Trump continues flailing out of the gate

With another Cabinet nominee on the brink of collapse we're learning that there is no vetting among Trump's team while he acts on impulse. The kind of chaos Democrats can exploit.

The collapse of Matt Gaetz’s nomination for attorney general was an unforced error in which Donald Trump used political capital, saying he was going to fight to the end. It will be a recess appointment, we heard. And Trump gave a big, “No!” when he was asked by a reporter just days before Gaetz’s withdrawal if he’d want Gaetz to pull out.

But with more coming out in the media about Gaetz’s alleged sex with a teen—whom he reportedly paid—and with Trump’s and JD Vance’s unsuccessful calls to GOP senators to rally around Gaetz, the saga ended. And it was a big loss for Trump.

Now it appears to be happening all over again with Pete Hegseth, Trump’s nominee for Defense Secretary, whose most recent job has been as a far-right host of a talk show on Fox on the weekends. After Trump’s transition team adamantly said Trump was standing by Hegseth, reports are surfacing that Trump is about to dump him—and possibly replace him with Ron DeSantis, who he demeaned and attacked in the primaries, among a few other contenders.

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There’s been so much written about Hegseth’s inexperience, his white supremacist tattoos, his desire to purge the military of “wokeness,” and the rape allegation against him—which he denies even though he paid his accuser in a non-disclosure agreement.

But this week we learned Hegseth’s own mother called him an “abuser” of women while NBC reported that colleagues at Fox were concerned about his drinking, smelling alcohol on his breath, and hearing him talk about his hangovers before going on air in the morning.

One current and two former Fox employees said they felt like they needed to “babysit” Hegseth because of his drinking and late nights. “We’d have to call him to make sure he didn’t oversleep because we knew he’d be out partying the night before,” one of them said. Another said, “Morning TV is stressful, and more times than not Pete made it even more stressful.”

Hegseth sometimes arrived with only 20 minutes or less before the show began, according to those three sources, stressing out his colleagues.

And then there was the blockbuster report from The New Yorker, which reported on Hegseth being carried out of events for the veterans group he led, hurling violently racist chants and identifying women who worked for him as “party girls and non-party girls”:

A previously undisclosed whistleblower report on Hegseth’s tenure as the president of Concerned Veterans for America, from 2013 until 2016, describes him as being repeatedly intoxicated while acting in his official capacity—to the point of needing to be carried out of the organization’s events. The detailed seven-page report—which was compiled by multiple former C.V.A. employees and sent to the organization’s senior management in February 2015—states that, at one point, Hegseth had to be restrained while drunk from joining the dancers on the stage of a Louisiana strip club, where he had brought his team.

The report also says that Hegseth, who was married at the time, and other members of his management team sexually pursued the organization’s female staffers, whom they divided into two groups—the “party girls” and the “not party girls.” In addition, the report asserts that, under Hegseth’s leadership, the organization became a hostile workplace that ignored serious accusations of impropriety, including an allegation made by a female employee that another employee on Hegseth’s staff had attempted to sexually assault her at the Louisiana strip club.

In a separate letter of complaint, which was sent to the organization in late 2015, a different former employee described Hegseth being at a bar in the early-morning hours of May 29, 2015, while on an official tour through Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, drunkenly chanting, “Kill All Muslims! Kill All Muslims!”

This may all have been the last straw for GOP senators, and Lindsey Graham was the first to publicly crack yesterday. Then came The Wall Street Journal report last night that Trump is thinking about replacing Hegseth with DeSantis.

Later reports said he was considering several people because a lot of people around him can’t stand DeSantis. This is a real shitshow!

From The New York Times:

Mr. Trump has made clear to people close to him that he believes Mr. Hegseth should have been more forthcoming about the problems he would face getting confirmed, according to two people with knowledge of his thinking.

The combination of events could determine whether he hangs on as the expected nominee. Mr. Trump is openly discussing other people for the job, including Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, whom he defeated in the Republican presidential primaries and with whom he has had a contentious relationship.

But the number of people in Mr. Trump’s world who dislike and distrust Mr. DeSantis—and bitterly recall the campaign he ran against the president-elect—is vast. Those people are discussing other options, including whether Mike Waltz, the Florida congressman whom Mr. Trump picked as his national security adviser, could slide into the job, expecting he would be confirmed fairly easily by the Senate.

There’s also talk of Senators Joni Ernst of Iowa and Bill Hagerty of Tennessee as a replacement for Hegseth.

It’s possible Hegseth will hold on as he continues meeting senators, but this looks like another collapse, as the opposition is growing.

And it all shows there is no vetting in the Trump team and no planning of any kind. There’s no three-dimensional chess either, in which Trump is putting out these extreme nominees in order to get others passed. When you’re replacing Gaetz with someone who would have been easily confirmed in this right-wing Senate from the beginning—former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi—and looking at establishment, well-vetted governors and senators to replace Hegseth, it shows there was no plan, and you’re running scared.

This is all just Trump impulsively throwing out names—Gaetz was decided upon while Trump was flying with him on his plane, after two senators had turned Trump down for the attorney general position—and then expending capital. If there’s any planning, particularly in the case of the reckless and dangerous insurrection defender Kash Patel, named as FBI director nominee (who some GOP senators are worried about)—it’s about Trump trying to placate the extremist figures who helped get him elected and want a payoff.

People like Steve Bannon, Tucker Carlson, and Roger Stone pushed for Gaetz and Hegseth—and Patel. Trump is showing that he’ll heed their recommendations and try to install these dangerous, anti-American elements into the Cabinet. They’re also pushing for Tulsi Gabbard as Director of National Intelligence (who is also facing resistance from GOP senators), among others.

But beyond that, there’s no planning. Just impulse. Trump plucked Representatives Elise Stefanik of New York and Mike Waltz of Florida for positions in his administration before all the votes were counted in the very narrow races for the House. Majority Leader Mike Johnson pleaded with Trump to stop poaching House members—Gaetz too was poached but then resigned to avoid the Ethics Committee report—but Trump wouldn’t listen.

Now the last House race in California was called last night, and Democrat Adam Gray flipped the seat, beating incumbent John Duarte. That means the GOP has the narrowest majority in history, and with Stefanik and Waltz resigning, there will be several months in which there’s a one-seat majority, 217-215. (In the House, if there is a tie it means a loss for whatever bill is put forward.)

This is a disaster for the GOP in the House, which Johnson couldn’t control with a slightly larger majority. And Trump made it worse. Again, no planning, all impulse. All of this works to the benefit of Democrats, who can use a lot of maneuvers to muck things up in the House, and if Johnson has just one or two members not present, it’s gridlock, let alone if they don’t play along with what the majority wants.

This will help Democrats kick things down the road as they plan to take back control of the House in 2026, which is now slightly less than two years away.

None of this is to downplay that Trump is going to do many horrible things, many of which we can’t even imagine right now, but much of which we’ve been given ample warning about. But one thing is coming into view: Even with all of these people Trump has brought in who know a lot more about how to put together an authoritarian government, his impulses will always lead.

So far, that’s caused him to hobble himself, making stupid mistakes as Republicans get nervous and Democrats make noise about the extremism of the nominees. They have got to make a lot more noise.

And let me just add, the claims in the corporate media that President Biden’s pardon of Hunter Biden will give Trump some sort of permission to pardon criminals—including the January 6th insurrectionists—are idiotic and flat-out wrong. Trump would be pardoning hardened criminals no matter what. The public sees the reasons why Biden, pardoning his son (who was selectively targeted by Trump’s Justice Department beginning in 2018), was acting as a father.

Trump, on the other hand, will be acting as a thug and a tyrant. He will impulsively overplay, as he already has with these nominees—and he’s not even president yet. As in his first administration, all of that must be used as Democrats move to win back Congress and the White House.