Kakistocracy, Foxistocracy, Nepo-cracy, All at Once.
Plus: What if we had a crisis and nobody cared?
Christopher Wray’s fight to preserve the independence and integrity of the FBI ended — like so many other things these days — with barely a whimper.
Even though he had three years left in his 10-year term, Wray chose to show himself out the door. If he wanted to give Trump a housewarming gift, he could have given him a fruitcake. Instead, he obeyed in advance — resigning, without waiting to be fired.
And just like that, yet another norm/tradition/guardrail simply faded away.
In a normal political universe, the ouster of Wray to make for a rabid and vengeful MAGA enforcer like Kash Patel would be a scandal on the level of Richard Nixon’s Saturday Night Massacre. But as Jonathan Chait wrote yesterday, the purge of Wray is being met with little more than a despairing shrug… the latest in the lengthening series of shrugs as the long surrender continues.
The president-elect had been facing the unpleasant task of firing a lifelong Republican whom he had selected himself, inviting the national media to raise ugly questions about his oft-confessed desire to turn the federal criminal-justice apparatus into a weapon of political vengeance.
Instead, Wray, like so many Republicans who couldn’t stomach Trump’s demands, decided to go gentle into that good night. Nobody except Wray will remember where they were when Christopher Wray resigned.
This seems like a good time to remind you that none of this is remotely normal; and that you are not the crazy ones. And we haven’t even gotten to Kari Lake, Lara Trump, Kimberly Guilfoyle, Mark Zuckerberg, or Time Magazine yet.
Happy Thursday.
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Where’s Laura?
We shouldn’t be surprised by the emerging Trump Administration because knew what was coming, right? He is simply creating a government in his own image.
What, after all, did we expect, when America elected a rapey, seditionist, convicted felon, who trafficked in bigotry, lied with abandon, and promised a reign of retribution?
At this point, the only thing that really surprises me is that his bigoted, freaky BFF, Laura Loomer hasn’t gotten a job, since every other member of his insane clown posse has landed a plum of one sort or another. But there’s still time, and Loomer is apparently quite persuasive with the Donald. (For some background, I refer you to my earlier post on Loomer, which for some reason remains the single most-read post on “To the Contrary.”)
**
I apologize for pulling out the hoary cliche about boiling frogs, but I do want to call your attention to how we seem to have gone from outrage to numbness as Trump’s administration vacillates between the dangerous, the absurd, and the absolutely farcical.
Kash Patel, Pete Hegseth, Matt Gaetz, and Tulsi Gabbard pose a real and present danger to national security and the Constitution. But what can we say about the news that Trump is trying to name MAGA Queen Kari Lake — a serial liar and loser— to head the Voice of America? What should we make of his appointment of Don Jr.’s recently dumped girlfriend, Kimberly Guilfoyle, as ambassador to Greece?
Trump is flooding the zone with absurdist drivel, so where do we look first?
There’s the Musk-led oligarchy/kakistocracy, which is taking shape in broad daylight, as Trump — the Populist Tribune of the People — stuffs his cabinet with billionaires.
Then there is the naked nepotism. During the holiday weekend, Trump named the fathers-in-law of two of his kids to government jobs —he appointed Massad Boulos, the Lebanese-born dad of Tiffany Trump’s husband, as senior Middle East adviser, and Charles Kushner, Ivanka Trump’s father-in-law, as Ambassador to France despite his prior felony convictions. Trump wants another daughter-in-law named to the US Senate, because why the fuq not.
And, we have the Government by Central Casting, by which, of course, we mean Fox News. By the latest count, Trump has now named 13 current or former Fox employees to high-ranking positions. Other members of his administration also auditioned for their new roles by appearing regularly on the network.
In case you’ve lost track, Media Matters has kept a running tally of the Fox-Trump pipeline:
Monica Crowley, State Department chief of protocol
A C-list conservative commentator who spent two decades as a Fox contributor, Crowley most notably pushed several bigoted conspiracy theories about President Barack Obama’s heritage,
Sean Duffy, secretary of transportation
Fox host, and mediocre former WI congressman.
Tulsi Gabbard, director of national intelligence.
You know.
Sebastian Gorka, Deputy Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Counterterrorism
A bombastic, self-proclaimed national security “expert” with dubious credentials, a proclivity for anti-Muslim conspiracy theories, and ties to foreign extremist groups.
Kimberly Guilfoyle, ambassador to Greece
Guilfoyle, an undistinguished pro-Trump pundit and founding co-host of the Fox panel show The Five, rallied network staffers to support then-Fox CEO Roger Ailes when longtime host Gretchen Carlson sued him for sexual harassment. Guilfoyle’s 2018 departure from the network was reportedly linked to “a human resources investigation into allegations of inappropriate behavior including sexual misconduct”; Fox reportedly paid more than $4 million to Guilfoyle’s assistant, who alleged “she was frequently required to work at Guilfoyle’s New York apartment while the Fox host displayed herself naked, and was shown photographs of the genitalia of men with whom Guilfoyle had had sexual relations” (Guilfoyle has denied engaging in “any workplace misconduct”)
Pete Hegseth, secretary of defense.
Fox host and all-around chode.
Tom Homan, “Border Czar.”
Homan joined Fox as a contributor in August 2018, two months after his retirement as acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (where he reportedly served as the “intellectual ‘father’” of Trump’s family separation policy).
Mike Huckabee, ambassador to Israel.
Huckabee, a former governor of Arkansas, hosted a weekly Fox program for more than six years before stepping down in 2015 to explore a presidential run.
Keith Kellogg, special envoy for Ukraine and Russia
Fox talking head.
Dr. Marty Makary, Food and Drug Administration Commissioner
Makary, a surgeon, professor, and health policy researcher at Johns Hopkins University, joined Fox as a contributor near the start of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020. In that role, he criticized public health officials for warning of new strains of the virus in the months leading up to the emergence of the deadly delta variant and criticized vaccine mandates, particularly for children, citing the vaccine’s purported health risks.
Dr. Janette Nesheiwat, Surgeon General of the United States
Nesheiwat, the medical director of a chain of New York urgent care centers, joined Fox as a medical contributor near the start of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020. In that role, she promoted the use of supplemental zinc as a COVID-19 treatment and repeatedly highlighted the purported health risks of vaccination.
Abigail Slater, assistant attorney general for the Antitrust Division at the Department of Justice
Michael Waltz, national security adviser
And this list doesn’t even include frequent guests on Fox News.
What if we had a crisis, and nobody cared?
The evidence continues to mount that the kids are not all right.
Depression among young people has spiked, social media continues to dumb us down, and even elite universities report that many of their students — theoretically the nation’s best and brightest — can’t (or won’t) read books. Last week, the Oxford University Press chose “brain rot” as its word of the year.
And the post-Covid test scores are abysmal.
By any measure, we face an acute educational crisis in this country. But the response? Pretty much… crickets.
Once upon a time in America, we would have risen to the challenge — mobilizing our national will and resources to confront the crisis. There would have been a robust debate. In those days, we would have at least pretended to care. But that seems like a long time ago now, doesn’t it?
In 1957, the Soviet Union shocked the world with the launch of its Earth-orbiting Sputnik satellite. The United States, fearful of the security risk and hoping to make the nation more competitive with foreign powers, reacted with dramatic investments in science-and-technology education. In 1983, “A Nation at Risk,” the report published by the National Commission on Excellence in Education, warned of a “rising tide of mediocrity” in American education that “threatens our very future as a Nation and a people.”
[The report described the crisis in grim and earnest tones. “If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today,” it famously warned, “we might well have viewed it as an act of war.”]
[Back then] the warnings helped spark a bipartisan national effort to improve the schools, and the following decades saw major federal initiatives such as George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act and Barack Obama’s Race to the Top program, accompanied by major state-level reforms to boost achievement.
America is again facing an educational crisis. Last week, The New York Times reported that American students “turned in grim results on the latest international test of math skills.” That test, the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), found that fourth graders have dropped 18 points in math since 2019, while eighth graders have dropped 27 points. The math scores of both high-performing and low-performing eighth graders fell. As the education reporter Dana Goldstein notes, the coronavirus pandemic is a major contributor to the decline, but not the only one: “In the United States, academic declines—and widening gaps between stronger and weaker students—were apparent before the pandemic,” she writes. In 2019, the National Assessment of Educational Progress found that two-thirds of American children could not read at a proficient level.
In math, Americans now lag behind their counterparts in places such as Singapore, South Korea, Britain, and Poland. Only 7 percent of American students scored at the highest levels in math—far behind the 23 percent in South Korea and Japan, and 41 percent in Singapore, who scored at that level. The decline in math scores is part of a much larger decline in educational performance overall—and an exacerbation of the achievement gap between rich and poor students. But despite the appalling numbers, the educational crisis was barely mentioned during the presidential debates, and there is scant evidence of the political will necessary to address it.
Any bipartisan consensus on education has shattered; President-Elect Donald Trump and Republicans at the state level seem more intent on waging culture wars about gender and religion than tackling achievement gaps. The education initiative that Trump has been most vocal about is his threat to abolish the federal Department of Education (which he is unlikely to achieve, because dismantling the department requires an act of Congress). Meanwhile, many congressional and state-level Democrats are reluctant to push back against either the educational establishment or the teachers’ unions. This dynamic appeared most notably in their failure to resist the unions’ push to keep schools closed during the early pandemic.
Instead of alarm, the crisis has been met with denial and attempts at obfuscation.
Some state educational bureaucracies have responded to the decline in student achievement by simply lowering their standards. In New York, Oklahoma, Wisconsin, and Alaska, for instance, education officials adjusted their passing scores on standardized tests or changed their definition of proficiency. And American parents continue to think their kids are doing just fine—in large part because of schools’ inflation of grades.
The public also remains in deep denial. American students may be lagging behind much of the world, but their parents continue to think their own kids are doing just fine. A 2023 Gallup study found that “Nine in 10 parents believe their child is at or above grade level in reading and math,” which was not surprising because their children’s report cards were filled with gold stars and happy faces. “Roughly eight in 10 students in the U.S. receive mostly B’s or better,” Gallup reported.
For decades, the consequences of underperformance have also been masked by the influx of international students into American higher education. A 2022 study found that foreign students made up a majority—sometimes as much as 80 percent—of students in U.S. graduate programs in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Meanwhile, immigrants make up about a quarter of all workers in STEM fields. It’s not yet clear how Trump’s massive crackdown on immigrants could affect opportunities for foreign students, or their willingness to come to the United States.
You can read the whole thing here (gift link.)
Exit take: I’m not new to this topic. A flashback from (checks notes) 1994….
Your daily dog
Finally
I care very deeply about education, but I no longer teach, and not because I am of retirement age (I am not). It really wasn’t worth it. Getting attacked from every angle and massively underpaid is not what I signed up for.
I believe it to be the case that Wray’s quitting blocks cash Patel from being installed immediately at least. The law says that when an FBI director steps down an interim appointee can only be someone previously approved by the Senate and who has served a minimum of 90 days in some approved role.