Donald Trump, Cabinet Maker

Roger Franklin Quadrant Online November 25, 2024

If November 5 was about anything it was free speech — the right, at its most basic, to call the other guy “literally Hitler” and be derided in response as “mentally defective, a halfwit”, which captures in a few words the entire home stretch of the US election season now mercifully concluded. Kamala has vanished to Hawaii, not seen since she steeled herself to concede on the afternoon after that dreadful night when the map turned largely red. Her admirers, who figure prominently amongst America’s sizeable contingent of silly women, are shaving their heads, swearing off sex, blaming men for denying America the blessing of an Ovum Office and, in less severe manifestations of the current mania, wearing blue bracelets as expressions of the girl grief gripping the American left’s sisterly sodality. The border’s waves of invasive migrants continue, regime media persists with its how-could-it-happen chin-strokers, and the Democrats snipe in their joyless wasteland of dashed hopes. The only Democrat showing undiluted signs of the old venom is Joe Biden. As a parting gift to Donald Trump he has given Ukraine permission to pound Russia proper with US-made Atakum missiles. These have nothing whatsoever to do with Native Americans but may have some relevance to World War III. With all of 57 days until Trump takes his oath, who can tell what further mischief a lame and spiteful administration might sow in the 47th President’s path?

Permanent Washington’s reaction has been less pointed but entirely predictable. The day after the election, just as an experiment, I donned a MAGA hat and went for a stroll through a part of Washington not far from Kevin Rudd’s for-the-moment roost on Embassy Row. It was a nice neighbourhood and, as it turned out, a very short walk. Within two blocks the hard stares had become most unsettling, and when a young woman pulled up at the pedestrian lights on her electro-scooter, leaned in close and personal and mouthed a silent ‘Fuck Trump’ it seemed the right moment to pocket the hat and stop reminding the natives that their little island of federal plenty, the District of Columbia, is in America but not really of America, which can also be said of New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and other resolutely blue urban disaster zones. The differences are stark.

The rest of the country, the red bits, doesn’t vote Democrat 90%-plus, accept parish pump corruption as the normal state of affairs or, in DC’s particular case, draw pay cheques near exclusively on Uncle Sam’s account. Drive two hours to the west and it’s Old Glory hanging over the front porch and, in numbers that chill when you know what they mean, large gold stars prominently displayed. They signify someone in that family home has died in America’s service. This has always been one of America’s prime recruiting grounds, the blood of its sons spilled disproportionately in every war from the Revolution, and the Indian Wars before it, to Vietnam and today’s Middle East. You can understand why the candidate pledging “no more endless wars” was an easy sell in those parts, unlike in Washington, where goading Putin with long-range missiles, which the Kremlin knows full well require US targeting assistance, is but a move on the chess board, politics by other means, and in the Biden twilight, homefront politics in particular.

Over the last three weeks Trump has given his enemies no peace. The trauma of losing House, Senate and White House had not loosened its grip on Democrats when he began naming his cabinet. One after the other, unexpected names have tumbled out, with even the mildest nominees enough to appall the Swamp, which as one switched from a shell-shocked collective moaning about the stupidity of the American voter to identifying Trump’s selections as a preview of the full-blown authoritarianism to come after Inauguration Day. Trump must have sported a wicked grin when tapping two of his hardest hard cases, Pete Hegseth at Defence and Matt Gaetz at Justice, as the vanguard of the appointments that have followed.

Gaetz’s nomination proved short-lived, withdrawn amid very dubious claims about underage sex trafficking, but as Trump’s proclamation that this would be no ordinary cabinet it was deafening. You can understand why Gaetz put the fear of God into those who spent Trump’s first term, as Roger Kimball puts it, “plotting and scheming to bring him down — the same bureaucracy that harassed, investigated, impeached, indicted, and attempted to imprison him.” Watch a relentless Gaetz boring in on Homeland Security chief Alejandro Mayorkas, grilling him about four years of wide-open borders and illegals in their tens of millions, and you will understand what Trump sees in the man. He was no less spirited defending Trump during the first impeachment hearings, which saw him repeatedly lambast the January 6 committee, the FBI and Justice Department bigwigs for stitching up the 45th President as a Russian puppet and other purported crimes. It required little imagination on the part of the Swamp to picture what this bull would do to the Justice Department’s china shop were he ever to get through the door.

But why would Trump nominate a candidate so unlikely to be approved at Senate hearings? One theory is that Gaetz asked for the job and Trump, indulging a loyalist, gave the nod with a “see how you go”. Another view pictures Gaetz as both bludgeon and sacrificial offering. By putting him up for confirmation hearings that could only end in rejection, Trump made his second choice nominee, former Florida Attorney-General Pam Bondi (pronounced bondy, not like the beach), seem a more reasonable contender than the man spitting contempt from beneath a brilliantine pompadour. A third possibility is that it was Trump simply being Trump, sending a warning not just to the Swamp but to the Republicans who, it turns out, loathe Gaetz even more than do Nancy Pelosi’s Democrats. Treacherous, untrustworthy, destructive, disloyal are but a few of his own side’s appraisals of Gaetz’s character, which is understandable given his role as a leader of the GOP hardliners’ revolt that a year ago ended Kevin McCarthy’s brief stint as Speaker.

Also predictable was that Gaetz’s nomination would no sooner be announced than he would be firehosed with leaks. That some came pre-packaged from the dark bowels of the FBI cannot be doubted, pants-down shaming being a time-honoured Washington method of nobbling those whom Permanent Washington wishes to ruin. What the much-regurgitated talking points about Gaetz’s unfitness to serve seldom mentioned was that the accusation of sex with a 17-year-old, below the age of consent in Florida, came from a disgraced state tax collector, an elected post, now serving 11 years for attempting to frame yet another political foe as a debaucher of innocent young things. Notice the pattern? No charges arose from the FBI’s two-year investigation which, as Gaites has said, would have seen him behind bars, as other Trumpists have been, had the FBI been able to find even a skerrick of truth in the claims. Given the Biden Justice Department’s four years of naked partisanship, most evident in the many criminal charges brought against Trump and members of his inner circle, that is beyond doubt. While the findings of a congressional investigation awaits release, with Gaetz now out of contention, his alleged predations, true or false, are academic.

It is all very familiar, as anyone who remembers the fate of one-time presidential hopeful Gary Hart might recall. A standard-issue Democrat on most issues, he broke with Left tradition by going after the Pentagon for the endemic waste, fraud and abuse that, then and now, consistently produces gold-plated weaponry which all too often doesn’t work. His motto was ‘more bang for the buck’, and the defence reform movement he led with fellow ‘cheap hawks’ brought to light astonishing abuses of the taxpayer dollar, from the legendary $600 toilet seats to hammers with four-figure price tags and billion-dollar weapons programs that continued to be funded despite failing every performance test to which they were subjected. Hart’s stocks soared to new heights when a radar-guided anti-aircraft system known as DIVAD, which he had adamantly opposed, demonstrated its uselessness at a stage-managed desert test before an audience of invited politicians, press and military brass. Ignoring the designated drone target, the robot gun locked on instead to an exhaust fan in a port-a-loo behind the spectators’ bleachers and was within seconds of wiping out a significant slice of the political class when a quick thinker quite literally threw himself on the kill switch.

Hart’s stocks were high. Then came the leaks about his extra-marital love life and that was it for his political career. That both Gaetz and Hegseth, self-proclaimed threats to the established order, have been subjected to the same sheet-sniffers’ smears comes as no surprise.

Defence nominee Hegseth (atop this page), though, is hanging tough. He doesn’t deny having drunken sex with an organiser at a Californian conference of the state’s GOP women. What he disputes is that the encounter was a case of sexual assault rather than a consensual encounter. Be that as it may, any third party reading the police investigators’ 2017 report will be hard pressed not to laugh for such is the human comedy arising from strong drink, a blissfully unaware husband and the sexual appeal of an alpha male, all of it laid out in 15 explicit pages of he-said/she-said. It seems that after a night of speeches and drinking the alleged victim was recruited as a “crotch blocker” — that’s how the police report describes her — by a friend who didn’t appreciate Hegseth’s invitations to pop up to his room and wanted a third wheel to inhibit his amorous attentions. The friend departed, and by the woman’s account, Hegseth endured her lecture about rapacious male sexuality while yet more drinks flowed. By the time hotel security men were demanding wee-hours decorum as the couple talked and laughed loudly in the courtyard at 1.30am, the unnamed woman was texting her husband in their room that she was having a fine old time and would be up later. Much later as it transpired, for it was not until near dawn when she left Hegseth’s room and slipped into bed with her husband. Just how much hubby’s curiosity prompted subsequent events and the police investigation can be left to the reader’s imagination.

Worth noting is that the purported rape was reported not by the alleged victim but a nurse to whom, four days later, she confided vague memories of having sex with a strange man, possibly after being drugged. As a “mandatory reporter” under California law, the nurse had no option but to inform authorities of what she had been told — and from there events proceeded according to their own dreadful momentum.

As with Gaetz, no charges were laid, and it’s not hard to understand why detectives were wary. In her record of interview she specifically mentioned Hegseth’s dog tags dangling in her face as he had his way with her. But when asked if he had any other identifying makers, her answer was none whatsoever, this despite his chest being tattooed with a large Jerusalem Cross and, on a forearm ‘Deus Vult’, the Crusaders’ battle cry, and other illustrations.

Not that those tatts are viewed by the Swamp as any sort of testament to innocence, quite the reverse in fact, as the personel file from his days as a Special Forces major include an informer’s note from a fellow officer that the body art might indicate sympathy for white supremacists and, therefore, he needed watching. Hegseth rejected that out of hand and quit the military soon after, seeing the incident as further evidence to back his two best-selling books which attempt to explain why the Pentagon hasn’t won a major war since Korea. He has two Bronze Stars, a slather of combat decorations and commendations, and no time at all for the wokery of the modern Pentagon, from women serving in frontline combat units to taxpayer-funded sex changes and, lunacy on caterpillar tracks, battery-powered tanks to make the business of smiting foes less offensive to Gaia.

The beef against Hegseth isn’t that he is warrior, of that there is no doubt, but that he lacks the executive experience to “manage” the defence budget. Given that the Pentagon has just failed its seventh consecutive audit, with unaccounted billions of dollars simply vanishing, the idea that anyone can bring the beast under control is ludicrous. Technocrat Robert McNamara, who had been running Ford, couldn’t do it when recruited by JFK to impose some sort of order on military spending, his only enduring innovations being the daily body count during Vietnam which was supposed to make progress towards victory something that could be represented by a bar chart, and the F-111, conceived as an example of materiel efficiency that would be flown by both the Navy and US Air Force. The admirals detested and white-anted the F-111 from the start by insisting on their own design refinements. By the time the nosey Aardvark, as it was dubbed, went into production, the Navy had loaded it with so many changes what had been intended as a fighter-bomber was too big to land on an aircraft carrier, too heavy for dogfights, too unreliable for theatre deployment and too expensive to continue producing. If McNamara, the very model of James Burnham’s scorned managerialism, couldn’t make the Pentagon answer to his will, what chance an ex-grunt whose post-military career reached its apogee as a weekend host on Rupert Murdoch’s Fox news channel?

And yet, David-versus-Goliath style, the idea an outsider might succeed where the solons fell short has its appeal. What, for instance, might Defence Secretary Hegseth do with the V-22 Osprey (below, in an all too typical condition), which has proven a greater threat to those who fly in it than anyone against whom the bizarre hybrid of helicopter and fixed-wing might be directed in anger. In development since 1975 at a guesstimated total cost so far of at least $13 billion, its various models keep crashing at the cost to date of 61 crewmen and passengers’ lives. Today, it’s a richly funded hangar queen, restricted to short-hop flights that limit pilots to ranging no further than 30 miles from the nearest emergency landing area. The Osprey is great when it works, it’s just that it doesn’t work very well or very often. As a seasoned combatant who knows from first-hand experience reliable weaponry is the only thing that matters when under attack, Hegseth’s lack of managerial experience might be a supreme asset: If it doesn’t work, Uncle Sam doesn’t want it and won’t be paying another cent.

Somewhere, almost forgotten, we can assume the frustrated and now aged reformer Gary Hart, plus the ghost of Robert McNamara, are wishing Hegseth all the best.

So far, Trump has nominated almost three dozen potential cabinet members and others who will require Senate confirmation. Sex being involved, Hegseth and Gaites have dominated the headlines, but there’s a third and so far little mentioned pick, that of Brendan Carr to head the Federal Communications Commission. A self-proclaimed First Amendment absolutist, he has made it clear that the airwaves are public property and, therefore, broadcasting licences may be subject to revocation where news has been twisted to suit partisan preference. Same with the internet except moreso, which means Big Tech has a lot to worry about.

Pre-Musk, Twitter colluded with the Biden administration to silence critics of the Covid response and anyone who raised questions about the safety of hastily produced vaccines. With facebook, it suppressed any mention of Hunter Biden’s laptop being anything other than Russian disinformation, and it even banned Trump himself from posting those ‘mean tweets’.

The election was about many things, the matter of free speech underlying everything else. There will be more on Carr at Quadrant Online in the days to come, but for the moment be encouraged by the news that the enemies of free speech are going to the First Amendment good and hard.

It’s a great time to be in America just so long as you’re not wearing a Trump in Washington DC.