America's First Kakistocracy Might Save Us
"A state or society governed by its least suitable or competent citizens"
Something everyone expected to happen is now happening with the Donald Trump transition team as he names, perhaps on a whim, his Cabinet-in-Waiting. Now that the Evil Democrats have been vanquished, and Trump believes he has a tremendous mandate, Trump World has turned on its own and is eating itself with a fury rarely seen in public. The only thing surprising is that it happened so quickly after the election, and so publicly.
Let’s break it down without getting bogged down.
The Cabinet-in-Waiting
We could do an entire multi-page article on the atrocious picks that Trump has made for his incoming Cabinet (and perhaps we will soon do just that). Suffice it to say that his nominees can be slotted into one of three general categories:
The Unqualified Sycophant: These picks will do anything Trump asks. Loyal to a fault, they crave his attention and approval, much like Don Jr. They have absolutely no guiding morals nor a backbone. Craven to the core, they seek only power and the limelight. Think accused pedophile and sex-trafficker Matt Gaetz.
The Ideologue: These picks fall into two camps. The first is the pharisaic Christian fanatics who slavishly adhere to the idea that Christians should rule the Earth according to (their version of) Biblical Law. Think Deconstructionist Christian Pete Hegseth at Secretary of Defense. The second idealogue camp contains the racists and antisemites whose entire identity is built around White (or Christian) Supremacy and erradicating from America all non-pure (non-white, or non-Christian) immigrants or Jews or Muslims, and so on. Think Tom Homan, Trump’s so-called Border Czar.
The Grifter: These picks want the power, and the money that flows from having power and they’re less concerned with the agenda except as it pertains to filling their friends’ pockets (now) and their own pockets (usually, but not always later, when they’re out of government). A good example of a grifter pick is North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum for Interior Secretary. He plans to slash regulations governing drilling and mining on federal lands so that his buddies and eventually he himself can get rich off exploiting America’s natural resources, regardless of the damage done to the environment, the economy, or the future of America’s public land and water.
Although the MAGAs salivate over them, all of these picks are repugnant to anyone with even a shred of common decency. This includes the vast majority of progressives, but also a sizable, if diminishing, number of old-school Republican lawmakers.
And this brings us to the point. Some Republican senators have indicated they might have a hard time voting to confirm someone like Matt Gaetz who allegedly broke the law by having sex with a 17-year-old minor girl whom he also sex-trafficked to his friends.
Joel Leppard, an attorney representing two women who testified before the House Ethics Committee told ABC News this about Gaetz:
She testified [that] in July of 2017, at this house party, she was walking out to the pool area, and she looked to her right, and she saw Rep. Gaetz having sex with her friend, who was 17.
The woman who Gaetz raped (it’s statutory rape in Florida when an adult over the age of 24 has sex with a 16- or 17-year old child) testified before both the House Ethics Committee and spoke with the Justice Department which investigated Gaetz during Trump’s first term. She said that Gaetz used Venmo to pay her for sex. When shown specific Venmo transactions, she replied, “That was for sex.” It doesn’t get much more explicit than that.
Voting to confirm Gaetz as Attorney General, the nation’s top federal prosecutor, is apparently a bridge too far for more than half of Senate Republicans, including some in senior leadership positions. There could be more than 30 Republican Senators who will oppose Gaetz’s nomination. In other words, it is highly unlikely that Gaetz will be confirmed and yet Trump and his allies continue to push his nomination anyway. Trump has even threatened to use a recess appointment to get Gaetz into the job if the Senate refuses to confirm him:
Why is Trump pushing a woefully incompetent and un-confirmable Gaetz when there is almost no way he makes it through the Senate confirmation process?
As bad as Trump is at being human, this is one area in which he excels.
Trump likely has two objectives with Gaetz: first, to lower the bar on what is acceptable in terms of his high-level appointments. Even though Gaetz will almost certainly not be confirmed, Senators may not have the appetite to fight Trump on other, “not as bad” nominations, which will allow those nominees to squeak through if for no other reason than to just get on with it. Almost no GOP Senator wants to pick a public fight with Trump right now given his iron grip on the entire Republican Party, its base, and its funds.
His second likely objective is more subtle: to identify who is 100% loyal to Trump and who equivocates. Whomever goes against the Gaetz nomination will be noted. It’s a litmus test of sorts. He controls the entire Republican Party apparatus, including nearly all of its fundraising sources. He has PACs and Super PACs at his disposal, ready to primary anyone deemed not loyal enough to Dear Leader. Trump is making a list and he has a long memory. Vindictiveness is in his DNA.
This type of infighting and score-keeping is what Trump thrives on. It will only get worse as time goes on but counterintuitively, Trump’s looming kakistocracy, a government ruled by its most incompetent citizens, might well be what saves the United States from fascist totalitarianism.
The backstabbing, the palace intrigue, the hirings and firings and the fear of losing access or losing your job will almost certainly make much of his administration far less effective than it potentially could be. Toss in the Left’s resistance at every turn and the fears that so many patriotic Americans have concerning Donald Trump’s election might actually never come to fruition.
Only time will tell, but if you’re on the right (Left) side of history, you need to do everything you can to foment discord between and among Trump and his Court of Clowns. The more time they spend fighting one another, the less time they have to damage or destroy the country, and by extension, us.
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Insightful, and thank you for “kakistocracy” - perfect term! I’m dubious about the conclusion. It seems like the more time they spend fighting each other with ego-fueled testeronic fear, the absolute worse the destruction for the US. Because it means they are acutely not paying attention to the job, which is keeping us safe from enemies foreign and domestic. I’d love to hear a furtherance of the conclusion, more about how their in-fighting might lessen the fallout. I desperately want to believe it.