He's Trolling Us

Susan Estrich on Nov 21, 2024

What to make of Donald Trump's nominations of the Fox News team to the Trump Cabinet? Attorney General Gaetz? Can this be serious? An expert on wrestling to take down the Department of Education? An opponent of public health to run Health and Human Services? What kind of game is this? Is he really just trolling us to see how far outside the mainstream he can go?

Yes and no. He's not really trolling us, if by us you mean people like me, who didn't vote for him in the first place. Frankly, he doesn't give a damn what we think. The more upset we are, the happier it seems to make him. We don't matter, not at all, not for two years, anyway.

The people he's trolling are the Republican members of the United States Senate. Any four of them can put the kibosh on an outlandish appointee who requires Senate confirmation. Are there at least four Republicans left in that formerly august body who will vote no on nominees who have no business serving all of us in the jobs they've been appointed to?

Maybe. On a few of them. That's the game I see playing out.

Nominate as many extremists as you can. The more the better. Even the more outlandish the better.

There are only so many that Republicans will block. The more extremists/crazies/should-be-unconfirmable nominees the Senate faces, the more they will end up confirming in exchange for the few they will block.

Do you put up a fight for Matt Gaetz -- the most outrageous of the group -- who Trump has already acknowledged may not be confirmed? Of course you do. You put up a fight, force the Senate to say no and virtually guarantee that whoever comes next -- who will be just as bad on policy and experience grounds but may not have a 17-year-old in his or her past -- will surely get the nod.

And maybe the one rejection will be enough to slide Pete Hegseth or Linda McMahon or even RFK Jr. through.

Or maybe you can persuade enough Republican senators, after one or two brutal battles, to take a vacation and let Trump make recess appointments of those who cannot survive the advise-and-consent process?

How many Senate Republicans are there who will take seriously their duty -- their sworn obligation -- to advise and consent on the president's nominations to high office?

This much is clear. This president is making his choices based on different criteria than his predecessors, Democrat and Republican. Sure, all presidents hope their nominees will be loyal to them and carry out their policies. But this president has taken the requirement of loyalty to a personal extreme. It matters more than anything else. And what he wants loyalty to is not only the president personally but an agenda that involves literally destroying the bureaucracies they are taking over. In some cases, that means real destruction -- of the Justice Department's independence, of the Education Department's literal existence, of the United Nations' role in the world, of the people who Trump holds responsible for undermining him in his first term. It is, quite literally, open season on bureaucrats who keep the government running.

Of course, this kind of radical loyalty, although the most important factor, is not the only one. There is another factor, which is clearly almost as important. That is, being good on television, preferably on Fox News. Trump is the first president who clearly considers being a television host an important qualification for being the boss of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people. Why wouldn't he, after all, since that was his qualification for assuming the position of the most powerful person on the planet?

So we will have radical loyalists with good TV ratings going through the confirmation process, and we are about to see how many good Republicans who take their oaths seriously and are not afraid of the new president are there to stop them. The answer is almost surely not enough.

Most Americans don't watch Fox News. If Trump has his way, and they want to watch America in action, they will have no choice.

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