Giving the middle finger to anyone who bought his schtick about lasting peace, Trump has chosen stunningly unqualified cranks and loyalists to help him burn down the government.
Matt Gaetz, more barking clown than lawyer, is under investigation relating to alleged sex with a minor. In a Saturday Night Live skit that writes itself, Trump would name him Botox King Attorney General. Tulsi Gabbard, who thinks it’s “defensible” to gas civilians, then bomb the clinics treating them, would be Director of National Intelligence. Trump’s deputy chief of staff, the dead-eyed Stephen Miller, says red states will send their National Guard units into blue states to execute mass deportations. (Civil war, anyone?) Pete Hegseth, a White nationalist tattoo-sporting Fox News commentator, would lead the Defense Department, condoning preemptive strikes and seeking pardons for war criminals. Worm-on-the-brain RFK? I can’t even. Too bad Jeffrey Epstein is gone, he’s missing a short-window opportunity at the Education Department.
And how many Hannibal Lecters must Trump want to appoint, that he’d try to strong-arm the Senate into taking recess just so he can bypass their advice and consent? The Senate’s role on presidential appointments is more than window-dressing. It’s a core Article II Constitutional function, foundational to the separation of powers. Advice and consent from the Senate was designed to keep nutjobs like these away from the seat of government. Given that the GOP will have a solid 53-member majority of bootlickers in the Senate come January, Trump’s desire to bypass them is even more alarming than who he’s picked so far.
These developments would be funny if they weren’t so dangerous. Trump now has a SCOTUS imprimatur to sic Seal Team Six on domestic enemies. One wonders if President Biden has read that opinion. A president’s first duty is to protect and defend, and it’s often repeated that the best defense is a good offense. Why not use the next two months to put Trump on an island or behind bars sans Twitter for the rest of his miserable life, if it will prevent the bloodshed he’s promising? The right already projects Trump’s “lawfare” and criminality onto Biden anyway, why not earn the label?
Trump’s asinine choices make clear that we’re in for a bumpy ride for the next two years, but Democrats need to knock it off with the intra-party blame game. In pontificating about what Dems “did wrong,” the line between helpful introspection and destructive navel-gazing is thin already. The most common rejoinder is: “If only Biden/Harris/Dems had done X, they’d have won, and it just so happens I’ve been arguing for X for years.” But there’s a major difference between data-informed reality and narratives that regurgitate pre-existing worldviews.
Instead of bald recriminations, Democrats should look at the numbers. Harris lost by 3 million votes, out of a national total of 151,318,415 votes. This loss by less than 2% of all voters is hardly a mandate. Whatever the spin of the hour is, it should be tempered with awareness of global reality. In defeating Biden’s party, the U.S. did what every other industrialized nation in the world did, with shocking uniformity: We punished the incumbent party, the party who was holding the bag during the worst years of post-COVID economic pain, regardless of who caused it.
In a remarkably under-reported phenomenon, in 2024, whichever ruling party occupied the seat of government was voted out of office, world-wide. A chart from Financial Times plots the increase and decrease in share of votes for incumbent parties dating back to 1910. Over the past century, there’s been a fairly even distribution of incumbent gains and losses, at least through 2020. But in 2024, in elections across the globe, whichever party was in charge — left or right — was shown the same exit door. In 2024, for the first time dating back to 1910, incumbent parties were removed from office with ZERO wins, without regard to partisan ideology.
So, the real narrative isn’t right vs. left, progressive vs. moderate, Trump vs. Harris. Democrats lost due to post-COVID economic pain outside their control, as it was for every other incumbent party in the world. I realize this is an argument so nice I made it twice, but I offer it again to not only encourage democrats to stop the blame game, but also to give comfort. As horrific as sending a craven felon to the White House is, US voters fell in line with the same global upset displayed by voters around the world.
It’s important to get behind that reality and remember that this too shall pass. There’s another election in two years. Every seat in the House and a third of the Senate — mostly Republicans — will be up for reelection. And if Trump keeps up the juvenile shenanigans, voters will punish his party hard, most likely all the way through 2032.
So as painful as this is, it’s temporary. The only enduring quality about elections is that, as soon as the victor is announced, the next election has already begun.
Sabrina Haake is a left-of-center policy wonk and 25 year litigator in Chicago specializing in 1st and 14th Amendment defense. She writes at SabrinaHaake.substack.com.
From The Progressive Populist, December 15, 2024
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