21.11.2024
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Cabinet of curiosities
Warmongers, kleptocrats, sex pests - but above all cronies. Paul Demarty looks ahead to an already fractious Trump front bench that will, in all probability, churn with remarkable speed
There were a couple of moments, towards the end of the US presidential campaign, when various veterans of Donald Trump’s first term - some, like general John Kelly, in the open, some anonymously - alleged that he had praised a certain former world leader by the name of Adolf Hitler.
It was, in the end, a futile attempt to get some of the energy of previous campaigns back - that acute fear that a Trump presidency might actually destroy the democratic fig leaf that hides the shame of American oligarchy and empire. There was one telling example cited, however, by The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg: “‘I need the kind of generals that Hitler had,’ Trump said in a private conversation in the White House, according to two people who heard him say this. ‘People who were totally loyal to him, that follow orders’.”1
It is not necessarily clear that Hitler’s generals fitted the bill more than any other set - after all, a bunch of military officers did attempt to assassinate him. But that need for total loyalty - rewarded, invariably, with scandalous disloyalty on his own part - really does seem to be Trump’s way of doing business. The activities of his transition team so far bear this out.
Transition
Indeed, the team itself bears that out. Biden’s transition was overlooked largely by experienced politicians used to the cut and thrust of Democratic infighting. But Trump’s is led by Howard Lutnick, an old Wall Street hand with no obvious political background beyond his Trumpism; and Linda McMahon, who filled a minor post in the first Trump administration, but is best known as co-ringmaster of World Wrestling Entertainment with her husband, Vince. She heads a political action committee by the name of America First Action, which edged out the Heritage Foundation for the job of staffing the new administration - largely because the HF people made the mistake of privately boasting that they, not The Donald, would be in charge of the whole show. (Lurking in the background, apparently, is Trump’s loyal son-in-law, Jared Kushner.)
So which eager beavers do we expect to see in the White House next year? The announcements so far, it is fair to say, point to quite a crew. On the domestic front, we may as well start with the eccentric tech tycoon, Elon Musk, who - along with hyperactive Silicon Valley creature Vivek Ramaswamy - will head up a new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE, after a famous and now rather stale internet meme), whose job is to slash and burn the administrative state. Musk should need little introduction at this point; already a little flighty, he seems to have been driven entirely mad by the experience of owning Twitter. Somehow we expect that the “efficiencies” he finds in the state machine will not be in the fantastically bloated department of defense, or Nasa, both of whom he relies on for extravagant contracts.
Ramaswamy’s angle in all this is not quite so clear. In spite of his occasional calls to invade Mexico, he is somehow hard to dislike, thanks to his puppy-dog enthusiasm and impromptu rap performances of Eminem’s ‘Lose yourself’. We take it he is a representative of the Silicon Valley right - Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, David Sacks and friends - who have swung hard behind Trump, as revenge for the more assertive anti-trust regime under Joe Biden and current Federal Trade Commission chair Lina Khan. (Venture capitalists mostly cash out via mergers and acquisitions, which they believe are being held up.) Expect the FTC and Securities and Exchanges Commission to be in the crosshairs of these people. As the cheerful shiba inu dog of the original meme might have said, “Such kleptocracy, wow”.
Moving on to those regulatory agencies themselves, the picture is even less rosy. Veteran climate-change denier and fracking enthusiast Lee Zeldin, a New York congressman, gets the nod for the Environmental Protection Agency. Jay Bhattacharya is rumoured to be in the running for the National Institutes of Health, an agency that Bhattacharya as a Covid-sceptical libertarian has frequently lambasted in his career.
Even if it comes through, it will be somehow only the second weirdest health-related appointment, after that of Robert F Kennedy junior, who has defected from the Democratic allegiance of his dynasty and now looks to be health secretary. RFK is a notorious anti-vaxxer and proponent of strange and slightly creepy interventions for drug addicts that look just a little like labour camps. His abortive third-party presidential run took in several bizarre incidents, from the dumping of a dead bear in New York’s Central Park (he protests innocence of the murder itself) to a cybersex affair with Olivia Nuzzi, a prominent political journalist four decades his junior.
More serious allegations have dogged Matt Gaetz, nominated as attorney general, and already notorious as an ultra-Trumpite Florida congressman, whose enthusiasm is only matched by his evident stupidity. In 2020, he faced allegations of sex trafficking and statutory rape for supposedly paying a 17-year-old to cross state lines to do the dirty, though charges were never filed. The House Ethics Committee was in the midst of investigating him for various sex-and-drugs matters when the proposed appointment arrived at just the right time to spring him from the trap. Nothing like hiring a man perpetually in flight from various authorities to head up the department of justice - but then one expects his prime role to be shielding his boss from his own legal difficulties!
No peace
On foreign policy, the appointments so far are a wake-up call for anyone who truly believed Trump’s claim to be the peace candidate. Despite the exclusion of neocon big guns like Mike Pompeo and Nikki Haley, we have quite a gang of warmongering fanatics in front of us. At the state department we have senator Marco Rubio, who is a standard-issue Republican on matters of war and peace, and of one mind with Trump on the importance of ‘disciplining’ China. The department of defense goes to Pete Hegseth - a total political newbie, whose primary qualification for the job seems to be his presence on Trump’s favourite TV show, Fox and friends, and who also comes with a long train of sex scandals trailing behind him.
Zionist fanatic Elise Stefanik gets to be the ambassador to the United Nations. Other names in a list that might have been ghost-written by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee include Mike Huckabee, to be ambassador to Israel - one of those Christian dispensationalists who believe that defending Israel will hasten the end of days, and think that would be a jolly good thing. The various intelligence agencies are to be handed over to Tulsi Gabbard - an eccentric former Democratic congresswoman, who has recently swung hard towards Trumpism, and in any case had always been virulently pro-Israel.
Most of these people need to be confirmed by Senate hearings, but, given the Republican trifecta, this is unlikely to be a problem, except perhaps in the case of Gaetz, whose legal issues are all a little too fresh in the memory. The fighting spirit of ‘never Trump’ moderate Republicans is more or less broken today, if it ever amounted to much, and only the most egregious individuals will face any serious scrutiny.
How, then, will this all play out? There are, to be sure, reasons to suppose that, by this time next year, many of these appointees will be yesterday’s men and women. Trump, after all, values loyalty above all other things, and relative political heavyweights like Rubio will find it hard to swallow their pride in the quantities likely to be asked of them. Trump also hates to be made to look a fool, which makes the lightweights potentially vulnerable; and in any case, they are easier to get rid of. Nobody much will miss Pete Hegseth if his attempts to square off against senior military commanders see him defeated.
Incoherence
There is also the problem continually faced by Trumpism - its total lack of political coherence. There are the two main themes: China and immigration - on those, we can expect total message discipline. In any case, the US state apparatus itself is on board with great power escalation, and likely comfortable with whatever shows of brutality Trump deems appropriate in his war on migrants. On everything else, there are divisions - between populists and tech billionaires, or extreme social conservatives like vice-president JD Vance and realigning Democratic blow-ins like RFK and Gabbard.
For example - Musk and Ramaswamy represent a section of capital whose whole raison d’être is to capture monopolies; but Gaetz, who will have some influence over anti-trust enforcement at the DOJ, is a noted proponent of breaking up tech monopolies, and one of the key ‘Khan-servatives’ who support the incumbent FTC chair. There is certainly scope for a blow-up on these grounds. The history of the previous Trump administration is of endless such blow-ups - Steve Bannon against Jared Kushner, Anthony Scaramucci against everyone …
This is, to an extent, built into the strongman game. Hitler, too, had bickering subordinates, and indeed encouraged their bickering. They competed to provide the Führer with his opinion before he had the time to think of it himself. It was more or less how the whole show rattled on, and it allows a modicum of healthy political competition without for a moment impugning the power of the big man himself.
If the last Trump administration is any guide, the people who tend to win his affections over time are not his most obsequious superfans like Gaetz or Hegseth, but his family (notable by their absence in the current slate), four-star generals, and his billionaire friends. His signal achievement in his first term was a giant tax cut for the rich; his most obvious defeat was his failure to get troops out of Afghanistan, despite campaign promises and even negotiating a withdrawal deal, because the generals convinced him it would be too embarrassing (as, indeed, Biden was to discover later).
Things are shaping up, therefore, not for a rapid slide into dictatorship, but a kleptocrat’s raid on state coffers and consequent degradation of American state capacity. Infrastructure will continue to rot; indicators like life expectancy will continue to decline. All of this, naturally, will be blamed on ‘woke’ Democratic governors and mayors, or else the predations of immigrants.
It is really quite extraordinary that one still finds people earnestly hailing Trump as the avatar of a great realignment in American politics, heralding the emergence of a strange mirror-world social democracy - one thinks of Sohrab Ahmari, probably the best-known ideologue of this outlook, who is presently pinning his hopes on the as yet unfilled role of treasury secretary. The man is no idiot - but really now, Sohrab! We both lived through this once already. The sole cabinet survivor for the whole of Trump’s first term, to my memory, was treasury secretary Steven Mnuchin - a classic Goldman Sachs clone. Why will it be any different today?
The grain of truth in the ‘realigner’ creed is that America’s two-party system is barely functional as a means of responding to popular discontent; and that discontent is, for now, utterly demobilised beyond occasional protest movements of left and right - which alike prove incapable of meaningfully shaping the governing practice of those two parties. That much is obvious both from Trump’s cabinet of curiosities and the sheer rancour of the Democratic reckoning over their catastrophic defeat. It is hard to see how this arrangement can continue much longer in its present form.