The Senate Must Draw the Line Now
Fear of worse nominees later is no reason to confirm bad ones now.
Look, Donald Trump was absolutely clear on the campaign trail that he doesn’t know anything about Project 2025. He’s barely heard of Project 2025. He absolutely does not approve of Project 2025. The fact that, per ABC News, Project 2025’s top minds are flocking into the new Trump administration is just one of those interesting coincidences:
Several individuals connected to the plan have already received posts in the new administration, and one of the plan’s top architects is under consideration for a top position, according to multiple sources familiar with the discussions.
Russ Vought, who authored a chapter on “Executive Office of the President” for Project 2025’s “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise” . . . is under consideration for a cabinet-level position in the next administration and has been vetted by Trump’s transition team, source said.
You might recall Vought as the guy who was caught on hidden camera back in August bragging that Trump was just distancing himself from Project 2025 at the moment for political reasons. You could knock us over with a feather. Happy Tuesday.
Why We Fight
by William Kristol
Trump’s cabinet selections are terrible. But they were also predictable. Except to Trump apologists and accommodators who pretended it would be different. As Jay Nordlinger, Bill Buckley’s intrepid successor in spirit at National Review, put it on social media:
True or false? If, sometime in 2024, you had told anti-anti-Trumpers that Trump would make Gaetz attorney general, Gabbard national intelligence director, RFK Jr. HHS secretary, etc., they would have shaken their head and said, sadly, “You suffer from Trump Derangement Syndrome.”
Of course Jay’s right. Our critics would have said just that. And they would have been sadly wrong. It turns out that Trump Derangement Syndrome was actually Trump Discernment Syndrome. We saw Trump clearly. And so here we are with these ghastly nominations.
The question we now face is what, if anything, to do about them. Let me address three well-meaning questions that friends and allies have raised about the wisdom of going all out to fight these nominations.
1. These nominees are unfit and repulsive. But if their names are withdrawn, couldn’t we end up with less tawdry but more terrifying alternatives, who might be more competent and dangerous?
A fair question. But the answer’s pretty simple: Senators have to advise on and consent to the nominees presented to them. If they reject one utterly unqualified nominee, and an even more dangerous one follows, they should reject that nominee as well.
More broadly, one can never be absolutely sure that there might not be adverse consequences in doing the right thing. But you can’t let that paralyze you. And in this case the positive consequences of rejecting these nominees are, I think, pretty clear: Stopping this first wave of awful nominees would slow Trump’s momentum and make the path of his overall authoritarian project less smooth. A victory here and now would make later victories more possible.
So in addition to being the right thing to do, it’s very likely that stopping as many of these nominees as possible is a good thing to do from a broader utilitarian (if I can put it this way) point of view.
2. The problem isn’t these nominees. It’s Trump. And the American people elected him.
True enough. And sad enough.
But by definition, a senator’s constitutional duty of advice and consent to presidential nominees is always exercised in judging nominations made by the winner of the previous election. So the fact that Trump won in no way relieves senators of their responsibility.
Furthermore, we as citizens have an ongoing right to seek to influence the operations of our government. We do have a long four years ahead. But there’s no reason not to start as soon as possible to make these four years less damaging.
3. Are the sex scandals of Gaetz, Hegseth, and Kennedy really relevant? Shouldn’t we avoid stooping to discuss them?
Churchill says somewhere, “The Muse of History must not be fastidious.” The muse of politics must not be too fastidious either. We’re not talking here about some slight improprieties. We’re not really even talking about ‘he said/she said.’ We’re looking at indisputably gross and grotesque behavior by Matt Gaetz, Pete Hegseth, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
It’s true that Trump got elected despite similar behavior. But should we compound the damage by turning a blind eye to the actions of his minions? If the top crime boss gets away with things, isn’t it still worth holding his henchmen responsible?
If these individuals’ alleged sexual assaults don’t amount to criminal behavior beyond a reasonable doubt, then don’t charge them with crimes. But don’t reward them with positions of trust and honor in our government. Senators needn’t spend time moralizing. But they do have a constitutional obligation to judge these nominations. Voting yes is excusing behavior that shouldn’t be excused.
That, by the way, is the real Trump Derangement Syndrome: Excusing the inexcusable and supporting the insupportable, due to an abject fear of challenging the ill-considered wishes and unchecked power of Trump. Rejecting these nominees is a good way for senators to show they’re not afflicted by that debilitating syndrome.
MANDATE REVOKED?: Don’t look now, but Donald Trump may not end up having won an actual popular-vote majority after all. As the late ballots have kept trickling in, primarily from blue states, Trump currently sits at 49.94 percent to Kamala Harris’s 48.26 percent.
The race was still an electoral triumph, and obviously nobody’s expecting Trump to hold a press conference tomorrow to announce he no longer believes he has a mandate for radical change and has decided to govern like the second coming of Mitt Romney. But at least it’s something for the silliest people alive to be steamed about.
THE ETHICS QUESTION: The House Ethics Committee will meet tomorrow to decide what to do with its report on allegations of sexual misconduct against Matt Gaetz, as the former representative prepares for Senate confirmation hearings on his nomination as attorney general. House Speaker Mike Johnson has repeatedly urged Ethics to spike the report, arguing that they have no jurisdiction over former lawmakers. But GOP committee chair Michael Guest told Politico yesterday that Johnson’s pressure campaign won’t influence their decision: “I appreciate Mike reaching out. I don’t see it having an impact on what we as a committee ultimately decide.” (Johnson is wrong, by the way: The Ethics Committee has twice before voted to publish their reports after resignations from lawmakers.)
Top Ethics Democrats, including ranking member Susan Wild, are already pushing for the report to be made public, but at least one committee Republican would have to take that position as well to trigger its release. Naturally, the report could be leaked even if the committee votes to bury it—although you have to wonder whether the goody-two-shoes types who sign up for an ethics committee would be likely to reach for that option.
DRUG PROBLEMS: What will a second Trump term mean for the pharmaceutical industry? As Axios notes this morning: depends which Trump factotum you ask. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump’s pick for secretary of health and human services, wants to add more regulatory hurdles for new drugs and vaccines to surmount before approval and plans to cut federal funding for research and development. But Vivek Ramaswamy, co-czar with Elon Musk of Trump’s new unofficial “Department of Government Efficiency,” is suggesting exactly the opposite approach, saying the administration should unleash innovation by slashing existing bureaucratic red tape at the FDA. Guess they’ll do one of the two!
DO YOU HAVE A BETTER IDEA?: Take your laughs where you can get them. RNC co-chair and presidential daughter-in-law Lara Trump’s charm campaign to get appointed to the Senate isn’t going particularly well. Trump, whose qualifications for the job include years of work as a TV producer and some truly inexplicable releases as a singer/songwriter, has had her eye on the World’s Greatest Deliberative Body™ for a while: She seriously considered running for the North Carolina seat vacated by Sen. Richard Burr in 2022. Since the president-elect tapped Sen. Marco Rubio as his nominee for secretary of state, Lara Trump has been hustling on Fox News to put herself forward as a replacement: “I have not been asked yet, but I certainly would strongly consider it if it’s presented to me.”
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, alas, seems unconvinced. “Florida deserves a Senator,” he said, “who will help President Trump deliver on his election mandate, be strong on immigration and border security, take on the entrenched bureaucracy and administrative state, reverse the nation’s fiscal decline, be animated by conservative principles, and has a proven record of results.”
The “proven record” is the operative phrase here.
Cheap Shots
I'm less concerned about the "why we fight" aspect than I am with the "*how* we fight" aspect. Since 2016, dems have consistently failed to realize 2 things: 1) they keep trying to go back to a bygone era of bipartisanship and have failed to embrace a wartime footing against the GOP and the oligarchy that entails going into scorched-earth political tactics instead of worrying about the "optics" of doing so, and 2) they continuously fail to embrace anti-establishment populism politics, instead opting for the defense of institutions rather than seeking to change them.
Trump got his start not by going after the dems, but by going after the leaders of the GOP. For Trump and MAGA, dems were the "far enemy," but the bipartisanship softies within their party were the "near enemy" that needed to either go away or be brought to heal first. Dems need to do this kind of thing within their own party over the next two years and start replacing their softies with fighters. They need to sideline anyone who still lives in this fantasy of a world where we go back to bipartisanship and start promoting the people within their party who understand that those days are long gone and the only way forward is to fight the MAGAfied GOP with scorched earth tactics that include firebreathing message campaigns that don't give a fuck about "optics", highlighting of the corruption/incompetence/illegality of the Trump administration at every turn, and a messaging focus on economic populism that centers around the American oligarchy hollowing out the middle class with corruption and crony capitalism and the need to take the country back from the rich via economic populism.
The old ways the dems have embraced are not working. They need to move away from "hope" and "joy" and start embracing *anger* and *fighting*. The American public is not in the mood for hope/joy, and they want angry fighters that are going to do something instead of just propose civility and niceties. Dems need to get out of their decency comfort zone and get into the arena and start throwing a whole lot of low blows, or they're going to be continuously rejected by a pissed off working class who are looking for some scapegoats to dish out punishments against. If dems don't turn the American public against the oligarchy and fight to remake the institutions on their own terms, they will continue to lose a critical mass of the American public whom they need to put them into power and they will watch the other side change these institutions in a way they won't like.
“The problem isn’t these nominees. It’s Trump. And the people elected him.”
Which is precisely why the framers of our Constitution crafted a system based on checks and balances. Almost 250 years ago they foresaw the possibility of a president like Donald Trump. What they didn’t foresee is that the other two branches of government would be corrupted at the same time.