THANKSGIVING 2024 -- SOUND AND FURY

For inveterate opponents of Donald Trump, and I am one, it seems a bit forced to be happy this Thanksgiving.

And nothing done in his brief tenure as President-elect has made that exercise easier. 

The big news since election day has been the rogue's gallery of incompetents Trump intends to appoint to  his Cabinet. 

For Defense, we have been given a FOX news host who thinks woman can't fight, war crimes are just fine, and the military can be used against any domestic political opponents he deems "Marxist" (the list is long); as the new DNI, an apologist for Putin and Syria's Assad who claimed the US funded biolabs in Ukraine to release deadly pathogens; at the Department of Health and Human Services, a lost Kennedy who thinks vaccines cause autism; and under him, the quack TV Dr. Oz to run the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

Trump's first would-be (but now withdrawn) attorney general (Matt Gaetz) was despised in Congress, probably a statutory rapist, and in any case -- judging from pictures he was said to have shared on the floor of the House -- more than comfortable in whatever locker room Trump occupied during his now-infamous bus ride with Billy Bush.  

His next candidate, ex-Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi, is more qualified than Gaetz could ever be and is not a criminal so far as we know. She did, however, serve as one of Trump's defense attorneys in his first impeachment trial and supported his election denial lie. Her selection also makes both the nominated number one and number two (Todd Blanche) at DOJ Trump's former lawyers.

Trump thinks federal employees belong to him. In his first term he routinely referred to Defense Secretary Mattis, DHS Secretary Kelly and National Security Adviser McMaster as his generals and was livid when his two Attorneys General -- Jeff Sessions at the beginning of his term on the Mueller probe and William Barr at the end on President Biden's win -- would not do his bidding. He expects he has now insured nothing along those lines will ever happen again.

If he is right . . .

The fifty-year era of independence at the Department of Justice will have officially ended.

(Pro tip sidebar to Speaker Johnson: when your to-do list includes deep-sixing a report that shows your AG nominee is a statutory rapist while making sure a trans-sexual female cannot use  the House's women's rooms, stay home. It's always a bad look to cover up the sexual crimes of one in your party as you pander to the sexual prejudices of another.) 

In his first term, Trump appointed people who for the most part had a reasonable familiarity with their department's duties and capacities.  He also appointed people willing to follow the law and, as importantly, willing to require that Trump himself follow the law. In this go round, he is giving notice that no one need care.  The only obvious requirements are loyalty to Trump himself and a demonstrated willingness to piss off those who oppose him. 

If competence comes in (or, in the rare case, without) that package, as it does with Sen. Rubio at the State Department and would with either Kevin Warsh or Robert Lighthizer at Treasury (or the latter returned to the USTR), that is accidental. It may also be unnecessary.  Trump and his MAGA minions believe the entire federal bureaucracy is a sea of opposition that must be emptied.  He claims the bureaucrats routinely opposed him in his first term (which, thank God, was often true) and unfairly indicted him after he left office (which is false; Trump earned those indictments and the fact that trials are being aborted is yet another failure of America's institutions, which did not protect us from Trump or, as the last election demonstrated, ourselves). 

With rare exception (Rubio, Warsh, Lighthizer), therefore, lieutenants who might competently run the government are not on his wish list.  

Incompetent loyalists who could help him dismantle it are.

Trump's desire for revenge is also married to the GOP's knee-jerk hatred of government. For decades now, Republicans have won elections convincing Americans that government (or at least the part of government which does things for others but not them) can do no good.  In this world, incompetence is a feature, not a bug, the rule, not the exception. It fulfills the GOP's prophecy.

Because . . .

The easiest way to demonstrate government sucks is to appoint people so inept they prove it.

Trump now thinks he is bullet-proof.  And his fellow travelers are not disabusing him of that notion.  To the contrary, they are claiming he has a "mandate". A "decisive" one, say his billionaire bros Musk and Ramaswamy. To "disrupt", whatever that means. Beyond tax cuts, tariffs, deportations, an inchoate promise to magically negotiate a wars end in Ukraine, or the inherent nature of his personality, we are not being told.

And with that, we can finally get to this years . . .

Thank yous.

Which must be . . . 

To the 74.2 million people, myself included, who voted against Trump.

Thus rendering all this mandate talk . . . 

"a tale    

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing."

We can thank Shakespeare (or, if you prefer, Macbeth) later.

Once the idiot leaves the stage.

In politics, mandate talk is generally useless and has been for the past sixty years. In that period, the only credible mandate claims were those made by LBJ in 1964 and President Reagan in 1980, each of whom won enormous popular and electoral college majorities and control of Congress (in LBJ's case by almost super-majority margins).  Since 1980, no one has come even close; in fact, the only remote contender was President Obama in 2008. Everyone else won by small margins and governed in the face of significant opposition. Two -- Bush in 2000 and Trump in 2016 -- lost the popular vote.

Today, Trump marches to the Oval Office having won less than 50% of the popular vote and only slightly more than Harris.  His party has a non-filibuster proof  four-vote margin in the Senate and an infinitesimal (as low as three and no more than five, depending on final counts) margin in the 435-member House of Representatives. Thirty-three senators (twenty-six of them Republicans) will be up for re-election in 2026, as will the entire House. None of their lives will be made easier by Trump, who has always been long on outrage but notoriously short on actual accomplishment. Indeed,  his party was slaughtered in the 2018 mid-terms, i.e., even in the so-called glory days of the pre-pandemic economy Trump continually touts.

Lots of people have never liked him.

Lots still do not.

And he has a habit of keeping it that way.

Mandate lovers -- and perpetually panicked Democrats -- are very good at ignoring reality.  This time, in addition to the small numerical margins, one of the realities being ignored is that Democratic candidates for the Senate actually won in four (Nevada, Arizona, Michigan and Wisconsin) of the seven swing states Trump won, came close in a fifth (Pennsylvania) and won the gubernatorial election in a sixth (North Carolina). In those Senate races, three of the winners (Rosen, Baldwin and Slotkin) were women. Had Harris not failed where they succeeded, she'd be the President-elect today.

In his victory speech in the early hours of November 6, Trump said his "promises made" would be "promises kept."  If so, he is off to a bad start as nothing on order thus far -- tax cuts, tariffs and deportations --  will return the price of groceries to their pre-pandemic level or remedy the severe economic inequality plaguing rural and non-college educated Americans.

Meanwhile, he will appoint judges bent on eliminating substantive rights and Cabinet and agency heads bent (again with notable possible exceptions) on rubber-stamping his whims.

Part of the problem here is that Trump, when he is not dangerous (which is way more often than not), is lazy and not interested in policy.  If he seriously wanted to put a dent in inequality, he'd have to invest his political capital in convincing his party that redistributing some wealth is not a bad idea.  That's the only way it's been done in this country since the frontier closed and moving west could no longer be America's de facto growth and/or welfare policy.  Think anti-trust law, the 16th Amendment (which allowed the federal income tax), the Federal Reserve, Social Security, unionization, the GI Bill and a minimum wage; the Civil Rights laws in the 1960s then removed the racism FDR had been forced to swallow in order to pass his New Deal. Collectively, these measures restrained the top, distributed productivity gains more evenly, and created the middle class.

All of them, however, are anathema to the GOP. 

While Trump is in love with any form of hatred that gives him votes (hence his fascistic claims against immigrants), that's as far as he ever gets. Tax cuts will not cure inequality, and tariffs and deportations will actually exacerbate it, the first by inflating prices, the second by cutting the labor force that creates a lot of the agricultural supply. Real immigration reform replete with paths to citizenship and reasonable guest worker programs would avoid this problem; deportation will only make it worse. Meanwhile, if Musk and Ramaswamy, neither of whom understands how federal spending works, take their proposed meat-ax approach to cuts by eliminating programs where specific authorizations have lapsed, some of the very programs the most vulnerable rely upon (e.g., veterans health benefits) will die.

In a world where a free and aggressive press laid bare the implications of Trump's approaches, the GOP might be forced to change.  That, however, is not today's world.  For, in addition to having convinced struggling white guys that their economic woes are caused by illegal (brown) aliens and affirmative action, Trump and the GOP have also convinced them that FOX is real news and the mainstream media (The New York Times, Washington Post, and three major networks) are not. 

So . . .

Brainwashed, the MAGA base will continue to live in a world of resentment and fact-free pseudo-solutions.  

If we survive that world and Trump's own disorders . . .

The thank yous to Harris voters will be voluminous.

In the meantime, this Thanksgiving . . .

In this year's parade . . .

They get mine.