This is Going to Get Worse
We are one week post-election and have already seen a flood of news. With several cabinet positions announced with various degrees of evil and incompetence, we are seeing the vision of what Donald Trump wants his second administration to be.
I will be diving into some of the news here, but there are two things you need to personally be doing.
Steel yourself. We are at the tip of the iceberg of Donald Trump’s malfeasance and cruelty. Predicting exactly what’s coming isn’t possible, but this will be worse than his first term and it will be worse than most of the electorate is imagining. We do not yet know which of his ideas he will be able to implement, but in most cases, even the attempt is going to cause great harm to the communities he hates and to this country. Do not give into hopelessness and nihilism. Just be ready for what is to come.
Part of being ready is to take care of yourself. You, as an individual, do not shoulder the responsibility of standing up to him, especially right now. This will be a collective action. If you need to unplug from political news, do it. Surround yourself with art, music, beauty, and the people you love. I have personally been overdosing on Hallmark Christmas movies. Do not forget WHAT you are fighting for.
There are several stories I’m going to cover soon, but in this newsletter I want to focus on Trump’s nominations. There is a common theme here - they are all wildly unqualified and huge Trump sycophants.
Elon Musk (along with Vivek Ramaswamy) has been named the head of the “Department of Government Efficiency.” This department is not actually a department - those require congressional approval. It’s an advisory committee. But they named it as such so Musk could have the acronym DOGE, a meme and the name of a cryptocurrency he has been associated with. (The price of dogecoin as well as Tesla’s stock have surged since the announcement.) Musk spent a staggering $200 million on this election and has pledged to cut $2 trillion from the US budget. Quite simply, this is not possible without slashing Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Firing every single government employee does not hit his figure. Eliminating the entire US military and Department of Homeland Security would not hit that target. In short, Musk, like many Trump appointees, has absolutely no idea what he’s talking about. It remains to be seen if this committee will have real power or be a useless figurehead. Let’s hope for the latter. Musk has been sitting in on phone calls between Trump and foreign heads of state. I cannot describe how insane that is. Despite his wealth, Musk has been shockingly incompetent in his administration of his companies. After taking over Twitter, many employees were not sure if they had been fired and could not get any answers from HR. One such employee, Haraldur Thorleifsson, reached out to Musk directly on Twitter to ask if he was still employed. Musk responded by mocking Thorlefisson’s disability (a trait he shares with Donald Trump) and confirming he was fired. He had to backtrack, apologize and un-fire Thorleiffsson as Musk hadn’t bothered to check who he was. Thorleifsson’s company was acquired by Twitter and instead of a large payout, he accepted a salary. But should he ever be terminated, Twitter would owe the remaining sum of the buyout - millions upon millions of dollars - immediately. The company even kept a “do not fire” list which he was on. Musk didn’t bother learning any of this because, like Trump, he sees no value in the input of others.
Tom Homan has been nominated as “border czar.” Naming someone as a czar instead of to a cabinet position is a loophole which bypasses Senate confirmation. Homan was the architect behind Trump’s family separation policy. Republicans have sought to paint these separations as a side effect of immigration enforcement. This is a lie. The explicit reason for taking children away from their parents was to cause their families pain and discourage other immigrants from entering the United States. This process was run so ineptly that six years later we STILL have not returned all of the children we took to their parents. Expect us to start the separations again. Homan is proud of this process and in a recent interview when asked about how he would handle mixed-status families, his response was that we can deport the entire family. Homan in 2017 publicly blamed the California wildfires on an undocumented immigrant. He knew this was a lie.
John Ratcliffe has been nominated to run the CIA. Trump nominated Ratcliffe to be Director of National Intelligence in his last term but withdrew the nomination after it came out that Ratcliffe’s resume was full of lies. Specifically Ratcliffe claimed he prosecuted terrorism cases when he had done no such thing. Trump decided eventually none of this mattered and re-nominated Ratcliffe to DNI, resulting in Senate confirmation.
Marco Rubio has been nominated as Secretary of State. One of Trump’s many Republican critics who quickly transitioned to obsequiousness, let’s just look at some of Rubio’s 2016 comments about Donald Trump. Rubio has said Trump is a con artist and an embarrassment. He explained that Republicans who supported Donald Trump would have to explain themselves several years down the road. Rubio pointed out Trump had no idea what the nuclear triad was and should not be in charge of our nuclear arsenal. Here’s a glimpse of the sort of campaign merch Rubio was selling in 2016:
Kristi Noem has been named head of the Department of Homeland Security. We could focus on Noem murdering a family pet dog, her being stuck on stage with Trump at a rally as he inexplicably played music for 45 minutes, or any number of other issues, but like many of Trump’s picks, the overriding issue here is that she has absolutely zero experience dealing with anything Homeland Security does.
Pete Hegseth has been nominated to run the Department of Defense. The US military is the largest, most powerful, and most complicated bureaucracy in human history. Hegseth has never run a large organization and is currently a weekend host on Fox. When Trump pardoned several US war criminals, he cited Hegseth’s advocacy as one of the reasons. It’s worth reading up on Eddie Gallagher’s atrocities to see what the military under Hegseth’s leadership would look like. Hegseth does not wash his hands as he believes germs are not real because he cannot see them.
Which leaves us with the worst nominee to Attorney General in US history, Matt Gaetz. Gaetz this evening resigned from Congress as THIS WEEK the House Ethics Committee was set to vote on whether to release their findings from their investigation into bribery of Gaetz and his sex trafficking. It is unclear how his resignation will affect the release of the report. Among other things, Gaetz was under investigation for paying a friend to have sex with minor girls and supplying them with drugs. Gaetz was one of the chief election deniers in the House and blamed the 1/6/21 attack on the capitol on antifa. This is who Donald Trump wants to run the Department of Justice.
These are the sorts of people convicted felon and rapist Donald Trump wants running the United States of America.
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