain Dew and up on water and organic granola, but I figured out that he's actually being a conservative in the Wilhoitian sense: he wants freedom for the nice suburban ladies who are the backbone of the anti-vaccine movement, to have their kids die of measles or polio if that's how they need to express themselves, and compulsion for the poor recipients of SNAP benefits, who won't be allowed to buy Doritos or Mountain Dew other than with folding money, even if they live in food deserts where kale isn't available. It's the same old ingroup/outgroup stuff.

Idly wondering, speaking of the cabinet choices, if Trump isn't actually trying to get himself impeached. It wasn't Kennedy's nomination for HHS that led me there but Gaetz's, for attorney general. At first, having a pretty clear idea how much almost everybody in both Houses of Congress hates Gaetz, Republicans even more than Democrats, I figured Trump was just saying "Fuck you" to all of them, and enjoying the opportunity to make them grovel.

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But then Gaetz quickly resigned from the House, for what seemed like pretty obvious reasons—the House Ethics Committee was about to issue their report on his alleged crimes on Friday, and it was going to be a doozy, as it should have been, and as the Justice Department investigation of his conduct should have been before that, as anybody who's been following the various cases should know, going back to 2021, when the WhatsApp exchanges and Venmo transactions started going public, showing how his best friend and confessed sex trafficker Joel Greenberg, who has made a deal to plead guilty for an 11-year sentence, had been pimping to provide him and other friends with paid female companionship, "some of whom are quite young," as Trump used to say of Jeffrey Epstein's proclivities, not to mention involvement in a weird Greenberg crime involving using discarded driver's licenses (as Seminole County tax collector, Greenberg got old driver's licenses out of the trash when people came in to get new ones and threw the old ones away) to make fake IDs:

what authorities said had happened was that Joel Greenberg had been involved in trafficking—potentially across state lines—a girl between the ages of 14 and 17 for the purposes of commercial sex and in doing so had basically created an identifying document for that girl. So it appears to be the case that Greenberg was using his office as tax collector to create false identities potentially for this girl [and presumably others]....

Joel Greenberg would often enter his office after hours, and on one such occasion on a Saturday in April of 2018, according to a source who spoke to us, he was seen entering the office with Matt Gaetz, interacting with the baskets where these discarded IDs were kept, and then entering the back room of the office. Matt Gaetz was present for all of this. Multiple reports have since indicated that that is one of the inciting incidents in the investigation that’s going on into Gaetz right now. The New York Times reported this week that the same girl who Joel Greenberg is accused formally of trafficking is the one that Matt Gaetz is suspected of trafficking.

And other allegations, some of serious illegality (cocaine) and others just disgusting (his phone was full of nude photos of the women Greenberg had sourced for him and he was fond of showing these to other, presumably male Members in the House cloakroom, trying to suggest that he'd seduced them instead of just paying for them). Also, after the 2020 election he seems to have asked both Johnny McEntee (then director of the White House Presidential Personnel Office, now a honcho in the Project 2025 operation) and Mark Meadows for a general pardon (both on the sex trafficking allegations and his role in the January 6 insurrection), never a sign of innocence. But as long as he was no longer a Member the investigation would be technically caduc; they'd no longer have a mandate to issue the report, and he'd just move on merrily to his new job of managing the 150,000 employees of the Justice Department and leave all that behind.

But the Senate Republicans have been showing a tiny bit of spine; they managed to defeat Trump's repulsive candidate for Majority Leader (Death Eater–FL and Medicare fraudster Rick Scott, in a secret ballot) in favor of somebody Democrats can contemplate without vomiting (South Dakota's John Thune), and it seems that they will ask the House Ethics Committee to show them their Gaetz report (John Cornyn of Texas has signed on). And I'm pretty sure it's going to be pretty easy for the Senate to turn the nominee down, if that report becomes entirely public. Not likely he'll go to prison (as I was saying, the FBI dropped their investigation in 2022, though it seems clear that they were wrong to do so), but if the Senators feel like rejecting him, as they have many reasons to do, they don't have to be as afraid to do it as they otherwise might be, just because Gaetz is such a terrible nominee. 

Trump is starting to make enemies, at long last, that he can't afford, starting with some of the House and Senate Republicans, who may have taken all they could take of his demands that they vote against really popular bills, pursue pointless oversight cases, and pretend to respect his stupid misbeliefs. And now he's asking them to surrender their constitutional obligation of advice and consent and let him name all his cabinet and other officials without them, as recess appointments. Many of them, obviously, are cowardly flunkies who don't mind this kind of treatment (Ted Cruz would rather be in his studio podcasting anyway), but some of them have to be reacting to this stuff, and the insult of Gaetz's nomination has to make them pretty mad. Also, as Trump snatches awful members like Gaetz, Stefanik, and Waltz into his cabinet, he's threatening the House Republican majority (not very seriously, the special elections that eventually replace them will probably be Republicans too, but it's still pretty careless).

Then there's the US military officer corps, which tried to keep neutral on Trump, torn between the white Christian nationalists of the Mike Flynn type (especially powerful in the Air Force, I believe) and those who aren't insane and who appreciate the diversity of today's services, obviously including the bulk of the Black and female officers who know the history of the forces' integration, but also including many who are white men and quite conservative by normal people standards, like former defense secretary James Mattis and former chief of staff John Kelly, and Joint Chiefs of Staff chair Mark Milley, "my generals" as Trump liked to call them, whose personal encounters with the then president horrified them with his ignorance, callousness, and impulsiveness, especially the threats to use nuclear weapons, which they were really afraid he might try to follow through, and of course his undisguised contempt for the "losers and suckers" in the ranks.

In the plague year 2020, these tensions had to become a lot worse, from Trump's demands to bring National Guard troops to stop political demonstrations over police brutality in the George Floyd case and other murders, which would have been an unprecedented trashing of the Posse Comitatus Act, through the talk of a regular coup around the election, when Flynn, who had told his Newsmax audience that Trump should declare martial law, showed up at the White House with Sydney Powell to urge the case a couple of days before what we now know as the "unhinged meeting" of December 18 following which Trump issued his invitation to supporters to show up at the Capitol on January 6 in the "will be wild" tweet. Or, as it was reported at the time: 

Having effectively exhausted his legal options—at least 86 judges, including dozens appointed by Republicans, have shut down the president’s unprecedented attempt to overturn his defeat through the courts—Donald Trump is apparently now entertaining even more anti-democratic paths to preserving his power. During a White House meeting on Friday, nearly a week after the Electoral College certified Joe Biden’s victory, Trump reportedly discussed invoking martial law to overturn his losing election result—a strategy one of the meeting’s attendees, former national security adviser and recent pardon recipient Michael Flynn, had recently proposed on cable television. Appearing on the right-wing Newsmax channel earlier in the week, Flynn encouraged the president to deploy the military to “rerun” the election, an idea Trump inquired about during the Oval Office meeting a few days later, the New York Times reports.

I had thought the military seizure of the voting machines was supposed to be checking them for fraud or something, but “rerun the election” sounds like a more precise picture of what they had in mind. With Trump in the background, no doubt, howling, “I just need 11,000 votes!”

(Of course Trump had denied all the reporting, via tweet. It's now pretty obvious he was lying about that, but it's amazing how much we already knew at the time.)

The nomination to the Defense Department of Fox News's Pete Hegseth, an islamophobe and woman hater and white Christian nationalist down to the crusader "Deus Vult" tattoo on his bicep (the "Deus vult" motto also figured in the January 6 insurrection), see the terrific piece on him by Jonathan Katz, has to come across to the senior US military as an insult in the same way as the Matt Gaetz nomination does to the legal profession. Hegseth is a decorated veteran, but he has no experience of command, or of managing anything, let alone an enormous organization like DOD, with its three million employees.

In 2017 he was nominating people with arguable qualifications; now it seems he's just clowning them. The same goes for naming Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence, a person whose only experience with international affairs seems to be her friendly association with Syrian president Bashar al-Assad and Russian president Vladimir Putin.

Then there's Bobby the Lesser, who is not going to be too popular with parents.

If these people don't start resisting, there's something deeply wrong with them. If Trump knows what he's doing at all, he's like a version of Hans Andersen's emperor who's actually perfectly aware that he's naked, shouting "Dese nuts!" while the assembled crowds don't get that he's streaking on them and keep anxiously pretending they can see his clothes.