The push led by Senator Bernie Sanders falls short, but advocates say it shows progress for Palestinian rights movement.

Donald Trump's support for 'recess appointments' fuels concerns over weakened US congressional oversight of White House.

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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

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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.

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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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Power-hungry presidents of both parties have been concocting ways to get around Congress for all of American history. But as Donald Trump prepares to take office again, legal experts are worried he could make the legislative branch go away altogether—at least for a while.

Several of Trump’s early Cabinet nominees—including Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and former Representative Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii—have drawn widespread condemnation for their outlandish political views and lack of conventional qualifications. Their critics include some Senate Republicans tasked with voting on their confirmation. Anticipating resistance, Trump has already begun pressuring Senate GOP leaders, who will control the chamber next year, to allow him to install his picks by recess appointment, a method that many presidents have used.

The incoming Senate majority leader, John Thune of South Dakota, has said that “all options are on the table, including recess appointments,” for overcoming Democratic opposition to Trump’s nominees. But Democrats aren’t Trump’s primary concern; they won’t have the votes to stop nominees on their own. What makes Trump’s interest in recess appointments unusual is that he is gearing up to use them in a fight against his own party.

[Read: The perverse logic of Trump’s nomination circus]

If Senate Republicans block his nominees, Trump could partner with the GOP-controlled House and invoke a never-before-used provision of the Constitution to force Congress to adjourn “until such time as he shall think proper.” The move would surely prompt a legal challenge, which the Supreme Court might have to decide, setting up a confrontation that would reveal how much power both Republican lawmakers and the Court’s conservative majority will allow Trump to seize.

“None of this has ever been tested or determined by the courts,” Matthew Glassman, a senior fellow at Georgetown University’s Government Affairs Institute, told me. If Trump tries to adjourn Congress, Glassman said, he would be “pushing the very boundaries of the separation of powers in the United States.” Although Trump has not spoken publicly about using the provision, Ed Whelan, a conservative lawyer well connected in Republican politics, has reported that Trumpworld appears to be seriously contemplating it.

Trump could not wave away Congress on his own. The Constitution says the president can adjourn Congress only “in case of disagreement” between the House and the Senate on when the chambers should recess, and for how long. One of the chambers would first have to pass a resolution to adjourn for at least 10 days. If the other agrees to the measure, Trump gets his recess appointments. But even if one refuses—most likely the Senate, in this case—Trump could essentially play the role of tiebreaker and declare Congress adjourned. In a Fox News interview yesterday, Speaker Mike Johnson would not rule out helping Trump go around the Senate. “There may be a function for that,” he said. “We’ll have to see how it plays out.”

Presidents have used recess appointments to circumvent the Senate-confirmation process throughout U.S. history, either to overcome opposition to their nominees or simply because the Senate moved too slowly to consider them. But no president is believed to have adjourned Congress in order to install his Cabinet before. “We never contemplated it,” Neil Eggleston, who served as White House counsel during President Barack Obama’s second term, told me. Obama frequently used recess appointments until 2014, when the Supreme Court ruled that he had exceeded his authority by making them when Congress had gone out of session only briefly (hence the current 10-day minimum).

[Watch: What’s behind Trump’s controversial Cabinet picks]

Any attempt by Trump to force Congress into a recess would face a few obstacles. First, Johnson would have to secure nearly unanimous support from his members to pass an adjournment resolution, given Democrats’ likely opposition. Depending on the results of several uncalled House races, he might have only a vote or two to spare at the beginning of the next Congress. And although many House Republicans have pledged to unify behind Trump’s agenda, his nominees are widely considered unqualified, to say the least. Gaetz in particular is a uniquely unpopular figure in the conference because of his leading role in deposing Johnson’s predecessor Kevin McCarthy.

If the House doesn’t block Trump, the Supreme Court might. Its 2014 ruling against Obama was unanimous, and three conservative justices who remain on the Court—John Roberts, Clarence Thomas, and Samuel Alito—signed a concurring opinion, written by Antonin Scalia, saying they would have placed far more restrictions on the president’s power. They wrote that the Founders allowed the president to make recess appointments because the Senate used to meet for only a few months of the year. Now, though, Congress takes much shorter breaks and can return to session at virtually a moment’s notice. “The need it was designed to fill no longer exists,” Scalia, who died in 2016, wrote of the recess-appointment power, “and its only remaining use is the ignoble one of enabling the president to circumvent the Senate’s role in the appointment process.”

The 2014 ruling did not address the Constitution’s provision allowing the president to adjourn Congress, but Paul Rosenzweig, a former senior official in the George W. Bush administration and an occasional Atlantic contributor, told me that the conservatives’ concurrence “is inconsistent with the extreme executive overreach” that Trump might attempt: “As I read them, this machination by Trump would not meet their definition of constitutionality.”

Thanks in part to those legal uncertainties, Trump’s easiest path is simply to secure Senate approval for his nominees, and he may succeed. Republicans will have a 53–47 majority in the Senate, so the president-elect’s picks could lose three GOP votes and still win confirmation with the tiebreaking vote of Vice President–Elect J. D. Vance. But the most controversial nominees, such as Gaetz, Kennedy, Gabbard, and Pete Hegseth (Trump’s choice for defense secretary), could struggle to find 50 Republican votes. And as Thune himself noted in a Fox News interview on Thursday night, Republicans who oppose their confirmation are unlikely to vote for the Senate to adjourn so that Trump can install them anyway.

Thune, who had been elected as leader by his colleagues only one day before that interview, seems fine with helping Trump get around Democrats. Letting Trump defy Thune’s own members and neuter the Senate is a much bigger ask. Then again, if Trump takes his power play to the limit, the new majority leader won’t have a say at all.

US Senate is set to vote this week on 'historic' resolutions to halt a $20bn weapons deal with Israel.

Although the plight of America’s 2.2 million federal bureaucrats seldom elicits public sympathy, spare a charitable thought for their future. Not since the congressional elections of 1882 has civil-service reform received so much political attention. President-Elect Donald Trump and his allies now face a fundamental decision: Will they listen to the loudest and most extreme voices in their party and be agents of chaos and disruption in upending the civil service? Or will they adopt a more measured, incremental approach that would deliver improvements and burnish their managerial credentials? The recent appointment of Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to lead the newly minted Department of Government Efficiency is a clear signal that Trump is leaning toward disruption. But the risks are significant—and the president-elect has other reform options that could be more effective at a far lower cost.  

Few would argue that the current federal civil service is perfect. In 2017 and 2018, the National Academy of Public Administration, an independent nonprofit chartered by Congress, issued a two-part white paper describing the government’s staffing system as “fundamentally broken,” with too many rules and too little flexibility. Its authors argued that firing nonperformers and attracting new talent can be too difficult. Other observers have bemoaned the bureaucracy for its cost, inefficiency, and unresponsiveness. Change is clearly needed, and would in fact be welcome in many corners of the federal government.

Although distinguished bipartisan commissions may agree on a path forward, Republican and Democratic politicians—buffeted by the interests and passions of their bases—have been unable to come together to address these problems. Under pressure from public-sector unions, Democrats have shied away from even modest reforms of their own and have focused instead on resisting GOP proposals—which have centered on removing protections from federal employees. Some on the hard right are working toward “deconstruction of the administrative state” and the “total destruction of the deep state,” as the former Trump strategist Steve Bannon has put it. But most Americans—including many moderate Republicans and Democrats—do not share this animus. They value government services and simply want to see them performed better.

Efficient and effective institutions are easy to degrade, difficult to build. The United States needs to retain the benefits of technical competence and impartial advice from a meritocratic civil service while ensuring that federal employees are accountable to political oversight. There are more constructive ways to achieve the objectives that both Republicans and Democrats claim to want, while retaining a high-performing, meritocratic civil service.         

[Read: Brace for the storm]

Late in his first administration, Trump used an executive order to introduce Schedule F, which sought to remove civil-service protections from any career official with a policy-making role, giving the White House much greater discretion in hiring and firing. Currently, there are about 4,000 political positions, out of which some 1,200 are subject to congressional approval. The number of positions that could be designated as Schedule F is unknown, but estimates suggest it could be 50,000 or higher. Trump’s campaign pledged to “immediately reissue my 2020 executive order restoring the president’s authority to remove rogue bureaucrats,” and he himself has promised to wield this power “very aggressively.”

He will have broad support from his party, which has sought to reap political benefit from stoking public hostility toward civil servants. In 2023, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, then a presidential primary candidate, claimed that he would start “slitting throats” of federal bureaucrats from day one. Other prominent Republicans, such as Trump’s nominee for secretary of state, Marco Rubio, have indicated their openness to Schedule F. During the primaries, Ramaswamy denounced the administrative state as “an unconstitutional fourth branch of government,” and proposed firing more than three-quarters of federal employees. He later revised this mass-termination plan to cover just half the federal workforce, selected randomly: “If your SSN ends in an odd number, you’re fired.” More recently, Ramaswamy has expressed admiration for Musk’s drastic staff cuts at X (formerly Twitter) as a template for reducing the federal government.

In the Senate, Florida’s Rick Scott has been the Republican most aggressively pressing for a radical restructuring of the civil service. In 2022, he rolled out his 12-point Rescue America plan, which included a proposal for many government agencies to either move out of Washington or shut down entirely. Although about 85 percent of federal employees already work outside the greater Washington, D.C., area, the idea of moving staff out of the capital has caught on in Republican circles—the Trump campaign said he would move as many as 100,000 civil-service positions “to places filled with patriots who love America.” Cutting civil-service protections is also popular with the MAGA base: The Public Service Reform Act, which Scott introduced last year, proposed to place the entire workforce in “at will” employment status, allowing them to be terminated “for good cause, bad cause, or no cause at all.” (The bill has not yet passed through committee.)

And then there is the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025. Tonally, the document is uncompromising. The federal government is a “behemoth” deployed against American citizens and conservative values; federal bureaucrats are “underworked, over compensated and unaccountable.” The project argues that the entire edifice of civil-service protections is a legacy of the American left: “Progressive intellectuals and activists demanded a more professionalized, scientific and politically neutral administration.” That statement is partly accurate but woefully incomplete. Republicans have historically been at the forefront of reform efforts, and the last major one, during the Carter administration, was a notably bipartisan affair.

Rhetoric aside, the project’s analysis of central agencies and federal personnel policy is more subtle and nuanced, grounded in a careful review of the relevant institutions and legal and regulatory frameworks. What influence Project 2025 will have on the second Trump administration remains to be seen. Tactically, the president-elect chose to distance himself from it during the campaign, but in office Trump may draw heavily on the document—as well as the personnel who drafted it.

As Francis Fukuyama has argued, the reintroduction of Schedule F will make the federal government “less competent and vastly more politicized.” The United States already has a much higher number of political appointees than any other advanced-industrial democracy—nearly 28 times the number in the United Kingdom, for example. Political appointments stretch down four or five levels of bureaucracy in some agencies (such as the Department of Defense).  

Republicans would be unwise to view Trump’s reelection as a mandate for completely uprooting the civil service. The most recent survey of public confidence in government by the nonpartisan Partnership for Public Service found disturbing evidence of reduced trust in government. Yet attitudes toward federal employees remain positive. A majority of respondents (55 percent) agreed with the statement that most civil servants are competent; a similar proportion agreed that most are committed to helping people “like me.” Only a quarter of respondents said that presidents should be able to fire “any civil servants that they choose for any reason,” whereas 72 percent disagreed with this statement.

[Read: Trump takes aim at Republicans]

Several measures could improve responsiveness, accountability, and performance at a much lower cost and risk than the ideas currently circulating in Republican circles. Departments and agencies should have more flexibility in managing their human resources, and be empowered to tailor their personnel policies to their particular business needs. The allocation of political appointees across the government needs regular review: A bipartisan commission should examine the current 4,000 such posts and make recommendations to the administration about streamlining and redistribution. Performance management is a key area for improvement: Currently, less than 0.5 percent of the federal workforce is rated “marginally satisfactory” or “unsatisfactory,” which at best stretches credence and at worst damages public trust. All government agencies ought to evaluate their staff’s performance on a standard curve, so that poor delivery is consistently identified and addressed. (Adjustments could be made so as not to penalize high-performing agencies and units.) Lastly, labor relations in the civil service need an overhaul: The processes and paperwork surrounding termination should be simplified; the window for appeals should be narrowed; and the role of unions in the grievance process for individual employees should be curtailed.

Such measures may disappoint the more fervent anti-government voices in today’s GOP. But a sober assessment would view Musk’s experience with X as a cautionary tale. Although the platform has functioned as a megaphone for its owner, it has also shed users; experienced repeated and embarrassing technical glitches; witnessed steep declines in advertising revenue; and may now be worth as little as a fifth of what he paid for it in 2022. In the private sector, such failures fall primarily upon owners and investors; in the public sector, they would affect us all. Do Americans want vital government services such as food inspection, air traffic control, or Social Security payments to suffer similar breakdowns? Dislocation and deconstruction may have a visceral appeal among elements of the MAGA base. But once the new Trump administration is in office, the American people will expect it to deliver the public goods and services they rely upon—and do so smoothly, fairly and efficiently. Disruption may sound trendy in Silicon Valley or tough in conservative think-tank circles, but delivery is what will ultimately determine the success or failure of these reforms.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

Among Donald Trump’s recent Cabinet nominations is a pick that has alarmed the scientific community: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for secretary of Health and Human Services. With this choice, Trump has further elevated a conspiracy-minded vaccine skeptic with no medical background, whose views are often not rooted in science. I spoke with my colleague Yasmin Tayag, who covers health, about the damage RFK Jr.’s proposals could do to Americans’ trust in public health—whether he is confirmed or not.

The Elevation of Fringe Beliefs

Lora Kelley: As you’ve written, some of Robert F. Kennedy’s concerns—such as taking on ultra-processed foods and removing toxins from the environment—seem appealing to Americans across the political spectrum, yet his proposed solutions for these problems could pose a danger to Americans. Could you help me understand the gap between some of his seemingly commonsense proposals and the fringe ideologies behind them?

Yasmin Tayag: A lot of Kennedy’s health proposals actually make sense to me: investing in regenerative agriculture, and increasing access to preventive health care, and even removing toxins from the environment are things that sound good to pretty much anyone, regardless of their political party. Kennedy, of course, was until recently a Democrat, and a lot of his environmental and health concerns do reflect the things that the left has historically worried about.

The problem is that when you start looking at how he’s going to execute on these goals, you realize that his track record of proposing solutions is not based in science. We can all agree that it’s a good idea to take toxins out of the environment, but we might not all agree that fluoride is a toxin, as Kennedy seems to suggest. And so you have to ask: How is Kennedy going to make these decisions?

He’s a science skeptic, even though he claims to be a champion of science that lets people make their own decisions about their health. His view is that science as an institution has been so corrupted by corporate influence—he’s always railing against Big Pharma—that anything that comes out of the science institution that we’ve long relied on is bad.

Lora: Even if he doesn’t get confirmed, could Kennedy’s nomination still have an impact on Americans’ trust in public health?

Yasmin: Kennedy being so publicly considered for such a prominent health role has already given legitimacy to the fringe ideas that he’s entertained over the years. He’s said in the past that he believes 5G cellular technology controls our behavior, and he has implied that antidepressants are linked to mass shootings.

For a lot of the public, this might be their first time really having to think about health topics such as fluoridation. If this is not something you think about normally, and all of a sudden, here’s this guy all over the news, talking about his doubts about things that have long been accepted as scientific fact, I think it’s reasonable that people would also start feeling confused. The fact that he is in the public eye and getting a lot of airtime to discuss his skepticism is, at the very least, putting a spotlight on these fringe beliefs and, at worst, making them seem more legitimate than they are.

Lora: Given that bird flu may be a growing threat, how do you anticipate Kennedy might respond to a pandemic as the head of HHS?

Yasmin: It’s unlikely that we would see anything close to a streamlined public-health response, in part because Kennedy is so skeptical of vaccines. That could mean a hesitation to invest in the production of vaccines, or a lack of encouragement for Americans to use them. But I think the broader impact might be if he continues to legitimize the view that vaccines are something to be afraid of. People may refuse to take them.

During the height of the coronavirus pandemic, we had people who believed in science leading HHS, and the response was pretty mediocre: inconsistent communication, inadequate testing, little coordination between state and federal agencies. But at least the interventions made sense from a scientific perspective. With someone who does not believe in basic health principles, we may see an unpredictable response—or even no response.

Lora: What kind of power does this role actually come with?

Yasmin: If Kennedy becomes secretary of HHS, he’s going to have an enormous influence on American public health—he would oversee the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control, the National Institutes of Health, Medicare and Medicaid, and the Administration for Children and Families, among others. And on top of overseeing all of those departments, he would also be the primary adviser to the president on health. So he would be the one telling Donald Trump what health priorities should be. That’s a really scary prospect, because a lot of Kennedy’s perspective on the world doesn’t seem to be rooted in any kind of scientific reality, at least not a mainstream one. He wouldn’t always be able to implement his ideas directly—removing fluoride from water, for example, can happen only at the state and local level—but his endorsement alone could go a long way.

His appointment, though he still needs to be confirmed, seems plausible to me. Kennedy’s audience is a big one—MAGA meets woo-woo, as our colleague Elaine Godfrey has called it—that could further expand support for Trump. But there are still a number of Republican senators he’ll have to win over. Some might take issue with his views on health. Others may feel threatened by his plans to remove corporate influence from the government—Big Pharma, for example, has long provided campaign money to both parties. Kennedy’s plans to overhaul food and pharmaceuticals would also require a ton of regulation, which is exactly what Republicans don’t want. The biggest pitfall for Kennedy would be if his goals run up against Trump’s economic priorities. He was an environmental lawyer, so he’s very anti-oil, whereas Trump is deeply pro-oil. In his past speeches, Trump has said that Kennedy can do whatever he wants, as long as he doesn’t “touch the oil.” I could see Trump or others in the party pushing back on him for that reason.

Related:

RFK Jr. collects his reward. The sanewashing of RFK Jr.

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Today’s News

Speaker Mike Johnson reportedly urged the House Ethics Committee to not publicly release its probe into former Representative Matt Gaetz’s alleged sexual misconduct and illicit drug use. Russian President Vladimir Putin and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz had a call about the future of the Ukraine war. It was their first conversation since late 2022. Trump selected North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum to be the Interior Department secretary last night; if confirmed by the Senate, Burgum would oversee the country’s public lands.

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Illustration by Diego Mallo. Source: Mark Peterson / Redux.

The Man Who Will Do Anything for Trump

By Elaina Plott Calabro

Kash Patel was dangerous. On this both Trump appointees and career officials could agree.

A 40-year-old lawyer with little government experience, he joined the administration in 2019 and rose rapidly. Each new title set off new alarms.

When Patel was installed as chief of staff to the acting secretary of defense just after the 2020 election, Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, advised him not to break the law in order to keep President Donald Trump in power. “Life looks really shitty from behind bars,” Milley reportedly told Patel. (Patel denies this.)

Read the full article.

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A month after his election in 2016, Donald Trump chose Andrew Puzder, a longtime fast-food-company CEO, to be his secretary of labor. Most of Trump’s Cabinet picks moved smoothly through the confirmation process, but Puzder’s nomination languished amid allegations of wage theft, sexual harassment, and spousal abuse, as well as his acknowledgment that he had hired an undocumented immigrant as a nanny and not paid her taxes. By February 2017, he gave up and withdrew his nomination.

Being a president’s most troubled or scandal-ridden nominee is dangerous—like being the weakest or sickest member of the herd when predators start to circle. Republican senators probably calculated that if they rejected Puzder, Trump would send a pick with less baggage and higher qualifications, which is exactly what he did: Alex Acosta, the eventual selection, had a long government résumé and easily won confirmation.

Something very different is happening with Trump’s Cabinet picks this time. Less than two weeks have passed since the election, but the president-elect has already put forward a batch of nominees so aberrant by historical standards that any one of them would have been a gigantic story in the past. (Hello, Attorney General–designate Matt Gaetz.) Each one barely holds the media’s attention for an hour or two before the next nomination eclipses them. (Whoops, I didn’t see you there, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., nominee to lead the Department of Health and Human Services.)

If Senate Republicans reject one of these unqualified nominees, how can they justify saying yes to any? And yet, how could they reject the whole slate of nominees by a president from their own party, who is so popular among their own voters? Perversely, the sheer quantity of individually troubling nominees might actually make it harder for the Senate to block any of them.

[Elaine Godfrey: Either way, Matt Gaetz wins]

The list of wild picks also includes Tulsi Gabbard, the walking embodiment of horseshoe theory and Trump’s nominee to be director of national intelligence; Pete Hegseth, a square-jawed Fox News host tapped by Trump to lead the Pentagon; and Kristi Noem, a governor with no national-security experience, selected to head the Department of Homeland Security. By the time anyone gets around to noting that Trump is appointing his personal lawyers (who defended him in his several criminal trials) to top legal posts in the government, who will have the energy to be shocked?

We don’t know yet if the Senate will confirm any or all of these nominees, but weariness is apparent in the voices of Republican senators, who face a choice between approving Trump’s nominees and allowing Trump to use a dubious constitutional work-around to appoint them without requiring a Senate vote. Many have gasped or raised pained questions about Gaetz, and some have even predicted that his nomination will fail, but none has publicly pledged to vote against him.

Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana is a medical doctor who has shown a willingness to buck Trump and even voted to convict him during Trump’s second impeachment; he’s the incoming chair of the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee. Yet Cassidy responded to the preposterous HHS nomination by posting on X that Kennedy “has championed issues like healthy foods and the need for greater transparency in our public health infrastructure. I look forward to learning more about his other policy positions and how they will support a conservative, pro-American agenda.”

This isn’t how things used to work. In 1989, President George H. W. Bush nominated former Senator John Tower to be secretary of defense. Few could question Tower’s credentials. A World War II veteran, he’d served nearly 20 years on the Armed Services Committee; he later investigated the Iran-Contra affair. But allegations of womanizing and alcohol abuse led the Senate to reject his nomination, even though the body tends to give former and current members an easy ride. Hegseth, by comparison, is a veteran but has no government experience, has a history of infidelity and was in 2017 accused of sexual assault, and has expressed various extreme views, including lobbying Trump to pardon American soldiers accused of murdering prisoners and unarmed civilians. (Trump granted the pardons.)

Or consider Tom Daschle, the former Senate majority leader, whom President Barack Obama nominated to lead HHS in 2009. Daschle was forced to withdraw his nomination over $140,000 in unpaid back taxes. That was a serious lapse, yet it feels quaint compared to Kennedy’s or Gaetz’s dubious résumé.

[Franklin Foer: Why the Gaetz announcement is already destroying the government]

A clear sign of how much things have changed may come from Puzder, whom Trump is reportedly considering nominating as labor secretary again. If Senate Republicans are willing to approve the same guy they rejected eight years ago, the advice-and-consent guardrails will be well and truly gone.

The circuslike bombardment of freakishly unqualified personnel picks calls to mind Steve Bannon’s notorious insight that the press can handle only so much information, real or fake, without being overloaded. Uncovering, verifying, debunking, and explaining information takes time and resources. “The real opposition is the media,” Bannon told the journalist Michael Lewis in 2018. “And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.” Something similar might apply to U.S. senators who might otherwise be tempted to show some independence.

Ascribing too much strategic intent to Trump is always a risk. The president-elect works from impulse and intuition. Trump selected Gaetz on a whim during a two-hour flight, according to The New York Times; Politico has reported that Susie Wiles, Trump’s campaign manager and incoming chief of staff, was on the plane but was unaware of the Gaetz pick. Even if Trump is not consciously following Bannon’s directive, however, the effect is the same. Intentionally or otherwise, the shit level is high and rising.

Indigenous Senator Lidia Thorpe says she has no regrets as Senate expresses disapproval of protest against the monarch.

Lidia Thorpe has been rebuked by the Senate for yelling "not my King" during a protest last month.