Back in 2017, Norm Ornstein wrote about the American Kakistocracy for The Atlantic. “There’s a case to be made that the United States is governed by the least scrupulous of its citizens.” And now we are an American Kakistocracy on steroids.“As I wrote my new book with E.J. Dionne and Tom Mann, One Nation Under Trump, I kept returning to the term. Kakistocracy is back, and we are experiencing it firsthand in America. The unscrupulous element has come into sharp focus in recent weeks as a string of Trump Cabinet members and White House staffers have been caught spending staggering sums of taxpayer dollars to charter jets, at times to go small distances where cheap commercial transportation was readily available, at times to conveniently visit home areas or have lunch with family members.”
I use the term “on steroids” intentionally. This is a term that djt used to describe the embarrassing failed North Carolina Republican gubernatorial candidate Mark Robinson. He was “like Martin Luther King on steroids.” This is an insult to both Martin Luther King and steroids.
What’s happening now, and it’s changing so rapidly that it’s difficult to encapsulate, is that any sense of guardrails or normalcy is out the window. As I used to say too often, though it’s still accurate, The trouble with normal is it always gets worse.
Another appropriate word for right now is ‘recrudescence’ (17th century): “the return of something terrible after a time of reprieve.”
Elon
Undoubtedly, you’ve heard how the Dems ran too far to the left or too far to the center or were too “woke,” or whatever. What I think is mostly true is that the Republicans were better able to define the Democrats than the Dems.
“Muslims in Michigan began seeing pro-Israel ads this fall praising Vice President Kamala Harris for marrying a Jewish man and backing the Jewish state. Jews in Pennsylvania, meanwhile, saw ads from the same group with the opposite message: Harris wanted to stop U.S. arms shipments to Israel.
“Another group promoted ‘Kamala’s bold progressive agenda’ to conservative-leaning Donald Trump voters, while a third filled the phones of young liberals with videos about how Harris had abandoned the progressive dream. Black voters in North Carolina were told Democrats wanted to take away their menthol cigarettes, while working-class White men in the Midwest were warned that Harris would support quotas for minorities and deny them Zyn nicotine pouches.
It doesn’t feel like just another election. The Hollywood Reporter, of all things, notes: “The results came as a shock to large swaths of the nation who had hoped that the election of… Harris would protect the United States from the kind of fascism sweeping across the world. But for some — communities of color and queer and trans people, for example— Trump’s re-election only reaffirmed nightmares about a country whose major civil rights gains are young when compared to its oppressive history.”
Cabinet
It appears there are two types of his Cabinet appointments: the totally unqualified and the merely unfortunate.
47 selected, for his Attorney General, a person who Ben Domenech, a “big noise in conservative circles [who is] a co-founder of The RedState group blog and The Federalist,” despises. The headline of his article, posted to Substack, left no doubt as to the tenor of the piece: “Matt Gaetz is a Vile Sex Pest, and Any Senator Who Votes For Him Owns That.” His selection triggers audible gasps from some Republicans.
Pete Hegseth is a Fox News TV host who is way out of his league to run an operation as vast as the Defense Department. He had a role in djt’s controversial pardons of men accused of war crimes. He also is waging a war on “woke.”
Rep. Elise Stefanik, a Republican from New York, was picked as an ambassador to the United Nations but not because of her international expertise.
Day 1
Meanwhile, per Red State: “Several conservative groups are currently in a campaign to identify federal employees who are partisan or possibly resistant to enacting Trump’s agenda, according to a CNN report. These groups include the Heritage Foundation Oversight Project and the American Accountability Foundation.
“The organizations have flooded federal agencies with tens of thousands of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests demanding access to emails, personnel records, and other communications between government employees. The effort is part of a comprehensive strategy to lay the groundwork for mass firings of civil servants under Trump’s Schedule F executive order issued in 2020, which was later revoked under President Joe Biden.” I wrote about Schedule F here.
So, am I optimistic? Not really. But one needs to fight the fight anyway. I’m just not sure what that looks like yet.