Musk is from Mars, Europe is from Venus

The move is part of a wider restructuring programme, which will see 4,000 posts closed across Europe.

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As president-elect, Donald Trump has the right to name the people he wants in his Cabinet. Some of Trump’s nominations, such as Senator Marco Rubio to lead the State Department, are completely ordinary. A few are ideological red meat for Republicans. Others are gifts to Trump loyalists.

Four of these nominees, however, are dangerous to the security of the United States and to the well-being of its people: Pete Hegseth (Defense), Tulsi Gabbard (Office of the Director of National Intelligence), Matt Gaetz (Justice), and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (Health and Human Services). The Senate must turn back these nominations, and do so en bloc.

The Gaetz and Kennedy nominations are apparently already in trouble, and more than enough has been written about them. Gaetz is an accused sexual predator (he has long denied the allegations); ironically, he is the least dangerous of this pack. Yes, as attorney general he would green-light every raving demand from MAGA world for investigations into Trump’s enemies, but in a strange blessing, he is also likely to be completely incompetent. The Department of Justice, as Trump himself learned during his first term, is packed to the rafters with very sharp lawyers who would almost certainly jam up any of Gaetz’s unconstitutional orders. Gaetz’s tenure at Justice would be a national humiliation and destructive to the rule of law, but it would also likely be very short.

The RFK Jr. nomination is, in a word, pathetic. Most of his views are little more than pure anti-science kookery, and if he is confirmed, Americans—and especially their children—will be in peril from this anti-vaccine crusader. But he would be a danger to the health of individual Americans (especially those who watch too much TV and spend too much time on the internet) rather than to the continued existence of the United States.

Which brings me to Gabbard and Hegseth.

Tulsi Gabbard, as I wrote last week, is unqualified for the job of DNI, but she is also a security risk: I have held security clearances for most of my adult life, and had I worked in any federal office next to her, I would have had no compunction about raising her as an “insider threat” because of her political views and her shady international connections. (As a member of Congress in 2017, she held meetings with the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad outside of U.S. government channels—an obvious problem for anyone seeking a senior role in national security.)

Gaetz, Kennedy, and Gabbard are terrible choices. The Hegseth nomination, however, is easily the most dangerous and irresponsible of all of Trump’s picks. (Gabbard is a significant hazard, but she would not have a gigantic army at her disposal, and she would not be involved with the control of nuclear weapons.) Like the other three in this group, Hegseth is shockingly unqualified for the job he’s been asked to take, but in this case, the Senate is faced with a proposal to place a TV talking head at the top of the Pentagon and insert him into the nuclear chain of command.

Hegseth has made personal choices that make him unfit to lead the DOD, including his extramarital affairs (which apparently helped tank his chances to lead the Department of Veterans Affairs in Trump’s first administration) and a payoff to a woman who claimed that he’d sexually assaulted her. He denies the assault allegation, but in any case, adultery is a criminal violation of the Uniform Code of Military Justice and can be a career-ending mistake for a member of the armed forces.

I will leave aside whether Hegseth’s tattoos identify him as a white supremacist. Hegseth denies the claim. But some of Hegseth’s ink is popular with extremists; that’s why one of his own military comrades reported him as an insider threat in the first place—and not, as Hegseth and some whining conservatives claim, because he is being persecuted as a Christian. I knew many people in federal service with patriotic tattoos. (I have one myself, and no, it’s none of your business where it is.) I am also a Christian who wears a cross—one that I had blessed in a church—every day. That’s not what any of this is about.

Hegseth’s defenders seem unable to understand that neither Hegseth nor anyone else has a right to be the secretary of defense: If the nominee made choices earlier in life that would now undermine his effectiveness in the job, then that’s his problem, not the Pentagon’s. But even if Hegseth were not an example of a sexist, MAGA-bro culture—his statements about women in the military are particularly noxious—the Senate is still faced with the problem that he’s utterly unqualified.

A former Army major, he has no serious background in national-security or defense issues beyond his military service. (And how that service ended is apparently now a matter of some dispute.) He has not worked anywhere in the defense world: not in any of its agencies, not with any of its industries, not with any of its workforce in any capacity. He has never managed anything of any significant size.

Not only would he be incapable of administering America’s largest government department, but he’d also be in a position of terrifying responsibility for which he is unprepared. Imagine an international crisis, perhaps only a year or two from now. President Trump is facing a situation that could be rife with danger to the United States and our allies—perhaps even one that involves nuclear threats. At this dire moment, Trump turns to …

Pete Hegseth and Tulsi Gabbard?

The Senate must do everything in its constitutional power to stop this. Trump won the election, but no president has an absolute right to his Cabinet nominations: The Constitution requires the Senate to consent to those nominations. Trump has already warned that if the Senate balks, he will subvert this process by using “recess appointments,” in effect a demand that the Senate take a walk and let Trump do whatever he wants—to consent, in other words, to autocracy.

Incoming Majority Leader John Thune and others who still might care about their duty to the nation have time to go to Trump, right now, and tell him that these four nominations are DOA. They could tell Trump that it is in his own interest—the only interest he recognizes—not to risk multiple defeats. And if the Senate folds and decides to take these up one at a time, Trump will wear them down, likely accepting that Gaetz must be a Succession-style “blood sacrifice,” in return for which Trump gets everyone else. For Thune—who, one assumes, does not wish to begin his tenure as a statelier version of Senator Tommy Tuberville, the MAGA obstructionist who held up military promotions for months—accepting such a deal would be a huge strategic error.

Whomever Trump nominates as replacements will likely be dangerous in their own way. But these four nominees have to be stopped—and right now.

Related:

The thing that binds Gabbard, Gaetz, and Hegseth to Trump The perverse logic of Trump’s nomination circus

Here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

He was the world’s longest-held death-row inmate. He was also innocent. How Trump could make Congress go away for a while Thomas Chatterton Williams: Is wokeness one big power grab? Europe braces for Trump.

Today’s News

President Joe Biden authorized Ukraine yesterday to use U.S.-supplied long-range missiles for strikes inside Russia, according to U.S. officials. Russia said today that the decision would escalate international tensions and add “fuel to the fire” of the war. Trump confirmed on Truth Social that his administration is planning to declare a national emergency and enlist the military to carry out a mass-deportation program targeting undocumented immigrants. Trump picked Brendan Carr, a member of the Federal Communications Commission and a Project 2025 contributor, to lead the FCC.

Dispatches

The Wonder Reader: Learning where famous musicians sleep and what they eat can feel like finally glimpsing the unknowable, Isabel Fattal writes.

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Evening Read

Justin Chung for The Atlantic

How Jimmy O. Yang Became a Main Character

By Shirley Li

Jimmy O. Yang had been trying to make it as an actor for years—cobbling together bit parts in network sitcoms, auditioning for nameless roles such as “Chinese Teenager #1”—when he was cast in a new HBO series. The show, Silicon Valley, was a comedy about a group of programmers at a Bay Area start-up incubator; his character, Jian-Yang, was an app developer who spoke in broken English.

It was a small guest role, but he saw it as an opportunity.

Read the full article.

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Watch (or skip). Conclave (out now in theaters) treats Catholic theology as mere policy, like the membership rules at Augusta National. It’s even worse than The Da Vinci Code, Matthew Schmitz writes.

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Why is a regular guy attracted to a billionaire candidate? It’s simple: Because the candidate can play to people’s fantasies. The man knows his television, loves girls, hates rules, knows how to make a deal, tells jokes, uses bad language, and is convivial to a fault. He is loud, vain, cheeky. He has a troubled relationship with his age and his hair. He has managed to survive embarrassment, marital misadventures, legal troubles, political about-faces. He’s entangled in conflicts of interest, but he couldn’t care less. His party? A monument to himself.

He thinks God is his publicist, and twists religion to suit his own ends. He may not be like us, but he makes sure there’s something about him that different people can relate to personally. He is, above all, a man of enormous intuition. He is aware of this gift and uses it ruthlessly. He knows how to read human beings, their desires and their weaknesses. He doesn’t tell you what to do; he forgives you, period.

So, how do you like Silvio Berlusconi?

Here in Italy, he loomed over our politics—and our lives—for 30 years. He created his own party in 1994 (Forza Italia, a sort of Make Italy Great Again), and a few months later, he became Italy’s prime minister for the first time. He didn’t last long, but he climbed back into government in 2001, and then again in 2008. Three years later, he resigned amid sex scandals and crumbling public finances, but he managed to remain a power broker until he died last year.

[Tom Nichols: Trump’s depravity will not cost him this election]

Silvio Berlusconi, like Donald Trump, was a right-wing leader capable of attracting the most disappointed and least informed voters, who historically had chosen the left. He chased them, understood them, pampered them, spoiled them with television and soccer. He introduced the insidious dictatorship of sympathy.

But Silvio Berlusconi is not Donald Trump.

Berlusconi respected alliances and was loyal to his international partners. He loved both Europe and America. He believed in free trade. And he accepted defeat. His appointments were at times bizarre but seldom outrageous. He tried hard to please everybody and to portray himself as a reliable, good-hearted man. Trump, as we know, doesn’t even try.

Berlusconi may have invented a format, but Trump adopted and twisted it. Trump’s victory on November 5 is clear and instructive, and it gives the whole world a signal as to where America is headed.

The scent of winners is irresistible for some people. The desire to cheer Trump’s victory clouds their view. They don’t see, or perhaps don’t take seriously, the danger signs. Reliability and coherence, until recently a must for a political leader, have taken a back seat. Showing oneself as virtuous risks being counterproductive: It could alienate voters, who would feel belittled.

American journalism—what is left of it, anyway—meticulously chronicled Trump’s deceitfulness. It made no difference, though. On the contrary, it seems to have helped him. Trump’s deputy, J. D. Vance, explained calmly in an interview that misleading people—maybe even lying to them—is sometimes necessary to overcome the hostility of the media.

I’m no better than you. I’m bad. So vote for me! This seems to be the magic new formula of American democracy. Venting and showing off flaws has become a way to reassure those voters—and there are many of them—who hate criticism. He who misbehaves is popular; those who dare to preach become unbearable. People love the Joker, not Batman—the Joker is more fun.

You don’t need to be a historian to know this; just a few history lessons are enough. The people, whether in the Athens of Plato and Demosthenes or in republican Rome, asked for leaders they could admire. This pretense lasted for centuries, in very different places and contexts. The people demanded honesty and sobriety from their leaders. They rarely got it, but at least they asked for it.  

Not even dictators escaped the rule. Italy’s own Benito Mussolini did not flaunt his excesses; he pretended to be sober and virtuous, and Italians pretended to believe it. Only autocrats and tyrants continue the farce today. A few weeks ago, the North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un got very angry when flyers rained down on Pyongyang showing his and his family’s luxuries to a very poor nation. Trump would have used them as election posters.

Aristocracy means “government by the best.” Today, we are in a kakistocracy, government by the worst. And tens of millions of American voters are proud of it, or at least happy to appear so. The copyright of this questionable political style belongs at least in part to former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Trump himself: Both, in 2016, won by proudly displaying their whims and weaknesses.

[From the July/August 2021 issue: The minister of chaos]

In his book Narrare l’Italia, the psychoanalyst Luigi Zoja wrote: “The growth of children is not guided by the rules that parents impart, but by the examples they offer. Leaders—fathers and mothers of the people—will be able to preach what they consider necessary national virtues, but they will spread them only if they are the first to practice them.” The author must admit that this has changed. Successful leaders have stopped “preaching the necessary virtues of the nation,” instead preferring to applaud its faults and consolidate their own power. It’s more rewarding.

The words Lead by example! are the soundtrack of distant childhood, for some of us. And what was asked of a firstborn or a class leader was expected of elected leaders. If they betrayed trust—and it often happened, everywhere—they lost their job and their reputation. Today, being labeled a good example or an expert is not only anachronistic; it is risky: Who do these guys think they are? How dare they show us a path, suggest a behavior? We know how to do our own research and make mistakes on our own, thank you.

Berlusconi’s shortcomings helped fuel his success, but he wasn’t proud of them. Trump wears his flaws like medals, and is appointing people to his coming administration who have the same attitude. Berlusconi would never have allowed the equivalent of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. near Italy’s department of health. An Italian Matt Gaetz would have been considered for a reality show on one of Berlusconi’s TV channels, at most.

If this is the path that democracy chose, let’s prepare for the worst. It will become impossible to get rid of a leader elected in this way and for these reasons. What do you want from me? they will reply after having disappointed and failed. I told you who I was, and you voted for me with enthusiasm. Now shut up and be good.

“On the record? We’re as calm as calm can be,” a European official assured me last week when I called him to ask what he thought about the reelection of Donald Trump.

His answer surprised me. I’d first met the official earlier this year when I was reporting on European allies’ view of the U.S. presidential election. Back then, almost every leader and diplomat I interviewed expressed dread at the prospect of Trump’s return to power; this same official had described the stakes as “existential” for his country. The reasons for the anxiety were obvious: Russia was waging war on NATO’s doorstep, and America, the alliance’s most powerful member by far, appeared to be on the verge of reelecting a president who had, among other things, said he’d encourage Russia to “do whatever the hell they want” to NATO countries he considers freeloaders. Yet now, the official on the other end of the line was talking optimistically about the “transatlantic cooperation” his government looked forward to fostering with its partners in Washington, and “working toward strong relationships with the new administration.”

[Read: What Europe fears]

“We approach the next Trump presidency with calm and focus, not wobbling and panic,” he confidently declared.

Then he asked if he could speak anonymously. I agreed. “Obviously,” he said, “a million things could go wrong.”

Political leaders and diplomats across Europe are clear-eyed about the threat that the next president will pose—and yet they can do very little about it. “The overall level of anxiousness is fairly high,” the official told me. “People are expecting turbulence.” America’s allies now know that they can’t simply ride out a Trump term and wait for a snap back to normalcy. So far this century, Americans have elected George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, Joe Biden, and Trump again. “Predictability is gone,” he said. “The pendulum swings from one extreme to the other.”

In the short term, sources told me, the plan is to cozy up to Trump and those close to him and hope for the best. In the long term, a growing consensus has emerged that Europe will need to prepare for a world in which it no longer counts on America for protection.

Wolfgang Ischinger, a veteran German diplomat who has served as ambassador to the United States, is among those urging calm. He has publicly cautioned European leaders against “finger wagging” in their interactions with the president-elect, and said they should take a wait-and-see approach when it comes to Trump’s foreign policy. Like other Europeans I spoke with, he was relieved by the choice of Marco Rubio—who has signaled support for NATO and has traditional views of America’s role in the world—for secretary of state. Ischinger also welcomed the realism that has shaped Europe’s response so far to Trump’s reelection. “We’re just going to have to deal with him—we’re prepared to deal with him.”

European officials, who have spent years planning for this contingency, are working to deepen personal relationships with Trump’s Republican allies, Ischinger told me, and talking about gestures they could make to flatter him. But these efforts will almost certainly face resistance from the European public, which, he said, broadly finds Trump repellent and even sinister. “I see a lot of disdain and panic,” he told me.

These reactions were reflected in the postelection headlines in the European press, which greeted Trump’s return with a mix of bafflement, scorn, and Apprentice puns. “What Have They Done … Again?” asked the cover of Britain’s Daily Mirror. The Guardian plastered its cover with the words “American dread.” And an op-ed on the homepage of the German newspaper Die Zeit resorted to English to capture the moment with a four-letter headline: “Fuck.”

Behind the scenes, Ischinger told me, European leaders have discussed inviting Trump to a capital for a grand state visit where allies could roll out the red carpet and hopefully cultivate some good will. But Ischinger worries that such an attempt could backfire. “I cannot imagine any such scenario in any German-French-Spanish-Italian city where you would not have huge anti-Trump demonstrations, probably really ugly ones,” he told me. “Organizing a decent visit for Mr. Trump would really be quite a nightmare for the police.”

Ischinger told me that the return of Trump and his hard-edged “America First” policy is emboldening Europeans who have been arguing that the continent needs more independence from its most powerful ally. Ischinger himself seems to be listening. When we spoke earlier this year, he was somewhat dismissive of the idea that Europe could chart a post-America course, at least in the near term. “Dreaming about strategic autonomy for Europe is a wonderful vision for maybe the next 50 years,” he told me in March. “But right now, we need America more than ever.”

Last week, though, he spoke urgently of the need for Europe to start manufacturing more of its own weapons and get serious about being able to defend its borders. “Are we finally going to wake up to the fact that we cannot rely forever on being protected by the United States?” he asked. He said he doesn’t believe that Trump will move to withdraw from NATO, but the fact that it’s even a question puts Europe in a deeply precarious position. The U.S. has more troops stationed in Europe (about 85,000) than the entire militaries of Belgium, Sweden, and Portugal combined. It provides essential air-force, intelligence-gathering, and ballistic-missile defense capabilities; covers about 16 percent of NATO’s operating costs; and manufactures most of the weapons that are bought by European militaries. Ischinger said that the situation is untenable: It’s just too risky to rely indefinitely on American military might to deter Russian aggression in the region. “We have a war now. This is urgent—this is not just political theory,” he told me. “This is a decisive moment in European history.”

Meanwhile, some in Europe are looking beyond the immediate military implications of Trump’s election. At Faith Angle Europe, an annual conference hosted last week by the Aspen Institute in France, journalists and scholars from both sides of the Atlantic gathered in a resort on the French Riviera and, in between pastry buffets and dips in the pool, contemplated the potential end of liberal democracy in America. To many in Europe, Trump’s election looks less like a historical fluke or “black swan event” and more like the climactic achievement of a right-wing populism that has been upending politics on their continent for much of this century—the same forces that led to Brexit in the United Kingdom, brought Giorgia Meloni to power in Italy, and made Marine Le Pen a major player in France. Not all Europeans, of course, are put off by the brand of politics that Trump represents

Nathalie Tocci, an Italian political scientist who has worked as an adviser for the ministry of foreign affairs and the European Union, predicted that Trump’s victory would “galvanize” far-right movements around the world. “They feel they really are on a roll, and they probably are,” she told attendees at the conference. “There’s a sense of legitimization … If this is happening in the heart of liberal democracy, surely you can’t make the argument that this happening in Europe is undemocratic.”

In recent years, Tocci said, far-right leaders in Europe were on their best behavior, eager not to alienate America by, say, airing their real views about Putin and Ukraine. Now that Biden, a classic transatlanticist, is set to be replaced with Trump, she said, “there’s going to be quite a lot of lowering of the masks.”

Bruno Maçães, a writer and consultant on geopolitics who has served as Portugal’s Europe minister, told me his phone had been ringing constantly since Trump’s election. European business leaders want to know what Trump will do with his second term, and how they can prepare. Maçães was not optimistic. He scoffed at Trump’s decision to create new, lofty-sounding administration posts for Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, and was baffled by the Silicon Valley types who believe the billionaires will transform the federal government, usher in a new era of unprecedented economic growth, and colonize Mars. “Maybe,” Maçães said. “I don’t know. But if you saw this in another country, you would see it as an acute sign of political decay when billionaires and oligarchy are taking over political policy.”

Maçães, like others I talked with, was eager not to be seen as hysterical or fatalistic. He said he didn’t think Trump’s foreign-policy appointments so far have been disastrous. But when he looked at the people Trump was naming to key domestic positions, most notably Matt Gaetz as attorney general, he found it hard to see anything other than a profound deterioration of political culture and democratic norms. “Americans have more reason to worry than the rest of the world,” he said.

Trump’s re-election will test Europe’s democratic integrity and its treatment of minorities

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Musk is from Mars, Europe is from Venus

Economist Jeffrey Sachs discusses how Trump’s victory could change US foreign policy in Europe, Middle East and Asia.