The Trump Administration Will Be the Government’s Evil Twin
He has assembled a cabinet of nihilists who will be loyal to him not their jobs
In theory, an incoming administration begins when the new president is sworn in, months after the election. In practice, the impact of an election is felt right away. The president-elect’s supporters are emboldened and his detractors demoralized; key advisors begin to implement their plans; anxious courtiers make concessions to avoid punishment or ramp up the flattery in the hope of gaining rewards. The transition of power begins well before Inauguration Day.
Although Americans were warned—including by this publication—that President-elect Donald Trump would staff his administration with loyalists, few expected the shock of his calamitous selections for top positions in his administration. The common theme is that he is constructing a kind of anti-government—not in the sense of being for smaller government, but in the sense of being government’s evil twin. Every appointee is selected as a deliberate negation, even a mockery, of the function of government he or she will be in charge of.
The Department of Negation
Start with his selection for Secretary of Defense, the Fox News talking head Pete Hegseth, a former national guardsman whose main claim to fame is convincing Trump to intervene on behalf of U.S. servicemen convicted of war crimes. The worst of them was Navy SEAL Eddie Gallagher. A report in Time describes the case:
Gallagher was charged by the Navy with multiple crimes, including shooting civilians in Iraq, using a knife to kill a teenage Islamic State prisoner in Iraq in 2017, and threatening to kill fellow SEALs if they reported him. Gallagher was acquitted of murder by a military jury but convicted on one count of posing for photographs with the deceased body. His rank was reduced by one step as punishment. Trump reversed Gallagher’s demotion, restoring his rank and benefit. ... [M]ilitary leaders and former officials ... warned that such high-profile interventions by a sitting president would undermine the military justice system and embolden troops to disregard the chain of command or engage in reckless behavior without fear of punishment.
Hegseth has also defended active duty military service members who participated in the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, and he was himself flagged by one of his fellow guardsmen for his tattoo bearing a Christian nationalist slogan. (Anyone who has wasted time online arguing with white nationalists and Christian fanatics will recognize the Crusader slogan “Deus Vult.”) As Secretary of Defense, Hegseth would now be tasked with carrying out a political purge of the officer corps.
For his Director of National Intelligence, Trump has chosen former Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii. More than just an “antiwar” gadfly, Gabbard has expressed sympathy for a variety of foreign dictatorships. She made a secret trip to Syria to meet with its president, Bashar al-Assad, and then sponsored a bill to cut off U.S. funding to rebels against his brutal regime. She has defended Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and has been “parroting fake Russian propaganda,” in Mitt Romney’s words, about imaginary “biolabs” in Ukraine. The main debate about Gabbard is whether she is merely a Russian dupe or whether her connections to Russia run deeper. For its part, Russian state TV has declared her to be “Putin’s agent”—and now she will be put at the center of our intelligence agencies.
Remember that the Director of National Intelligence was an office created after 9/11 to ensure information would be shared and coordinated across intelligence agencies. But how much intelligence will these agencies share if they have reasonable doubts about the director’s loyalty? How much intelligence will our allies share with us if they suspect it will find its way to the Kremlin?
For attorney general, Trump has proposed Congressman Matt Gaetz of Florida, who is under investigation as part of a teen sex-trafficking ring. An ethics report that House Speaker Mike Johnson is attempting to suppress contains testimony that Gaetz had sex with an underage girl. This is who would be in control of the Department of Justice.
To cap off this festival of negation, Trump has chosen a crackpot conspiracy theorist and anti-vaccine activist, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., to be secretary of Health and Human Services, where he will be in charge of the Food and Drug Administration, the National Institutes of Health, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
These individuals are not merely unqualified for their offices. They are disqualified. They are anti-qualified—the antithesis of what the offices call for.
If Trump gets his way, we will have a defender of war criminals as Secretary of Defense, a Russian lackey as Director of National Intelligence, a criminal running the Department of Justice, and a crank promoter of quack remedies in charge of Health and Human Services.
This is a negation of government, an act of nihilism directed at the central function of each of our government’s agencies.
A Team of Toadies
This sets the theme for Trump’s second administration, in which he is clearly setting out to break our whole constitutional order.
Part of the point of choosing cabinet officers who are outrageously disqualified for their offices is to destroy the appointment system. The president is supposed to nominate the government’s top officers and then wait for their approval by the Senate. Trump is already trying to pressure the Republican Senate to declare a fake recess so he can appoint his officers without any approval process, precisely because he knows many Republican senators will balk at signing off on these nominees.
This is an attempt to destroy both the independence of the legislative branch and the Advice and Consent Clause of the Constitution in one fell swoop.
Let’s set the context for these constitutional provisions, which our Founders regarded as pillars of liberty in the English system long before America was founded.
The English fought for centuries over the question of who gets to decide when the legislature adjourns, and it was decided a century before 1776 in favor of legislative independence. Parliament sets their calendar and their agenda, not the king. The English Parliament also figured out that the way to limit the power of the monarch was to require approval of his ministerial appointments. The king is only one man. He has to wield power through his subordinates, and if the legislature gets a say over who they are, they can limit what he can do.
By requiring the Senate’s approval of the president’s cabinet officers, the U.S. Constitution ensures that he cannot appoint mere toadies or lackeys. He must appoint men and women with substantial experience, people with a track record and reputation that they want to preserve after that president’s term is over.
For precisely this reason, Trump wants to do away with the whole system. He wants only lackeys—and cronies. He knows the Constitution stands in his way.
Appointing a Horse to the Senate
This is the theme of the rest of Donald Trump’s transition, in which he has been bringing his billionaire cronies along for joyrides in the running of government.
Trump campaigned against “elites” only to subject government to the whims of his billionaire friends. Trump-apologist publications like The Free Press have framed Trump and his elite backers as outsider “counter-elites.” But Trump is actually installing our own oligarchy of billionaire loyalists.
Elon Musk has been clinging to Trump, following him around constantly since the election and dubbing himself the “First Buddy,” and then going off to engage in weird freelance foreign policy: meeting with the Iranian ambassador and sitting in on a call between Trump and Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Trump has rejected the usual practice of letting State Department officials listen to these calls and take notes, so we have no idea what is being demanded and traded in these meetings and for whose benefit.
The upshot is that we now have real-life Russian-style oligarchs in America: politically connected businessmen whose power and authority is coextensive with that of the political strongman whose interests they serve.
Trump has capped off this whole circus by pressuring the governor of Florida to appoint Lara Trump, the president-elect’s daughter-in-law, to the Senate seat vacated when he appoints human chameleon Marco Rubio as Secretary of State. This is flagrant nepotism, treating the U.S. government like it is the Trump family’s property. It’s also an assault on the independence of the state governments. In this case, Trump is not just making a former rival, Gov. Ron DeSantis, bow to him. He is also showing that there is no remaining part of government that can defy his whims. Just as he is trying to break down the separation of powers within the federal government, he is breaking down the separation of powers between the federal and state governments.
There is an old Roman legend that the decadent Emperor Caligula expressed his contempt for the Roman system by appointing his favorite horse to the Senate. This is a similar assertion of power, and the point is to make everyone in the system do something ridiculous, just to show that he can make them do it.
It is a mistake to think that authoritarian leaders want to strengthen government. To the contrary, they want to weaken government’s institutions. They want an unstructured government, one without rules and procedures, so as to leave fewer impediments to their whims. That is the point of Trump’s anti-government: to provide more scope for the exercise of arbitrary and capricious power.
The Lust for Power
This has been the guiding impulse of Trump’s entire life. He is a man obsessed with gaining a sense of power over others—not necessarily the power to do anything in particular, just power for its own sake, power for the gratification of wielding it. How do you experience the gratification of power, if you are afflicted with the neurotic need to do so? How do you experience it emotionally? Precisely by making demands that are arbitrary and unreasonable. If you order people to do something that they want to do, something that is reasonable and consistent with their goals, then you are not really exercising power. They are only acting in accordance with their own judgment and interests. Real power, raw power, is demonstrated by making people do something they hate, something they think is wrong and destructive, just because you told them to do it. The gratification of power is experienced through humiliation.
The perfect Trump supporter, from this perspective, is someone like Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina. Trump does and says things that are entirely the opposite of what Graham has stood for in his entire career to date—and he consistently abases himself on television, gritting his teeth and making excuses for Trump.
To be sure, Trump’s actions have an instrumental goal: to destroy rules and institutions in order to clear away obstacles to the further acquisition of power. But they are also an end in themselves: the experience of making everyone bend to whatever absurdity he imposes on them. This is what comes across when he longingly muses about how the nation should treat him the way dictatorships treat their dictators.
This is the future, the fantasy of absolute power, that Trump is already establishing as our new reality, only a week and a half after his election.
© The UnPopulist, 2024
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Awhile back I saw a MAGA-adjacent type acknowledge that when he criticized "elites," he didn't mean the superwealthy, whom he saw as mostly beneficial to society, but rather the upper-middle class of lawyers and middle managers and nonprofit administrators who send their kids to the best schools and who mostly share the same worldview - which is what really bothered him.
"Counter-elites" has nothing to do with understanding or empowering ordinary Americans. It just means "elites who share my worldview."
Proof as if any were needed that TDS is incurable