Cabinet Makers

Fresh of his election victory, Donald Trump has begun rolling out the Cabinet picks for his next administration.

First and foremost, we should note that he’s moving incredibly quickly here. Typically, this process takes a good deal of time, as an incoming administration works through potential names and makes sure that the candidates are fully vetted. As a result, we generally see these nominations start to roll out in late November, with most coming even later than that.

Joe Biden, for instance, rolled most of his nominations out in mid-December and didn’t announce his pick for attorney general until early January. Even Trump, the last time around, followed this usual practice of not even starting until mid-November and taking his sweet time with it. Hell, he was even slower on some big appointments, waiting until the week before his inauguration to name his secretary of defense and the day before he was sworn in to name his agriculture secretary.

Not this time! In just the week and a half since the election, Trump has already thrown out a ludicrous number of names for major positions, including the Cabinet members who would oversee the Departments of State, Defense, Justice, HHS, Interior, Veterans Affairs, Homeland Security, and National Intelligence, plus the UN ambassador, the border czar, the heads of the EPA and CIA, and many many more.

This isn’t surprising, I suppose, given how much the Project 2025 blueprint was dedicated not just to laying out an agenda for a second Trump term but to finding the individuals who would be tasked with carrying out that agenda.

But it’s one thing for the Heritage Foundation staffers to vet these nominees, and it’s another for, uh, normal people to do so. And the Trump campaign is pushing every angle to prevent that vetting, from getting its lickspittles in the House GOP to bury an apparently explosive House Ethics Committee report on Attorney General nominee, to refusing to have the FBI conduct the routine background checks on him and others, all the way to threatening to use his recess appointment power to sidestep the Senate on one of its most important roles entirely.

This is, to put it mildly, deeply troubling. Obviously, we usually do such thorough vetting for top government officials — from exhaustive FBI background checks to open hearings before the relevant committees in the U.S. Senate — because these are incredibly important positions with a considerable amount of power.

And as a wise man once said — with great power comes great responsibility.

It really would matter if — HYPOTHETICALLY SPEAKING — the Director of National Intelligence were a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Kremlin, or if the Secretary of Defense were a white nationalist and outspoken misogynist, or if the Attorney General had a record as a sexual predator and perhaps even a sex trafficker. HYPOTHETICALLY.

(Seriously, Bill Clinton had two straight nominees for Attorney General shot down when it was revealed that they hadn’t paid Social Security taxes for their children’s nannies. Now, the allegations about Matt Gaetz also involve minors, but his issues are a little more serious.)

All together, this firehose of shitty nominees seems designed to overwhelm the opposition. And I don’t mean the Democrats or the media, but Senate Republicans.

Yes, they’re largely on board the Trump Train, but their glorious leader seems intent on humiliating them and making them bend the knee, whether that means rubber-stamping his ridiculous picks or standing by as he runs around them with recess appointments.

Look, I’ve never rooted for the Senate GOP before, but this time around I’m hoping that their own instinct for self-preservation kicks in here and they don’t roll over, or at least don’t roll over completely. That said, I doubt it.

If they approve this crowd of venal idiotic grifters with various levels of foreign entanglements and legal issues, that’s setting up a sure-fire recipe for disaster. At best, these people are ripe targets for blackmail or manipulation by foreign powers; at worst, they’re arsonists and bumblers who will ruin the government in ways we can’t even imagine.

On the bright side, though, I’ll be able to do a new thread with Bond villains. So we got that going for us.