Libs Give Washington Back to Trump; Trump Prepares to Give It Back to Them
As the Right celebrates the humiliating defeat of Kamala Harris and the woke mob, blind sycophancy to a winner who has learned nothing is already previewing how it could all come crashing down.
Donald Trump’s victory over Kamala Harris last month could only be a mystery to someone who’s been sleeping through the past year (or who lives their life sheltered in a leftist enclave, which amounts to the same thing). Especially in the home stretch, it had become clear that Democrats wouldn’t take the advice that could have saved them to drop the woke pandering and reverse course on their most toxic policies. Make no mistake: 2024 was Democrats' election to lose, and they lost it.
The Biden administration was hellbent on opening the border, spending like crazy, and appeasing gender activists, and Democrats refused to admit it. They chose to stick with Biden himself until it was impossible to keep pretending he wasn't senile. Then they chose to settle for Biden's affirmative-action hire of a vice president because his decision four years earlier to pick her solely for her race and sex trapped them in an identity-politics box of their own making. They gambled that normal Americans would care more about Trump's personal awfulness and abortion-on-demand than how Democrat policies directly hurt them. It was always an insane, stupid, reckless gamble, and it blew up in their face.
So they got Trump again.
As was to be expected, they’re not taking it well. Ever since, most of the Left has alternated between hysterical caterwauling about the general public’s disregard for “democracy,” the Biden and Harris camps trying to pin the blame on each other (There’s no need to fight! You all suck!), and, most incredibly, ranting that maybe they weren’t leftist enough. As a whole, the Democrat Party is not yet showing signs that it’s ready to listen to the smattering of cooler heads in its ranks who’ve been proven right.
All of which, naturally, has had most of the Right in a celebratory mood, feasting on MAGA hype and liberal tears—overlooking that a repudiation of how historically awful the Biden-Harris administration has been for the average American was by no means a wholesale embrace of an ex-president those same Americans kicked out of office last time for locking them down and destroying his own previously-strong economy.
As this Substack has extensively covered, almost every day between leaving office and winning his return to it, Trump demonstrated that he has not learned from or changed any of his defects from his first term, is going to dive head-first into making all-new mistakes, and is no longer interested in listening to most of the people who made his first three years successful.
As such, the first major window into Trump’s second term—his nominees for Cabinet heads and other top officials—has revealed we’re in for as big a mess as ever.
To be fair, several of the picks are good, and a couple are even great. I have no respect for Marco Rubio, but he’s probably as good a Secretary of State as could be reasonably expected in a Trump administration. Tom Homan is the real deal on border control (though making him an informal “czar” rather than giving him a position with actual legal authority should raise red flags). Brendan Carr will be solid as FCC chair. Ambassador to Israel is a good fit for Mike Huckabee. Keith Kellogg gives me hope of more responsible heads prevailing over the appeasement panderers in formulating Russia-Ukraine policy. And putting Jay Bhattacharya in charge of NIH is so fantastic that how it happened is a mystery.
But most of the rest of the lineup is downright farcical in its awfulness. Leftist junk-science peddler RFK (who since joining Trump seems to have dropped the one cause conservatives liked about him, Covid accountability, in favor of playing with normal vaccines and food dye) at the top of Health & Human Services. Clownishly loud-mouthed thug and Qanon-pandering, ass-kissing self-promoter Kash Patel in charge of the FBI. A George Soros alum for Treasury Secretary. An anti-right-to-work union shill heading the Department of Labor. Tulsi Gabbard, a leftist, Israel-hating Bernie Sanders supporter with a conspicuous history of blind spots for America’s enemies, as the Director of National Intelligence. Two-faced liberal “carbon neutral” enthusiast Doug Burgum as Secretary of the Interior. A Surgeon General who continued to promote the Covid establishment’s bad medicine long after the facts were clear. An under-qualified Defense Secretary of abysmal personal character and a Navy Secretary with no relevant qualifications (unless donating big bucks to the incoming president and his party counts). Oh, and Doctor Oz, for a job having nothing to do with his daytime-talk skill set.
Trump also wanted a woke Covid tyrant who only registered Republican to align with his boss running the Drug Enforcement Agency, and notorious scumbag Matt Gaetz to be his Attorney General. Those nominations were actually egregious enough to fall apart...but not before the fiasco got House Republicans to sink to Democrats’ level by suppressing an Ethics Committee report about Gaetz (if you think that sounds suspiciously like the kind of Swamp behavior Donald Trump was supposedly sent to Washington to drain, it’s not just you—although the Conservative Infotainment Complex’s collective agreement to pretend not to see such things when “our” guys do them can have the effect of making lonely non-sellouts feel like they’re going crazy).
The prevailing defense of Trump’s selection process is that he wants people he is absolutely certain will be loyal to him, to prevent a repeat of the buyer’s remorse he had over so many of his first-term hires. The problem with that is twofold: first, MAGA’s conception of “loyalty” is strictly about blind devotion to one very fallible man, not commitment to shared causes—the latter of which is plainly not evident in the above Cabinet.
Second, healthy loyalty is fine as far as it goes—but since when is it a substitute for competence? Legions of conservative activists and issue specialists are readily available who would have been happy to help the Trump campaign find eminently-capable, results-oriented professionals who would have been absolutely rock-solid in helping Trump implement an ambitious, positive agenda. You may recall one such effort by the name of Project 2025. Trump used to tout it himself—before, in his infinite wisdom, he knifed it in the back.
The Washington Times reports that part of the reason Trump has gravitated to hires with media backgrounds is because he’s been “pouring over television clips of potential Cabinet and administrative picks to gauge how effective they would be at making the case for his policies in the media.” Which makes one wonder if Trump realizes that government agencies have designated spokespeople to handle that sort of thing—who, for good reason, typically aren’t the same people making actual policy or management decisions.
Trump’s hiring process is not one iota better than it was last time. He is making vitally important decisions on a whim, with no discernible vetting. And if the Senate rubber-stamps most of them, the result will be a hodgepodge of a leadership team that will alternate between betraying the MAGA diehards who enthusiastically voted for Trump, betraying the conservatives who reluctantly voted for Trump, satisfying both on some easy stuff like last time, and incompetence blowing up attempts to deliver on anything too complicated.
But the thing about surrounding yourself with sycophants is that you’re the one who ultimately gets burned by nobody telling you unpleasant things you need to hear. Like, for instance, that the improvements we’ll see from reinstituting the executive actions of Trump’s first three years and whatever gains are made by plucking low-hanging fruit won’t be enough to succeed for the American people, save Trump’s legacy, or sustain the glorious MAGA future if the new administration doesn’t deliver on the closest thing it has to a mandate: reducing Americans’ cost of living.
The best idea to come out of Team Trump, and its most promising tool for curbing inflation, is the Department of Government Efficiency advisory group helmed by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy. A group with the president’s ear, focused exclusively on identifying federal spending to cut and brainstorming how, could do a lot of good.
However, keep in mind that despite its name DOGE isn’t an actual government organ and has no legal authority, so ultimately all it will do is make recommendations. Whether those recommendations make it into the budget proposals the White House submits to Congress, whether Congress includes those recommendations in the budgets it sends to Trump’s desk, and whether Trump signs or vetoes final products that fall short are very different questions—particularly given Trump’s aversion to touching the main driver of spending, entitlements, his promising new entitlements and spending projects of his own during the campaign, and his openness to inflationary Democrat ideas like raising the federal minimum wage.
Whatever progress he makes through economic growth and spending cuts would also have to not be kneecapped by his maniacal infatuation with tariffs. If, as some observers predict, Trump is all bark on the subject and just wants to use the empty threat of tariffs as a bargaining chip, then fine. Let him amuse himself with some meaningless bluster. But if he really does intend to go through with his alter ego as “Tariff Man,” the result will be more expensive food, clothes, cars, materials, toys, you name it.
Lots of Americans who build things, sell things, have retirement accounts, manage life savings, etc.—in short, people whose hard work has given them actual experience with and a personal stake in the real-world consequences of what for MAGA is just appealing rhetoric about abstract theory—understand this perfectly well. Many of them voted for Trump last month strictly because he wasn’t Harris, but are under no illusions about or special devotion to who he is. Even voters who aren’t so economically astute will recognize if their lives aren’t improving under the new guy.
In short, in order to have a successful second term, Trump is going to need lots of people willing and able to save him from his own worst ideas. And yet, early signs so far point to him getting the opposite. With rare exceptions, most congressional Republicans and most of conservative media have turned full cheerleader. Despite the end of the election officially terminating the “But Kamala” excuse for pretending Trump was anything better than “Not Kamala,” the goalposts almost instantly shifted to “we have to support whoever and whatever he wants for the sake of the agenda”—meaning his agenda, which conservatives are just supposed to take as a given is also theirs.
Gee, what could go wrong?
So by all means, celebrate if you want about the election’s humiliation of Kamala Harris and repudiation of the woke mob. But sincere conservatives need to recognize that we have an even more difficult task ahead of us now: taking the American Right back from a hostile takeover of clowns and opportunists who care more about lining their pockets than they do conservative principles or defeating leftism. And MAGA diehards tempted to begin fantasizing about coronating JD Vance to continue the revolution in 2028 would do well to brace for the very real possibility that blind deference to Donald could very well bring it all crashing down and deliver the presidency to another Democrat successor...only this time, one who won't be senile and who may have learned more from his side's mistakes than we did about ours.