The first time I ever predicted an election result was a fortnight before 5 November. Trump will win, I said on a New York podcast, and he’ll win big.
Now, like a freshly deflowered virgin who enjoyed her first tryst, I’m encouraged to continue in the same vein. So here it is: there is no way the Senate will approve all of Trump’s picks for cabinet and staff positions.
I know it, all 100 senators know it and, most important, Trump knows it. Say what you will about the president-elect, but he isn’t short of street smarts. So why so many doomed picks?
One gets the impression that Trump wants to thumb his nose at the Washington establishment, even if it’s largely Republican. I can beat you all with one arm tied behind my back, he seems to be saying with his usual pugnacity.
Even if he loses one or two of his nominees, the message will have got home: the president will barge full speed ahead and damn the political torpedoes. So which ones will he lose?
I’m not going to venture a guess because there are several enticing possibilities. But in general one gets the impression that Trump doesn’t just want sycophantic loyalists. He wants sycophantic loyalists who reflect aspects of himself. His picks are an exercise in amour propre.
Thus two of his nominees have been accused of, though not charged with, sex crimes. Matt Gaetz, Trump’s choice for Attorney General, has been implicated in a scandal involving sex trafficking and statutory rape. And Pete Hegseth, his nomination for Defence Secretary, was investigated for sexual assault in 2017.
Innocent until proven guilty and all that, but the Senate isn’t a jury of one’s peers. It may well punish candidates simply on suspicion of scandal. Now, I find it hard to believe that Trump’s team missed such little peccadilloes when vetting candidates. More likely is that Trump actually wants to pick a fight, win, lose or draw.
Some of his other picks are guilty of things worse than suspected sexual impropriety. For example, his choice for Health Secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., reminds us of the small step separating unorthodox from unhinged.
Mr Kennedy is clearly incapable of holding his views to the most rudimentary tests of factual veracity and sound logic. This isn’t surprising in someone who spent his youth in a narcotic haze. Kennedy’s CV includes several arrests for marijuana possession and one felony conviction for possession of heroin.
Trump said Kennedy is “a very talented guy and has strong views” who will “go wild on health”. I’m not sure about the talent part, but, considering Kennedy’s “strong views”, one can’t gainsay going wild.
He has never seen a conspiracy theory he couldn’t take on faith. An anti-vaxxer of long standing, Kennedy has stated that no childhood vaccines, including those against polio, are effective and all of them drive up autism rates.
There is absolutely no evidence of even correlation there, never mind causation. It is, however, a fact that the polio vaccine reduced the number of reported cases from an estimated 350,000 in 1988 to 33 in 2018.
On this basis, one can trust Kennedy’s self-diagnosis of having had a part of his brain eaten by some mysterious parasitic worm. That deficit of grey matter may also account for his belief that fluoride in drinking water makes children autistic, while herbicides in their food make them transsexual.
Many commentators raised serious doubts about Covid-19 vaccines, but Mr Kennedy opted for insane ones. The virus, according to him, was part of a dastardly conspiracy with racial objectives. It was specially designed to target black and Chinese people, while sparing Jews.
And speaking of viruses, it’s not HIV that causes AIDS. Kennedy has been reluctant to name the real culprit, but he wasn’t so reticent about Wi-Fi that, according to him, causes cancer. Sorted. Mystery solved.
As a general principle, Kennedy believes in voodoo medicine that relies on remedies unsupported by any clinical evidence. As to the drugs boasting such support, they should have no role to play in the health of the nation. Thus the announcement of Mr Kennedy’s nomination instantly sent tremors through the pharmaceutical industry, with its shares taking a headlong plunge.
And naturally his views on Russia’s aggression against the Ukraine must make Trump grin like the Cheshire Cat. That conflict, explains Kennedy, is in fact, “a US war against Russia” deliberately provoked by NATO’s eastward expansion. That was done specifically to “sacrifice the flower of Ukrainian youth in an abattoir of death and destruction for the geopolitical ambition of the neocons.”
The Ukraine, insists Kennedy, shouldn’t be admitted into NATO, but Russia should. After all, Russians living in the Ukraine are “being systematically killed by the Ukrainian government”.
I share Mr Kennedy’s antipathy for the neocons but, should he find himself sitting at cabinet meetings next to Marco Rubio, a neocon par excellence and Trump’s nominee for Secretary of State, he’d have to temper such feelings. Sen. Rubio, incidentally, voted to stop all US aid for the Ukraine.
My parents taught me to be chivalrous towards women, but I still can’t resist the temptation of treating Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s nomination for Director of National Intelligence, as an out-and-out nutter.
Now, call me a racist and report me to the Equality Commission, but I have problems with candidates taking the oath of office on a copy of Bhagavad Gita, not the Bible. I appreciate Miss Gabbard’s multicultural background, but I question the suitability for the top intelligence role of someone raised on the Vaishnava Hindu tenets of karma and those promoted by the International Society of Krishna Consciousness.
Moving from the general to the specific, she goes even further than Kennedy in viewing Russia from Putin’s perspective. Thus media freedom in Russia is, according to her, “not so different” from that in the US.
Yes, we all bemoan the diminution of free speech in the West, which is indeed deplorable. However, it takes either a cosmically stupid individual, or else a Putin agent, to claim parity with Russia in that respect.
Does Miss Gabbard know that all Russian media are forced to function exclusively as propaganda outlets, and that the slightest disagreement with Putin’s policies is a shortcut to draconian prison sentences? If she doesn’t know that, she doesn’t belong in the intelligence services. If she does know and still says it, she belongs in the loony bin.
And of course the war in the Ukraine “could have easily been avoided if NATO had simply acknowledged Russia’s legitimate security concerns regarding Ukraine’s becoming a member of Nato.”
One such concern, insisted Miss Gabbard in unison with Putin’s propaganda, was that the Ukraine has secret laboratories developing American biological weapons. That’s cloud-cuckoo-land. Also, in 2022 the Ukraine was still years, not to say decades, away from any hope of NATO membership.
Then what are Putin’s other “legitimate security concerns”, as opposed to illegitimate ones? That NATO would launch a massive unprovoked strike on Russia?
If Miss Gabbard genuinely believes that’s a possibility, she ought to have her head examined. No, hold that. I’ve already conducted that examination vicariously and found her either deranged or stupid or at least bone ignorant. A perfect candidate to head all US intelligence, in other words.
Add to this list of nominees Mike Waltz, chosen by Trump as his National Security Adviser, and you’ll see that all of them support his apparent intention to twist the Ukraine’s arm into agreeing to end the war on Russia’s terms.
And let’s not forget Elon Musk who, while cutting public-sector waste, will try to populate Mars with millions of colonists, fill roads with nothing but self-drive Teslas and implant AI electrodes into people’s brains to make them almost as intelligent as Mr Musk.
None of them will be blocked by the Senate for political reasons alone. Some of them, however, may be denied Senate approval because they aren’t quite mentally sound. So why, apart from the possible reasons I cited above, did Trump put them forth? The title of this article should give you some clue.
This isn’t the 1990s. Very few people have direct personal experience with the polio epidemics, but they do remember the useless vaccines of the COVID-19 pandemic and how the pharma companies fraudulently urged everyone to “Follow the $cience” and get “vaccinated” again and again to no effect.
Likewise RFK Jr.’s environmentalism is based on vague emotional sentiment and explicit rejection of CO2 as a contributor to climate change. It is the hyper-rational obsession with “Net Zero” that caused the West to cripple its own energy production and become more dependent on Russian energy sources, putting more money in the hands of Putin and enabling him to finance his wars in Syria, Ukraine, and elsewhere.
If voodo medicine and sentimental environmentalism leads to the end of the corrupt pharma industry and the bankruptcy of Putin, then it has its place.
That seems to be the problem with this new brand of Republicans or conservatives or whatever name we want to give them: they say three things that make sense and agree with my line of thought, then they say five things that are absurd or even disturbing. But as long as they stand against abortion and socialism and we lack a better alternative, they will continue to receive my vote. Such is the sad state of “democracy” in America (and around the world).
Just a random thought: An estimated 8 million people have seen the play “Hamilton”. I wonder how many left the theater wondering why no political candidate (or cabinet member) in their entire life has seemed as intelligent or as dedicated to his country. (No need to wonder how many have read The Federalist Papers).
I’d vote for them too. That’s what I call the evil of two lessers. You are right: no modern politician is a match for Hamilton’s mind, wisdom — and pugnacity.