The Art of Diversion

What is President-Elect Donald Trump best at?  Diversion.  Mr. Trump has said so many outrageous, cruel, and frankly traitorous things over the years that it has been impossible for the responsible media or any individual citizen to keep track of them all.  All have become mentally numb, and our national moral spirit has correspondingly withered.  I have seen it suggested that Mr. Trump’s most controversial Cabinet picks thus far, taken together with the possibility that these nominees will be placed in their jobs through a maneuver that would avoid their requiring Senate confirmation, constitute either a mockery of the American system or an attempt to tear it down.  (The President-Elect’s selections are so absurd by traditional standards that at one point I briefly considered whether Mr. Trump hadn’t decided to destroy our system by staging his own version of The Producers, Mel Brooks’ 1960s film about a couple of Broadway failures who attempt to reap millions from a fraud by staging what they expect to be a sure flop entitled, “Springtime for Hitler.”)

I’ve reconsidered.  Consider whether Mr. Trump’s announcements aren’t a brilliant diversion.

Take former U.S. FL Rep. Matt Gaetz, who has just resigned from the House of Representatives after being tapped by Mr. Trump to become Attorney General, the head of the Department of Justice (DOJ).  I would suggest that Mr. Gaetz may merely be a pawn for Mr. Trump.  Since the nomination was announced, I’ve seen a Twitter clip in which a Republican House member stated that about 200 members of the House Republican Caucus – there are only about 218, in total 😉 — are happy to see Mr. Gaetz depart the House for all the disruption his self-serving shenanigans have caused during his years in Congress.  It is hard not to believe that Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, no matter what he says in public, was pleased to see Mr. Gaetz resign.  Given the antipathy for the Attorney General-nominee among his own party members, it is also hard not to believe that what is by all accounts a very damaging House Ethics Committee report on Mr. Gaetz won’t become public by some means or other.  In any event, the legislative outcry about the Gaetz nomination will seemingly demand public hearings if Mr. Gaetz does not withdraw, and one would have to assume that the odds against his confirmation are high – rejecting him will enable several Republican Senators to pretty politically painlessly establish that they are still institutionalists, independent, bipartisan, and moral.

But even Mr. Gaetz’ head on a stake might not be enough of a diversion to achieve Mr. Trump’s ultimate goal.  So the next item on the menu will be Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., whom Mr. Trump has nominated to be the Secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).  Mr. Kennedy is a manifest quack.  His steadfast opposition to most if not all vaccines, questioning fluoride in water, etc., etc., etc., is enough to raise doubts in the minds of all but the densest conspiracy buff; I’ll venture that even the majority of MAGAs who have now been conditioned to question the efficacy of COVID vaccines nonetheless support children’s polio, chickenpox, and measles, mumps and rubella vaccinations.  Add to that Mr. Kennedy’s declarations that he has a dead worm in his brain and that at one point he dumped a dead bear in New York City’s Central Park, and Senate confirmation hearings on Mr. Kennedy’s nomination will be enough circus to keep late night talk show hosts busy for weeks.  Even the most rabid Murdoch American print publication, the New York Post, has come out vociferously against Mr. Kennedy’s nomination.  Mr. Kennedy – although he may well not be savvy enough to recognize it – may simply more political cannon fodder for Mr. Trump.  He provides more political cover for Senate Republicans, who can hold hearings, provide Democrats enough votes to reject Mr. Kennedy, and thereby appear institutionalist, independent, bipartisan, and rational.  (And if by some miracle Mr. Kennedy is confirmed, one might question how effective he will be in instituting his hair-brained beliefs.  I will venture that Mr. Kennedy is wildly misguided, but not malevolent.  HHS is 80,000 strong, and every HHS employee will understand how to employ every existing bureaucratic roadblock to check Mr. Kennedy’s flights of fantasy.)

The President-Elect wins either way.  If the Gaetz and/or Kennedy nominations are confirmed, he has completely emasculated the Senate.  If either or both are not, Mr. Trump will have nonetheless gained favor with the Republican House caucus and the diehard healthcare conspiracists among his base.  But what else, of greater strategic importance, have these nominations achieved?  They’ve cleared the way for Senate confirmations of two nominees who might well have faced significant opposition from a decisive number of the remaining conservative (as contrasted with MAGA) Republican Senators but for the fury that will be expended during consideration the DOJ and HHS nominees:  those of obviously unqualified Fox News Host Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense and undoubted Russian sympathizer former U.S. HI Rep. Tulsi Gabbard as the U.S. Director of National Intelligence (DNI).  Even if hearings are held for Mr. Hegseth and Ms. Gabbard, Senate Republicans certainly aren’t going to reject everybody; Messrs. Gaetz and Kennedy will be the outside limit. 

One might argue that Mr. Hegseth, if confirmed, will have trouble effecting MAGA aims against a bureaucracy as entrenched as the Pentagon.  I’m not sure that’s correct – after all, remember who will be the Commander-in-Chief – but even if it is, imagine how much American military readiness will be impacted by the distractions within our armed forces caused by Mr. Hegseth’s – I can’t resist 😉 – witch hunts for “Woke” officers.  The men and women who lead our military are human; they are concerned with their careers just like everybody else.  Similarly, assuming that Ms. Gabbard is confirmed, our ability to protect our interests – at least, our traditional interests – will certainly be compromised if, as I have seen reported, our allies will no longer be willing to share their most sensitive secrets with us for fear that they will be disclosed to Russia.

I will venture that Russian President Vladimir Putin could care less about HHS, and probably but little more about DOJ.  He does care about American military efficiency and America’s intelligence capabilities.  One could argue that if the Russian President himself had orchestrated this series of nominations, he couldn’t have done any better to protect his interests.

Clever.  Really clever.  I practiced law too long to not still admire a true tour de force by those with whom I disagree.  (Mr. Trump’s not that smart, you say?  The man has been smart enough to get elected President of the United States twice – this last time with a majority of the vote – while making plain who he is and what he stands for.)  Liberals and progressives – and me – now suffer from whiplash after nine years of having repeatedly looked down to see if our shoes were untied.  (This analogy is not to make light of what is happening.  Recall that on the brink of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, to try to stave off the invasion President Joe Biden took the unprecedented step of releasing extremely sensitive American intelligence – undoubtedly shaped just sufficiently to protect the source — warning the Russians that we knew what they were about to do.  At the time, it was speculated that to have such intimate intelligence, we had to have “turned” one of the perhaps – what, half dozen?  10?  — men closest to Vladimir Putin.  If this speculation was accurate, on or soon after January 20, 2025, Tulsi Gabbard is going to know who that is.  Unspoken but almost certain:  right now, the Biden Administration is undertaking frantic efforts to get America’s most sensitive Russian assets out of Russia.) 

Bob Woodward noted in his book, Rage:  “As [the first] DNI [in the first Trump Administration, Dan] Coats had access to the most sensitive intelligence – intercepts and the best deep-cover human CIA sources in Russia.  He suspected the worst but found nothing that would show Trump was indeed in Putin’s pocket.  He and key staff members examined the intelligence as carefully as possible.  There was no proof, period.  But Coats’s doubts continued, never fully dissipating.”

And to think — if Mr. Trump had lost this month’s presidential election, I had planned to pitch all of the Trump-related books I collected during the first Trump Administration.