What Could Possibly Go Wrong?
A cabinet of zealots, toadies, and cretins.
Personal note: I’m going to continue posting on X and Threads for the time being, but I’m also joining the growing horde of refugees to Blue Sky. Look for me there. You'll find quite a few old friends...
Happy Wednesday.
To the Contrary is a reader-supported publication. You may disagree with me from time to time (and I expect you will, because I’m not promising you a safe space here). But I’ll always try to give it to you straight. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. (And I’m immensely grateful for your generous support.
Zealots, and toadies, and cretins. Oh My.
Well, so much for the it-could-be-worse crowd.
We’ll get to the gobsmacking choice of Peter Hegseth to be Secretary of Defense in a moment, but let’s start with the news that Kristi Noem has been named Secretary of Homeland Security, a position for which she has no discernible qualifications except her willingness to kill puppies. Her message to Trump: “I will kill dogs for you, just to show how tough I am.”
She will now be the public face of Stephen Miller’s mass deportation operation.
For a few hours on Tuesday, after Trump picked Marco Rubio to be Secretary of State, establishment-types engaged in aggressive wish-casting. Maybe this wouldn’t be so bad after all. In contrast to other possible choices, he felt normal.
Maybe, they told themselves, Rubio will bring a semblance of order and sanity to Trump’s Putinesque foreign policy.
AYFKM? Have we learned nothing from the last nine years? Are we going to memory-hole everything we know about Trump? And everything we just heard and saw in the campaign? He told us over and over what he would do; and now we’re going to get it good and hard.
Rubio won’t be setting any policy. That will flow from JD Vance, Trump, and the Kremlin-friendly trolls of MAGA. Rubio will be a figurehead who poses no threat whatsoever.
And both men know it.
Trump picked Rubio because he squashed him like a bug and can do it easily again.
As Josh Marshall notes: “Marco Rubio is less a hardliner than a thin and insubstantial slice of soap. What he is mostly is servile, soft. At least in these positions that seems to be what Trump wants – people who’ve already been broken in.”
In other words: This is not a cabinet of equals. It is a cabinet of disposable toadies.
And then there is Hegseth, a weekend Fox News host known for his undiluted MAGA extremism. There is not world enough or time for us to rehearse all of the ways this is a risible choice.
But apparently, we are doing this.
We’re taking about a guy who bragged that he hasn’t washed his hands in 10 years because “Germs Are not a Real Thing.” A guy who urged pardons for war criminals and who pushed Trump’s Big Lie ahead of J6. A guy who hit a drummer with a thrown axe on live television. He will now run one of the world’s most complex institutions and have access to nuclear weapons.
‘Who the f--k is this guy?’: Defense world reacts to Trump’s surprise Pentagon pick - POLITICO
“Hegseth is undoubtedly the least qualified nominee for SecDef in American history,” one veterans’ advocate said.
Pete Hegseth Appointment Sparks Military Fury: 'Beyond Stupid' - Newsweek
Paul Rieckhoff, founder of the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America Association, commented: "Hegseth is undoubtedly the least qualified nominee for SecDef in American history. And the most overtly political. Brace yourself, America."
The news was met with bewilderment and worry among many in Washington as Trump passed on a number of established national security heavy-hitters and chose an Army National Guard officer well known in conservative circles as a co-host of Fox News Channel’s “Fox & Friends Weekend.”
Hegseth would be an ultra-loyalist, and would go along with everything Trump and his apparatchiks in the White House want. He would enable all of Trump’s plans to politicize and degrade our military, about which we’ve already seen a glimpse. It’s impossible to imagine him raising any objection regarding the host of things Trump plans to do, from using the military to round up immigrants to intervening to promote politically aligned general officers.
Exit take: This is why Trump has been pushing for more recess appointments that don’t require senate confirmation votes, so it’s probably going to get worse. Still to come: Trump’s picks for AG, FBI director, and Director of National Intelligence. Jake Sherman is reporting that Tulsi Gabbard (sic) is in the mix.
BONUS: This seems a good time to remind ourselves (again) that a clown with a flamethrower, still has a flamethrower.
What could go wrong?
Over at the Dispatch, Yuval Levin writes: “What Trump’s Win Doesn’t Mean,”
Despite all the talk about Trump’s “mandate,” Levin notes that Trump’s victory “was a relatively narrow win owed almost entirely to negative polarization.”1
And it doesn’t mean that Trump’s eccentric mix of interests and priorities is well aligned with the public’s hopes and fears….
It may prove particularly challenging for the motley crew surrounding Trump, whose political instincts add up to an especially incoherent jumble—at once dovish and hawkish, libertarian and activist, traditionalist and revolutionary, authoritarian and anti-establishment.
The constituency for dispatching Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to take fluoride out of our drinking water is non-existent. People around Trump—even in the more distant reaches of his camp—are all inclined to think they’ve won a mandate for their pet cause even though voters have no idea who they are or what they want, and likely wouldn’t be on board if they did.
Most of what Trump himself is most eager to do, from mass deportations to steep tariffs, would likely prove fairly unpopular when actually put into practice.
This is the trap that our 21st-century presidents have tended to fall into. They win elections because their opponents were unpopular, and then—imagining the public has endorsed their party activists’ agenda—they use the power of their office to make themselves unpopular.
This could well be the story of the next few years: Over-reach and extremism, with an overlay of spiraling incompetence and crazy.
What else could go wrong?
The billionaire bromance
Donald Trump and Elon Musk are both titanically arrogant narcissists. In the end, of course, there is room for only one, and there are already signs that Musk is out-staying his welcome at Mar-a-Lago.
“They’re both narcissists, and there can be only one narcissist as head of the country, and that’s Donald Trump,” notes Kara Swisher. “Trump goes through people like tissues, essentially. And even if it’s Musk, they’re going to clash at some point.”
Yesterday, Trump named Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to co-chair something called the Department of Government Efficiency. But — and here’s the rub — DOGE is not actually a government agency at all, but merely an advisory commission. How’s that going to work? Mike Murphy has a savvy prediction:
1.) Great fanfare
2.) Nice offices
3.) Painful discovery: Fed Gov’t doesn’t work like hedge fund or start up
4.) Painful discovery II: 75% of Fed spending is basically on auto-pilot
5.) Epic squabbling with Agencies, Congress, WH
6.) Elon gets bored. Wiles kills it off
**
Mass deportation
It won’t just be criminals. And it’s going to be very, very messy. Which may come as a surprise to many voters, including Latinos who didn’t think Trump’s plans would affect them.
Trump’s pick to be the Deportation Czar (under the Deportation Maximum Leader, Stephen Miller) “makes no apologies for some of its most controversial policies, including the separation of migrant parents from their children.”
I wrote about the deportation plans a year ago today:
This weekend, we got a deeper glimpse at Trump 2.0 from the NYT: “Sweeping Raids, Giant Camps and Mass Deportations: Inside Trump’s 2025 Immigration Plans.”
Former President Donald Trump is planning an extreme expansion of his first-term crackdown on immigration if he returns to power in 2025 — including preparing to round up people living in the United States without legal permission on a vast scale and detain them in sprawling camps while they wait to be expelled.
Camps.
He plans to scour the country for immigrants living here without legal permission and deport people by the millions per year.
“Following the Eisenhower model, we will carry out the largest domestic deportation operation in American history.” The reference was to a 1954 campaign to round up and expel Mexican immigrants that was named for an ethnic slur — “Operation Wetback.”
To help speed mass deportations, Trump is preparing an enormous expansion of a form of removal that does not require due-process hearings.
Trump wants to build huge camps to detain people while their cases are processed and they await deportation flights.
Trump would redirect money in the military budget, as he did in his first term to spend more on a border wall than Congress had authorized.
Nota bene: He fully intends to do all of this by eliminating any possible impediments and guardrails.
**
RFK Jr. and the next pandemic
Via the Wapo: “The longtime anti-vaccine activist could influence how the FDA and CDC approach the lifesaving shots.”
Kennedy, founder of one of the country’s most prominent anti-vaccine groups, has long criticized the CDC’s recommended list of childhood immunizations, promoting debunked claims about vaccines’ link to autism. He has argued that federal agencies have not done enough research on the shots that hundreds of millions of Americans have received to protect them from measles, flu and other infectious diseases.
What could go wrong? Pennsylvania Leads U.S. Pertussis Outbreak — Precision Vaccinations News
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) today reported that In 2024, confirmed cases of pertussis have significantly increased across the country,
Preliminary data show that more than five times (22,240) as many cases were reported as of week #44, reported on November 2, 2024, compared to (4,209) at the same time in 2023 and higher than what was seen at the same time in 2019.
The CDC's data shows Pennsylvania has reported about 10% (2,462) of all pertussis cases this year.
**
The economy, stupid
Via AP: Frustrated Americans await the economic changes they voted for with Trump
The Peterson Institute for International Economics, a leading think tank, has estimated that Trump’s policies would slash the U.S. gross domestic product — the total output of goods and services — by between $1.5 trillion and $6.4 trillion through 2028.
Peterson also estimated that Trump’s proposals would drive prices sharply higher within two years: Inflation, which would otherwise come in at 1.9% in 2026, would instead jump to between 6% and 9.3% if Trump’s policies were enacted in full.
From France, with love
From my daughter’s splendid Substack newsletter, some obligatory dog pictures.
It doesn’t look like Trump will win a majority of the popular vote. Via Nate Silver:
Updated estimate:
Harris 75.5m votes (48.4%)
Trump 77.8m votes (49.8%) other 2.7m votes (1.7%)
Total turnout 156.0m votes (vs 158.6m in 2020)
Trump margin +1.4%
I missed you at the Bulwark so I subscribed.
I am a fan of this "no hopium" zone.
Charlie, still telling it like it is.
Thank you.
I hate to admit it, but I think we are F'd.....for a while.
Charlie Charlie don't stop writing! I've gone into a hidey hole since Nov 5 and I don't plan to come out for a very long time. MSNBC. Gone. NYTimes. Gone. The Post. Gone. LA Times. Gone. I am now in a Sykes and Bulwark bubble and I like it in here! Thanks for the sanity. Whitney Green