Velociraptor Trump tests the fences
How to think about Matt Gaetz and Tulsi Gabbard
Thanks to many of you for your thoughtful reactions to my “Two scenarios” column imagining a country where the federal government effectively ceases to exist and the US drifts toward becoming Europe. And welcome to the more than 500 new readers who subscribed yesterday alone—WOW! THANKS!
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When I wrote that column Wednesday morning, it was meant as a hypothetical thought experiment—and yet even by the end of that day, the idea of a functioning federal government effectively dissolving amid dysfunction, weaponization, bad management, and an epic talent drain felt much less hypothetical. We’ve now seen plenty of evidence this week alone to understand how grim and dire the state of the federal bureaucracy will be under Trump’s second-term vision.
Cabinet nominees like Matt Gaetz, Tulsi Gabbard, and RFK Jr., are a recipe for the end of the federal government as we know it, the end of a shared national administration state that works in partnership with state, local, and tribal partners to the good of our collective society. Those appointments at the Cabinet level have been followed, with much less attention and hysteria, by equally troubling ones at the sub-Cabinet level. At the Justice Department, he’s indicated he will nominate his personal defense lawyers to DOJ’s top three positions — deputy attorney general, solicitor general, and a critical post known as the principal deputy attorney general. To say that he’s aiming for a venally corrupt, unprecedentedly servile and weaponized Justice Department would be the mildest and least hyperbolic criticism.
Some people have speculated that Gaetz is a sacrificial offering, a stalking-horse for a slightly-less-outrageous-but-still-awful AG nominee who will be named if and when his nomination fails. That feels far too sophisticated of a power play for a decision that came together on the fly Wednesday afternoon during Trump’s flight to D.C.
I’ve never been a big believer in the “Trump as nine-dimensional-chessmaster theory.” Donald Trump is as close to a walking, breathing political ID as any human ever created.
Instead, I think this week’s nominations are best thought of in the vein of the scene in Jurassic Park when the scientists explain how Velociraptors are able to learn: “They were testing the fences for weaknesses, systematically. They remember.”
This is Donald Trump testing his limits. This is Trump seeing just how much he can get away with.
The sheer insanity of appointing an actually corrupt and unqualified person like Matt Gaetz, a man literally investigated by that same Justice Department in recent years for sex trafficking, to a vital post like attorney general — or appointing Tulsi Gabbard to lead the nation’s $80 billion-a-year intelligence community after years of concern that she was more closely aligned toward Russia than she is the United States — underscores how much Donald Trump is viewing this presidency as a war on the professional federal government.
It is, for Trump, a useful and immediate loyalty test for the rest of the GOP. Does the Senate immediately fall in line? Or does it turn out that, for the first time in eight years, there is some line that they are unwilling to cross? (Personally, I can’t tell what would feel more surprising: Matt Gaetz ever serves a single day in the Cabinet or Republican leaders end up finding a spine and drawing one bright moral line that they are unwilling to cross, the first time in eight years of outrageous accommodations.)
CBS News’s great Robert Costa already indicated the cave and capitulation ahead: “What I’m hearing privately from a few key GOP senators: yes, they’d prefer to not have a messy fight over Gaetz. Not their favorite. But they also don’t have a lot of energy for pushing back. Trump runs the show, they say. If Gaetz can reassure them, they’re open to backing him.”
Either way, rejection or acceptance, Donald Trump will have learned an important immediate lesson about the people he’ll be working with for at least the next two years in Congress. He’ll have a clear idea whether there’s any fence that can contain him.
Leaving all the niceties aside, it’s clear Trump wants the Senate to weigh all of this even as a bigger threat looms over the body: Whether Trump, using an obscure and untested constitutional provision, could simply force the Senate into adjournment and appoint what you might call, in a reverse nod to David Halberstam and the “best and the brightest,” the “worst and the dumbest” as recess appointments. Newly elected Senate majority leader John Thune surely is weighing which Sophie’s Choice he wants: To pick an immediate fight with the new, feeling-his-oats president leading a party ever-more-MAGA or abdicate the body’s historically most important constitutional power, its ability to advise and consent on presidential appointments. Either way, Trump will have learned a lot about John Thune very quickly.
There’s another advantage to a whirlwind of nominees — each seeming worse, less qualified, and more destructive than the last — a strategy that Steve Bannon laid out at the start of the first Trump presidency in 2021. At that time, he said, “The Democrats don’t matter. The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.”
Remember the initial outrage from early in the week about the nomination of Pete Hegseth as defense secretary, a man also completely unqualified to lead the $900-billion-a-year Pentagon and all of its three million employees, the largest, most complex, and highest-stakes bureaucracy ever designed in human history? Suddenly a Fox News-host-turned-nuclear-advisor looks downright reasonable, even though he’s railed against women in combat, criticized Blacks in the military, is an anti-vaxxer — any military historian knows disease has been far deadlier to armies than any battle —and theorized, according to the Washington Post, that “Islam is a violent force threatening to overtake America and should be countered by a new ‘crusade.’”
But what if the GOP and the Senate are willing to pick a fight over only a single nominee? Almost every newly elected president, after all, loses one Cabinet appointee in the first round—think Linda Sanchez for George W. Bush, Tom Daschle for Obama, and Neera Tanden for Biden. (Trump actually lost four Cabinet nominations in his first term.) Suddenly most members of Congress would rather fight over Gaetz than Hegseth—or perhaps let him slide by in order to oppose the Russia-curious Gabbard.
Hegseth, amid a zone flooded with shit, looks by week’s end the second coming of Robert McNamara. (Yes, McNamara didn’t turn out to have a great tenure, but he started out with so much promise! In fact, that’s the whole irony behind the use of the phrase “best and brightest” — it was the nation’s best-and-brightest who led us into the debacle of Vietnam. So just imagine what the “worst and dumbest” could manage to pull off!)
There’s another layer of corruption and threat to the basic foundation of the federal government that we’re starting to watch unfold this week too: The purported government efficiency effort led by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, two people who have never worked a day in government.
Many of the still-in-over-their-heads media just credulously stenographed their “appointments” to lead the “Department of Government Efficiency,” a Musky crypto joke, but it’s not really an official effort—it will instead be effectively an outside advisory committee that will enable an all-new layer of corruption and mismanagement. Musk, Ramaswamy, and whatever team of misfit toys they assemble will be able to hugely influential while skating around and outside all typical government responsibilities and checks-and-balances in terms of Freedom of Information Act records, ethics and conflict-of-interest considerations, or other guardrails. While they won’t have to be accountable for their decisions to the public, their internal authority and influence is all too clear: Surely if Musk or Ramaswamy shows up with a request to any federal government office or employee, they’ll get what they want. It’s all the authority, with none of the responsibility—the perfect recipe to punish enemies, reward friends (and themselves!), and inflict lasting damage on the federal bureaucracy without a care.
And all of that, of course, doesn’t even get into the more base corruption and conflicts-of-interest that permeate so many of the key players of this Trump administration, from Musk to Jared Kushner. Greg Sargent took a good look at that this week at the New Republic, if you want more.
Thanks for reading — more to come!
GMG
PS: I hope to use this newsletter reliably to share history and context (and lots of book recommendations) about the time and challenge ahead. I hope you’ll consider sharing it with a couple people in your life who you think might find value in it:
PPS: I’m loving the newly-invigorated post-election BlueSky experience, if you haven’t explored it and/or are still looking for a non-Twitter alternative. This is my handle if you want to follow me. Part of what makes the site such a shining joy in this time of darkness is, much like the Twitter of yore, it offers the chance to explore and discover things that would never normally cross your radar.
I spent part of last night watching this great video where a rapper watches Hamilton for the first time, live, and reacts and analyzes it as a rap experience. His pure innocence of one of this last decade’s most iconic pop culture phenomenons is delightful: “I was recently told that there is rapping in Hamilton, which sounds so weird to my brain—like the musical with rapping?! I don’t know how that works, so now I’m curious.”
PPPS: If talking about velociraptors has you dinosaur-curious and you want to unplug from the news this weekend with a FANTASTIC book, I highly recommend THE RISE AND FALL OF DINOSAURS, by Steve Brusatte. It’s amazing how much dinosaur science and knowledge has advanced and changed since I was a kid. His follow-on book, THE RISE AND REIGN OF MAMMALS, is even better, I think. It is incredible — truly incredible — that we are here at all right now on Earth.
