I indicated not long ago that I had been considering a framework that would provide a context for the Trump Administration’s actions since January 20; upon reflection, I’ve decided there are two different overall strategies being implemented.  No attempt is made here to place all of the Administration’s blizzard of activities in one of the categories; those listed below are for illustration only.  Some of the Administration’s initiatives fit in more than one category.  If you agree with the gist, I leave it to you to place other Trump actions in one or more of the categories, and to add any additional categories you think I’ve overlooked.  Listing them from least to most malign:

Implementing Policy Initiatives.  Mass deportations of illegal immigrants, imposition of tariffs, enabling increased domestic drilling for carbon fuels, further tax cuts, and ending diversity initiatives in place via Presidential Executive Order are all policy initiatives that the President Donald Trump campaigned on.  He won the election.  Like them or not, none of his efforts in these areas appear to be beyond the lawful scope of the Executive Branch.

Hucksterism.  If willingly gullible ordinary MAGA citizens want to contribute to various Trump Organization financial vehicles because they believe such will – wait for it – Make America Great Again, or buy Trump cryptocurrency meme coins, Trump Cologne, etc., etc., etc., they should have at it.  [Authorities:  W.C. Fields and (apocryphally, at least) P.T. Barnum.]

Exhibiting Vindictive Toxicity.  Examples:  Mr. Trump’s order removing security details for former Trump Administration Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and former Trump Administration National Security Advisor John Bolton – both under threat by Iran due to their part in the assassination of Qasem Soleimani at Mr. Trump’s order – due to their criticism of Mr. Trump; Mr. Trump’s order that Mt. Denali be renamed, “Mt. McKinley,” a blatant slap at Alaskan indigent tribes opposed by a majority of Alaskans and both Alaska’s Republican Senators; and the unsubstantiated claim that Democrats and their “DEI” policies somehow caused the recent Washington, D.C. airline crash.  All petulant spasms.

I’d suggest that these first three categories collectively are intended to achieve a strategy that is pure Trump:  please your audience, make a quick buck off a sucker, and petty payback.

Undercutting Strategic Alliances.  Examples:  Deploying tariffs against our North American neighbors despite their adherence to a trade deal Mr. Trump negotiated in his first term; declaring that the Gulf of Mexico should be renamed, “the Gulf of America”; proposing to annex Canada; threatening to take Greenland (under the jurisdiction of Denmark, a NATO ally) by force; and suggesting that Gazans should be transported to Egypt or Jordan (irritating these U.S. allies in an extremely unstable region).  None of these actions served any purpose save to make our allies less amenable to any requests for assistance we might make in the future.

Dismantling the American Government.  Here’s a couple:  nominating grotesquely unqualified persons to run extremely complex and sensitive organs of the American government, such as Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, soon-to-be Secretary of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard; and the DOGE machinations.  These maneuvers create fear and disruption.  Although making government more effective is certainly within a President’s purview – Theodore Roosevelt made clear in his autobiography that he authorized quite a number of independent, unpaid individuals to improve federal government efficiency during his presidency — the measures Mr. Musk and his little Bobos are effecting toward our governmental structures are not those of a rational business person attempting to improve an organization’s processes.  I am confident that if/whenever Mr. Musk seeks to trim the workforces in his two operations that he actually understands – cars and spacecraft – he doesn’t indiscriminately give almost all of his full-time employees carte blanche to go with severance pay, or turn hiring and firing decisions over to neophytes, without regard to the impact on his operations.

Degrading the Rule of Law.  Here are a few:  Politically browbeating U.S. Senators to abdicate their Constitutional responsibility by approving abjectly unqualified Cabinet nominees; dismissing members of the Department of Justice and the FBI for conducting investigations and prosecutions that yielded sufficient evidence that grand juries returned indictments against Mr. Trump; executive orders to end birthright citizenship notwithstanding pretty darn clear language granting same in the Fourteenth Amendment; impoundment of funds and closing of federal agencies authorized by Congress; and, of course, the pardoning of those who either pled guilty or juries of ordinary citizens found guilty beyond a reasonable doubt of assaulting the Capitol on January 6, 2021.  Such attacks not only undermine faith in our system of government, but also undermine global confidence in our financial system, which draws much of its strength from world nations’ belief in the competence, integrity, and impartiality of our courts.

A lot has been made in recent days of the impending Constitutional crisis that will ensue if the Trump Administration defies rulings rendered against it in federal courts.  While the potential crisis is perhaps a new notion for many of our citizens, those with legal training are always acutely aware that our courts’ power is based upon the premise that those government officials with actual enforcement power will abide by their rulings.  Obviously, if it becomes clear that the Administration is willfully disregarding court orders, such will trump (if you will) all other manners by which MAGAs are undermining the American rule of law.  I will venture that the culmination of such a confrontation will occur if/when a majority of the U.S. Supreme Court, with three Trump appointees and a total of six conservative Justices, rules against a Trump initiative – and the Administration thereafter ignores the ruling.  Since the Court controls its docket, I suspect that there will be a temptation on the part of some Justices to only take the disputes which they believe will be easiest to rationalize in favor of the Administration, but it is going to be difficult to duck some impending Constitutional issues, such as birthright citizenship, in which the Administration’s opponents seemingly have the stronger legal argument.  I suspect that when these challenges come, the key votes will be Chief Justice John Roberts – who will certainly be at least as interested in preserving the Court’s putative standing within the Constitutional framework as the outcome of the case before the Court — and Associate Justice Amy Coney Barrett.  (There was a point at which I thought Associate Justice Neil Gorsuch was more judge than partisan, but that fleeting notion has passed.)

The types of activities that fit within these last three categories collectively amount to the decimation of the American state.  President Trump and Co-President Musk have over the years each made clear their respective affinity for Russian President Vladimir Putin.  These efforts couldn’t suit Putin’s purposes any better than if the Russian President had specified them himself.

“The people stood by and watched; the rulers, meanwhile, sneered at him and said, ‘He saved others, let him save himself if he is the chosen one, the Messiah of God.’”

• Luke 23:35

The MAGA Messiah will be inaugurated today.  He saved himself; let us see how many he saves of those who have chosen him.

[Hopefully, any fans of Agatha Christie’s novels will excuse my adoption of her title to a 1927 mystery referring to four leaders of a global criminal ring.  🙂 ]

All are aware that any incoming president must make literally thousands of appointments to staff the posts discharging the government functions for which s/he is responsible.  At the time this is typed, four of President-Elect Donald Trump’s nominees (hereafter herein, the “Big Four”) appear to be garnering the most scrutiny:  Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., as Health and Human Services Department (HHS) Secretary; former Fox News Commentator Pete Hegseth as Department of Defense Secretary (DoD); former U.S. HI Rep. Tulsi Gabbard as Director of National Intelligence (DNI); and Trump Jack-of-All-Trades Kash Patel as FBI Director.  Although one might be tempted to suggest that attempting to discern the relative threats each presents to our republic is akin to deciding whether one would rather be executed by lethal injection, electric chair, beheading, or firing squad (I’m a firing squad guy, myself; at least you’d take it standing up 😉 ), let’s take a look.

In a 2019 post about presidential cabinet appointments, I indicated, “… I follow an admittedly simple two-factor analysis in deciding whether I think the nominee should be confirmed:  Is the nominee objectively qualified for the position?  If so, is there any other objective factor that should nonetheless disqualify him/her from the positon for which s/he has been nominated (e.g., prior criminal conviction, demonstrated drug abuse problem, etc.)?  Since the Constitution provides our President the power to nominate whom[ever] s/he considers appropriate, I don’t believe that a nominee’s subjective leanings or policy positions (if within the bounds of law) should be part of the equation.”

If I’m going to be consistent with past Noise, this is what I see looking at Mr. Trump’s Big Four:

Mr. Kennedy:  I find Mr. Kennedy more nutty than nefarious, but he’s still dangerous.  The New York Times recently reported that in May, 2021, Mr. Kennedy filed a petition with the Federal Food and Drug Administration seeking to have its authorization for the then-recently-released COVID vaccinations rescinded — when estimates were beginning to indicate that the vaccines were saving thousands of lives.  It’s obvious that he’s not qualified to lead HHS.  He should be rejected on this ground.  We don’t need to consider any allegedly questionable personal elements of Mr. Kennedy’s background.  That said, there is a silver lining for those who are concerned about the disruption he might cause if confirmed:  Mr. Kennedy has had no experience running a huge bureaucracy such as HHS; he is going to have to maneuver through thousands of HHS scientists who are more qualified and knowledgeable about their bureaucracy than he is; and although I am confident that Mr. Trump relishes the consternation that he has caused by Mr. Kennedy’s nomination, I doubt he is going to want to spend a lot of political capital fighting the battles Mr. Kennedy’s inclinations might generate (note how Mr. Trump already assured the public that we are not going to end the polio vaccine).

Mr. Hegseth:  It is obvious that Mr. Hegseth, like Mr. Kennedy, is completely unqualified to discharge the post for which he has been nominated.  Although — in the words of the pro-Trump, Murdoch Family-controlled Wall Street Journal Editorial Board — Mr. Hegseth “has never run an organization of any size,” he is seeking to lead the organization with either the most or the second most employees in the world (I’ve seen one indication that India’s Ministry of Defence might be larger). During his hearing, he appeared to have limited knowledge of the world or of the strategic issues DoD faces.  He should be rejected.  There is no need to get as far as his views of women or his multitude of attendant personal failings.  [Even so, when your own mom calls you out – even though Mr. Hegseth’s mother has now retracted her reported past comments about her son (without denying she made them) – that’s bad, Man.  😉 ]  That said, there is a silver lining for those who are concerned about the disruption he might cause if confirmed:  the Pentagon is arguably America’s most entrenched bureaucracy.  Although Messrs. Trump and Hegseth can certainly fire a number of generals they find to be “woke,” Mr. Hegseth might find it easier to physically push the Empire State Building than to move our military colossus where it doesn’t want to go.  In what I hope will not prove to be the most Pollyannaish comment ever made here, I have trouble believing that many senior officers – who are made of sterner stuff than career politicians — are going to be willing at Messrs. Trump’s and Hegseth’s instance to use American military force against American citizens who may hereafter be demonstrating peacefully against Trump Administration policies.

Ms. Gabbard:  It is ironic that one of the two of the Big Four about whom I have the deepest misgivings perhaps fares the best within the framework I have outlined.  If I am to be consistent with what I have said before – that a nominee’s subjective leanings or policy positions (if within the bounds of law) should not be part of the determination regarding the nominee’s confirmation – Mr. Gabbard’s clear affinity for Russian President Vladimir Putin and sympathy for Russian claims should not be a bar to her confirmation.  Mr. Trump’s own affinity for Putin is well established no matter whom he names to be DNI.  Whether Ms. Gabbard has the background to be DNI – to deftly sift through the oceans of intelligence gathered by our resources, and effectively inform the President — is seemingly a subjective rather than an objective determination.  Her 2020 presidential candidacy, her service in the U.S. House of Representatives, and her interactions in the foreign realm (no matter how misguided they seem to me) arguably lend weight to her resume; on the other hand, I’ve seen a Wall Street Journal report indicating that she recently unsettled some Republican Senators by being unable to describe what the DNI does.  Mr. Trump must think she has the necessary qualifications, and he won the election.  I am not aware of any reports of extraneous personal issues that would constitute a bar to Ms. Gabbard’s nomination.  That said, a conceptual framework only takes one so far.  If I got a vote on Ms. Gabbard’s nomination, I would vote NO. 

Mr. Patel:  I will mostly set forth quotes I’ve gleaned elsewhere:

The ACLU:  “Patel has described his desire to target perceived enemies, including the press and civil servants. In September, Patel stated, ‘We [must] collectively join forces to take on the most powerful enemy that the United States has ever seen, and no it’s not Washington, DC, it’s the mainstream media and these people out there in the fake news. That is our mission!’”

The Washington Post:  “Kash Patel, Donald Trump’s pick to lead the FBI, has suggested that multiple individuals previously critical of the president-elect should be criminally investigated, according to a review by The Washington Post of dozens of hours of appearances on conservative podcasts and TV interviews over the past two years.… Patel floated criminal probes of lawmakers and witnesses who gave evidence to the Jan. 6 committee…. Those include former Trump aide Cassidy Hutchinson and police officers who testified about defending the Capitol during the Jan. 6 attack.… If confirmed by the Senate, Patel would have the authority to launch FBI investigations .… In June 2023, Patel told Donald Trump Jr. on his podcast that ‘the legacy media has been proven to be the criminal conspirators of the government gangsters,’ referring to roughly five dozen members of the ‘deep state’ listed in his 2023 book, ‘Government Gangsters.’  And in December 2023, Patel told former Trump aide Stephen K. Bannon on his podcast that journalistsshould be investigated,repeating false claims that Trump had won the 2020 election.  ‘We’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections,’ Patel said. ‘We’re going to come after you. Whether it’s criminally or civilly, we’ll figure that out.’”

The Roll Call (a publication rated “Center” by All Sides): “Kash Patel is set to face questions during a bid to be the next FBI director about his history of fierce criticism of current and former federal officials, including a list of 60 people he has deemed members of the ‘Executive Branch Deep State’ that critics have dubbed an enemies list.  The list appears in an appendix of Patel’s book, ‘Government Gangsters: The Deep State, the Truth, and the Battle for Our Democracy.’ It includes people such as FBI Director Christopher Wray, Attorney General Merrick B. Garland and President Joe Biden.  There are high-profile Democrats, Trump administration officials who have rejected his false 2020 election fraud claims and other administration officials who have since spoken out critically about his behind-the-scenes conduct.  Patel used the book to fume against what he called the ‘deep state,’ a pejorative term for current and former federal officials, which he said was the ‘most dangerous threat to our democracy.’ … [S]ome critics have raised concerns that he will wield the sprawling investigative authority of the FBI to investigate and prosecute Trump’s enemies, if he’s confirmed. The president-elect, who flirted with authoritarian themes during his campaign, has called for the prosecution of perceived foes…. Patel’s list includes Biden administration officials as well as first-term Trump officials who have been critical of Trump, such as former Attorney General William Barr; former national security adviser John Bolton; Mark Milley, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; and former Secretary of Defense Mark Esper…. In his memoir, Barr wrote that he told White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows that Patel would get a role at the FBI ‘over my dead body.’  ‘Patel had virtually no experience that would qualify him to serve at the highest level of the world’s preeminent law enforcement agency,’ Barr wrote.  NBC News reported that Bolton, who after leaving office lambasted Trump’s fitness for the presidency, said Trump had picked Patel to be his Lavrentiy Beria, an infamous Stalin police chief, and said that the ‘Senate should reject [Patel’s] nomination 100-0.’ … Patel, in the book, said the list was not exhaustive and did not include ‘other corrupt actors of the first order,’ such as Adam B. Schiff, the California Democrat who will be a senator and able to vote on a Patel nomination.”

A link to the full list included in Mr. Patel’s book is provided below.  Unlike the bureaucratic and institutional constraints confronted by incoming Cabinet Secretaries, an FBI Director has fewer restraints.  An exhaustive investigation of a private citizen such as Ms. Hutchinson, no matter how unwarranted, has the power to emotionally and financially destroy the subject’s life.  Although he has reportedly recently assured a couple of Senators, including Democratic U.S. PA Sen. John Fetterman, that if confirmed he will not seek to prosecute Mr. Trump’s perceived enemies, you make up your own mind.  (I do seem to recall Mr. Trump’s first-term Supreme Court nominees assuring the Senate that Roe v. Wade was settled precedent.)  Mr. Patel’s statements make it appear that he is blissfully unaware of a little-known provision called the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America, and I’m pretty sure that his declarations are evidence of notions that would be unconstitutional if implemented by an FBI Director.  I’m with Messrs. Barr and Bolton on this one.

Click to access patel-list.pdf

As anyone following reports of current Congressional machinations is aware, the majority of the Big Four appears highly likely to be confirmed, and perhaps all of them will be – I guess demonstrating that in the last analysis, it really doesn’t matter whether you’re injected, electrocuted, beheaded, or shot.   

I’ve been a bit amused by some commentators’ sometimes-painful attempts since the election to provide a more benevolent gloss to the prospective actions of the incoming Administration.  (I know, I know; a dark Irish sense of humor 😉 .)  Although such is the American way – we have generally tended to rally around a new President, at least initially – Mr. Trump is not a new president.  I give the President-Elect unqualified credit for consistency.  What you see is what you get.  The time for emotion has passed.  His nominations of the Big Four, together with his bizarre suggested annexation of Canada and even the implied willingness to use force in Panama and Greenland, constitute compelling evidence that we are entering another staging of the divisive, vindictive, chaotic theater of the absurd we had during the first Trump Administration.  I only hope that the Americans who voted for Mr. Trump understood what they’re going to get.  You know the wag’s definition of insanity; I would prefer not to think that these citizens are completely insane.

Think this is only so much Noise?  I sincerely hope you’re right. To use a phrase that Mr. Trump and I both appreciate:  We’ll see what happens.

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.

President-Elect Donald Trump’s announcements this week of appointments for his Administration have demonstrated a previously evident but now openly flagrant contempt for – and possibly hatred of – the principles America has stood by and for over the last two hundred-plus years.  We will reap the whirlwind.  Even Mr. Trump’s most reasonable selection, U.S. FL Sen. Marco Rubio, who is qualified to be U.S. Secretary of State, has made it clear by his nauseating bootlicking to Mr. Trump that he will be no more than a lapdog for the incoming President’s whims.  Stephen Miller, named Deputy White House Chief of Staff, declared at the New York City Trump Rally in the last days of the campaign that “America is for America and Americans only.”  (I’ll leave it to you to characterize that one; I will note that it has been suggested in the Jewish publication, Forward, that Mr. Miller’s declaration was an echo of the “Germans for Germans only” slogan “which the Nazis used to separate out (and slaughter) Poles, Jews and other undesirables.”  Tom Horman, whom Mr. Trump has named as “Border Czar,” will soon be caging migrants.  I think one can be confident that while SD Gov. Kristi Noem is head of Homeland Security, any dog seeking to enter the country illegally will be shot.  Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy have been named co-heads of a new “Department of Government Efficiency” – transparently an organizational device that will be used to rid the federal bureaucracy of all of those not perceived as abjectly loyal to Mr. Trump and the MAGA movement.  (This is a Trump proposal that does surprise me a bit in one respect.  It’s not that Mr. Musk is getting a prominent role in the upcoming Administration – since he’s collected a car, a spaceship, and a social media site, he certainly has room in his garage for a President — but if this new Department’s “Efficiency” initiatives result in delay of Social Security checks to Trump voters, they will notice, no matter how much propaganda the alt-right media feeds them.) 

Even then, the President-Elect was just getting warmed up.  I admit that I found it so absurd that I actually laughed when I heard that Mr. Trump had named Pete Hegseth, a Fox News Host, as his choice to be Secretary of Defense.  I’m no longer laughing; I wasn’t then aware of numerous reports I’ve since seen that he has called liberals, “domestic enemies.”  The pick that has generally created the most shock is Mr. Trump’s choice of U.S. FL Rep. Matt Gaetz – he who has been investigated for sex trafficking and was as of the time his nomination was announced the subject of a U.S. House of Representatives Ethics inquiry – to become the next Attorney General, a post from which one might reasonably assume he will pursue former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, U.S. CA Sen-Elect Adam Schiff, and others Mr. Trump has called “enemies within” America.  But … we’re still not done.  Mr. Trump has named former U.S. HI Rep. Tulsi Gabbard — who has been referred to by a Russian commentator on Russian state television as “our girlfriend”— to become Director of National Intelligence.  Russian President Vladimir Putin arguably literally couldn’t have selected any American as Intelligence head better suited to his purposes. 

With every succeeding pick, Mr. Trump has ever more arrogantly demonstrated his intent to institute an autocratic regime aligned with other autocratic regimes (at least, Caucasian autocratic regimes).  Not even I – and no one who reads these notes would call me, “Mr. Sunny” — thought he would move this dramatically, at least this early.

Ominously but predictably, I have seen reports that representatives of the upcoming Administration are making arrangements for erection of huge tent encampments outside our major cities, purportedly intended for the housing illegal immigrants prior to their deportation.  I expect that this will be the only way in which these encampments are employed … for a while.

The majority of voting Americans are going to get what they voted for, although a significant segment of them might well soon decide that it wasn’t really what they wanted.  As I said in a note posted here about a month ago:  “[If Mr. Trump wins the election], [a]t some point [thereafter], some of the citizens who vote for Mr. Trump this November will say, ‘This is wrong.  This is too much.  I never intended this.’  By that time, it will be too late.  In this context, the shame will be on them, not on him; he has made his designs perfectly plain [Emphasis in Original].”  Now – although Mr. Trump hasn’t even yet assumed the presidency, and whether or not such segment realizes it yet – it is indeed too late.

One of the most arresting images I have seen since Mr. Trump was declared the victor in last week’s election is a sketch of Lady Liberty, seated, bent over, her face in her hands.  Because I am now well into my Medicare-eligible years, these days I frequently find myself considering events not from the perspective of how they will affect TLOML’s and my generation, but how they will affect our children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren (assuming that we ultimately have some 😉 ) and their generations.  As I looked at that sketch of Lady Liberty, these words came to mind – perhaps blasphemous, but reflective of my sentiment:

“But Jesus turning to them said, ‘Daughters of Jerusalem, do not weep for me; but weep for yourselves and for your children.’”

• Luke 23:28

“Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant, to step the Ocean, and crush us at a blow?  Never!  All the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth (our own excepted) in their military chest; with a Buonaparte for a commander, could not by force, take a drink from the Ohio, or make a track on the Blue Ridge, in a trial of a thousand years.

At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected?  I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us.  It cannot come from abroad.  If destruction be our lot, we ourselves must be its author and finisher.  As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.”

• Abraham Lincoln, January 27, 1838

After giving you eye strain in the week before the Election, I have been uncharacteristically silent since.  It has taken me a while to put Tuesday’s election results in perspective.  I didn’t have to go through all the stages of grief – I was able to avoid “denial” (I always instinctively felt that it was going to be difficult for Vice President Kamala Harris against an entrenched MAGA base) and “bargaining” (whatever that means in this context; I leave it to the two accomplished psychologists who read these pages to enlighten me at some future juncture 🙂 ), and experienced depression before transitioning to anger (as one of Irish descent, that sequence is my usual).  At this point, I have internalized that we have the result we have, although I am not ready to placidly acquiesce in what might come from it.

The fact that President-Elect Donald Trump won a majority of the popular vote (sweeping all seven of the supposed swing states) is at once reassuring – he has received a mandate from our people, which is what democracy is supposed to be about — and demoralizing, demonstrating as it does the willingness of the majority to deprioritize the principles that over the last two centuries made America different – that in my view actually have, in good economic times and bad, made America great.

There are so many rationales floating around as to why Ms. Harris lost that one cannot possibly list or address them all.  I doubt that Ms. Harris lost because she is black in a nation that President Barack Obama won twice.  I have significant doubt that she lost because she is a woman [although I also doubt that Democrats will run another woman presidential candidate in my lifetime (assuming there are further elections; more on that below)], since two Democratic women senatorial candidates – one of them openly gay — defeated male MAGA opponents (albeit narrowly) in swing states Mr. Trump carried. I don’t believe that President Joe Biden would have won if he had stayed in the race, given his low approval ratings (no matter how, in my view, grossly undeserved).  Finally, I don’t believe that if Mr. Biden had announced his withdrawal after the 2022 mid-terms – a course recommended in these pages at that time – a full-blown Democratic Party Presidential Nomination contest would have either provided Ms. Harris a greater opportunity prove her mettle as a candidate or yielded a different Democrat who would have defeated Mr. Trump – not when Mr. Trump not only won all the swing states, but improved his vote percentage over 2020 in 35 states.

I’ve used pro football analogies before in describing different perspectives of the race; Democrats’ current rationalizations sounds to me like a losing NFL team saying, “We should have run the ball more,” or “We should have blitzed more,” when it lost by four touchdowns.  In fact, given America’s currently toxically-partisan and supposedly closely-divided citizenry, Democrats – to use Mr. Obama’s summation of the 2010 midterm elections – got shellacked.  This isn’t a criticism of Ms. Harris; I think she did all that she, or any other likely Democratic presidential nominee, whether starting this past July or in 2022, could have done to address all of the competing factors with which she had to deal. [And for all you fans of MN Gov. Tim Walz 🙂 : the final outcome seemingly unquestionably shows that Democrats wouldn’t have fared any better with PA Gov. Josh Shapiro as their Vice Presidential nominee than they did with Mr. Walz.  I am guessing that today, Mr. Shapiro is privately thanking his lucky stars that Ms. Harris didn’t pick him as he readies for a presidential bid for 2028 (again assuming, for the purposes of this paragraph, that we have an election in 2028).] 

One observation that has resonated with me is the notion that a significant number of our citizens were more offended by Democrats’ emphasis on identity politics — which they perceived as demonstrating a disregard for them — than they were fearful of Mr. Trump’s unabashed willingness to disregard the rule of law and demonize “others” and those who disagree with him.  Perhaps those sentiments, taken together with the indication that a growing number of Americans are afraid of the future, yielded the result we got. In a democracy in which each citizen gets the same one vote, this matters.  Although their irritation with identity politics is understandable, these citizens’ selection of Mr. Trump, despite all warning flags, to “fix it,” ignores the clear lesson of history:  that demonization and trampling of norms, once begun, only metastasize. The latter fear of the future, if accurate, represents an apparent retreat from the bold optimism that has been the animating American characteristic throughout most of our history — a retreat that will form the subject of an impending post.  

An aside, but perhaps an appropriate reflection upon the evolution of the American perception of acceptable presidential behavior evidenced by Mr. Trump’s election (excluding the many presidential indiscretions of which we are now aware, but were unknown by the American people at the time they were occurring):  Former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who was an aide to now-long-deceased NY Gov. Nelson Rockefeller until he was lured away by President-Elect Richard Nixon in 1968, made clear in his memoirs that he considered Mr. Rockefeller one of the most able men he ever met.  In 1960, when Mr. Rockefeller vied with Mr. Nixon for that year’s Republican nomination, one of the political impediments Mr. Rockefeller faced with the ordinary voter was that he had been divorced.   By 1974, when Mr. Nixon was driven from office by his complicity in the Watergate scandal – although his resounding 1972 re-election makes clear that most Americans thought he was doing a good job on substantive issues — his successor, President Gerald Ford, successfully got Mr. Rockefeller confirmed as Vice President.  In 1980, Americans elected President Ronald Reagan despite a previous divorce (although by that time Mr. Reagan had been married to Nancy Reagan for decades).  By 2000, Americans were willing to accept a president they knew was not only a philanderer but a perjurer as long as they believed he was helping them; President Bill Clinton left office with a 60% approval rating despite the Lewinsky scandal, and I would submit that had he been constitutionally able to run again, he would have easily defeated the born-again and faithful husband George W. Bush.  Twice divorced, admitted adulterer Mr. Trump was elected sixteen years later despite (well, you can fill in all of Mr. Trump’s “despites” 🙂 ) and has now been re-elected by a majority that necessarily includes a segment of voters who know that he was lying in his denial of his 2020 defeat and that he incited an attack on our nation’s Capitol in an attempt to overturn the results of a free and fair election.  It is for each of us to decide where on our own personal moral spectrums, if anywhere, the evolution from Mr. Rockefeller to Mr. Trump should have been enough.  I have always thought that the American presidency called for a fundamentally good person who was willing to take morally questionable actions to achieve a greater good.  It is clear that many Americans are willing to abide a man whom even a large share of his supporters concede is amoral in hopes that he will do good things.  [I am particularly struck by those Evangelicals who admit that they wouldn’t want Mr. Trump as a pastor but can abide him as president.  Granting that the Bible can be cited for just about anything anyone wants, one cannot help but pause at the seeming … let’s say, incongruity … that any such literalist Christians so readily disregarded Matthew 7: 17-18:  “Just so, every good tree bears good fruit, and a rotten tree bears rotten fruit.  A good tree cannot bear rotten fruit, nor can a rotten tree bear good fruit.”] It is what it is.

What comes next?

I have always guessed that the greatest irony of the 2016 Trump candidacy was that Mr. Trump undertook the effort not to win, but to hype his brand.  The greatest irony of his 2024 campaign may be that he ran not because he wanted to govern but to avoid prosecution and jail time for truly consequential federal offenses for which he was obviously guilty. 

We are where we are.  The fact that there may be an understandable and even sympathetic explanation within a segment of the Trump Coalition for the upheaval we’re about to experience doesn’t mean that its consequences will be any less severe.  Over the years, while I have striven to maintain a civil language and tone in these pages, I have said so many substantively harsh things about Mr. Trump, MAGAs, and their undemocratic designs that I couldn’t even list them all here.  Any who have read many of these notes may be wondering if there is anything I might change or amend about these sentiments in whatever warm glow surrounds Mr. Trump’s undeniable victory and the impending peaceful transfer of authority of the most powerful nation the world has ever known.  There is not.  I pay Mr. Trump the respect of believing that he means and will do what he has said.  I have meant what I have said.  I have the severest doubts that the MAGA Administration will allow for a truly free and fair election in America in 2028.  Over the next four years, I expect:  that Mr. Trump – already exhausted and mentally degrading – to become a figurehead for a radical reformation of our federal government by Vice President-Elect J.D. Vance, Donald Trump, Jr., and the MAGA zealots who have put together Project 2025; that all criminal charges now adjudged or pending against Mr. Trump will be dispensed with; that all of the convicted January 6^th rioters will be pardoned; that many of Mr. Trump’s most prominent political and media critics will be prosecuted by the Trump Justice Department on trumped up (if you will 😉 ) charges (but not, ironically, Mr. Biden, who will be largely protected by the presidential immunity doctrine Mr. Trump’s Supreme Court has handed down) or otherwise pressured into submission; that MAGAs will pass measures that in fact if not in name will serve to disenfranchise Democratic-leaning constituencies; that many legal as well as illegal immigrants will be swept up in the Administration’s deportation initiatives; that MAGA-sympathetic generals will be appointed to lead the American military, and that at some point under their direction our armed forces will take action against peaceful American citizen demonstrators; that violence will increase against African Americans, legal immigrants of color, non-Christians, and Americans with untraditional gender and sexual preferences; that NATO will remain in name, but will have severely reduced effectiveness as America substantially limits its participation; that Russia will absorb at least Ukraine and possibly a number of NATO countries formerly members of the USSR; that Mr. Trump and his cohort will continue their approach of division and distraction; that – as I saw one wag on Twitter comment – within 90 days, as inflation continues to drop, Mr. Trump will claim credit and also announce that the economy he has falsely denounced for four years is the strongest economy in the world; and that — the bitterest irony of all — the gap between the American rich and those poor who consider Mr. Trump their Messiah will continue to widen.  (The cruelest joke will be that because of alt-right propaganda, most are likely not to even realize that Mr. Trump did nothing for them.)

Too pessimistic, you say?  I will be thrilled – thrilled – to be proven wrong; but review the above list, and point out which of the above you believe won’t occur during the upcoming Trump Administration.

If Mr. Trump and his minions actually effect the tariffs and tax cuts for which he’s advocated and bend securities laws to favor powerful oligarchs like Elon Musk, it doesn’t take an economics degree to predict that inflation, the deficit, and accordingly interest rates will soar and the stock market will drop; if they effect the mass deportations of illegal aliens he has promised, certain sectors of our economy dependent on illegal labor will crater, materially adversely affecting the entire economy; and that if they obtain the control over the Federal Reserve Mr. Trump seeks, global confidence in the dollar will plummet along with its value and hasten its abandonment as the world’s reserve currency.    

For clues as to whether the MAGA Administration will be willing, contrary to my deepest misgivings, to allow for a free and fair 2028 election, an early indication will be how the Administration approaches issues that do matter to Trump voters.  Ones coming to mind are the conservative shibboleths of a nationwide abortion ban, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid cuts (there are a lot of Trump voters who benefit from Medicaid), and repeal of the now-popular Affordable Care Act without an essentially-like replacement.  In these areas, Mr. Trump, even in his obviously mentally and emotionally degraded state, is cannier than his doctrinaire followers.  If he or his MAGA cohort truly intend to subject their hold on power to the free will of all American citizens in 2028, they will abstain from any actions that they know will outrage their base.  A more ominous indicator of any anti-democratic intentions they may harbor will arise, if at all, after the 2026 mid-terms, if MAGA propaganda starts to stoke unfounded fears of civil unrest or insurrection. 

I fear that those who love American democracy as it has existed for more than two centuries will look back at November 5, 2024, and Inauguration Day, 2025, as the darkest days in American history; I fear that those who may have voted for Mr. Trump because they feel disrespected or afraid have administered a supposed cure to our body politic that will ultimately prove extraordinarily more lethal than the ailments it was intended to address.  In all fairness, what will transpire after Mr. Trump reassumes office in January is yet to be seen.  At least one very close friend for whom I have the highest regard believes that my concerns about Mr. Trump and his MAGA cohort are WAY overblown.  That said, although I respect the outcome of a free and fair election and understand that the purposes of the Almighty are beyond my comprehension, I can’t help but be heartsick – for us, for the Ukrainians, and for all who for centuries nurtured the dream of America.  If MAGAs do begin to effect a repressive society with fascist echoes, it will then be up to each of us to decide how – while acting peacefully within the bounds of law, morals, and ethics — we respond.

“Neither let us be slandered from our duty by false accusations against us, nor frightened from it by menaces of destruction to the Government nor of dungeons to ourselves.  LET US HAVE FAITH THAT RIGHT MAKES MIGHT, AND IN THAT FAITH, LET US, TO THE END, DARE TO DO OUR DUTY AS WE UNDERSTAND IT.”

• Abraham Lincoln, February 27, 1860; Emphasis Mr. Lincoln’s.

What will be, will be.