The Mount Rushmore of Putzes

By Kevin D. Williamson

Friday, November 15, 2024

 

Marco Rubio has finally found a place for himself … on a Mount Rushmore of putzes. 

 

Oh, sure, he’s kind of the Teddy Roosevelt—the one who doesn’t really belong—but in joining the ranks of Trump’s first-round picks—Matt Gaetz, Tulsi Gabbard, Pete Hegseth, etc.—Sen. Rubio is now in a terrific position to judge himself by the company he keeps. Some of you will know the old Polish proverb: “Not my circus, not my monkeys.” 

 

Welcome to your circus, Little Marco. Meet the monkeys. 

 

Rep. Gaetz has spent years dealing with allegations of misconduct, from using illegal drugs to being involved with an underage prostitute. His longtime friend Joel Greenberg, who is at the center of the case, already has pleaded guilty to a half-dozen felonies, including a sex-trafficking charge. Gaetz, it bears repeating here, has not been charged with anything, much less convicted, and, as a legal matter, the presumption of innocence must apply to even such a specimen as he. But there are degrees of proof short of criminal conviction. According to CBS News, the evidence against Gaetz includes testimony from four women who said they were paid to attend sex-and-drug orgies that Gaetz attended, and Venmo transactions that show Gaetz making payments to the women. A House ethics probe, expected to be made public at any moment, will shed light on this. 

 

Pete Hegseth calls to mind Sen. John Tower, who was nominated to the same position for which Hegseth has been proffered—secretary of defense—by the George H.W. Bush administration. Tower was eminently qualified for the position, having served as chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee and as the lead negotiator in the Reagan administration’s arms-reductions talks with the Soviet Union. But he was rejected after leaders of conservative organizations complained that he was often seen around Washington exhibiting “a lack of sobriety” while keeping company “with women to whom he was not married,” as Paul Weyrich, co-founder of the Heritage Foundation, put it at the time. Hegseth does not have anything like Tower’s qualifications—he had an undistinguished stint in the military and has mainly worked as a cable-news pundit—but he has had something like Tower’s social life. In 2020, the Pentagon rejected his attempt to join National Guard troops chosen to secure Joe Biden’s administration, one of a dozen rejected because of links to “right-wing militia groups” and “extremist” activity. Hegseth insists this is all about a misunderstood tattoo, a claim that you are free to believe, if you happen to be that sort of person. 

 

Tulsi Gabbard, who has been nominated for director of national intelligence in spite of no experience with intelligence work (and no obvious experience with intelligence of any kind), is a reliable amplifier of Russian disinformation (remember those made-up U.S.-run biological-weapons labs in Ukraine that were the “real” reason for the Russian invasion?) and one of Vladimir Putin’s most able enablers when it comes to harnessing the conspiracy-kook right to Moscow’s political and military interests. I don’t think she’s on the Kremlin’s payroll, but I don’t know what she’d do differently if she were, except perhaps try to be a little more subtle about her enthusiasm for doing PR for Putin. Her other great love in public life is Syrian caudillo Bashar al-Assad. 

 

None of these people has any meaningful experience relevant to the post in question. Gaetz has a law degree and worked briefly at a firm in Florida that represents a lot of homeowners’ associations and handles a lot of real-estate litigation—he never has worked as a prosecutor of any kind. Hegseth served honorably in Iraq and Afghanistan with the Minnesota National Guard but has no experience of any kind relevant to what the Department of Defense actually does. Gabbard is a former Army reservist who has held elected office off and on since she was 21 years old; before being elected to office, she was a self-employed martial arts instructor. Gaetz might be a threat to the intern pool, and Hegseth a threat to the general dignity of the U.S. government, such as it is, but Gabbard would represent a critical threat to U.S. national security in the role for which she has been selected. 

 

Since Donald Trump has a weird thing for talking about Hannibal Lecter all the time, I might be forgiven for borrowing a line about him from Silence of the Lambs author Thomas Harris: “[His] object has always been degradation.” Trump is a lifelong specialist in degradation: of the wives and family he humiliated and dragged through the pages of the tabloid press as he went from mistress to mistress, of the office of the presidency, of institutions, of norms, of the public square itself, but, above all, of individuals. Rubio spent his last gasps in the 2016 campaign imitating Trump—the personal insults and schoolyard taunting—and spent the years since perfecting an even deeper imitation of the villain he failed to vanquish. Trump knows what Rubio most wants in life—to climb up the next rung—and offers him a chance at it while imposing a high price: his dignity. Rubio may make the climb, but he’ll do so with these miscreants and lunatics on his back. As Lecter says to Clarice Starling: “I’ll give you what you love most … advancement.” Trump has something in common with another world leader to whom he sometimes is compared: His strength is that he forces his enemies to imitate him.

 

When Trump rolled out Rubio and Susie Wiles and the rest of the respectables, all the usual pundits and podcasters—including a lot of nominal Trump skeptics constantly on the hunt for an opportunity to praise or defend him—did the predictable thing and declared themselves pleasantly surprised and cautiously optimistic (or incautiously optimistic!) about the administration’s prospects going forward. As though they hadn’t seen this show before. As though they didn’t know that their praise and defense and agonized apologia were part of the strategy. It always goes the same way: in for a penny, in for a pound, even if you decide to make like Mike Pence and suddenly grow a conscience during your last five minutes in office when you calculate—wrongly!—that you’ve ridden the Trump train as far as it can take you. 

 

Rubio often talks movingly about the sacrifices his parents made in life in order for him to be able to advance. I wonder if this is what they thought all that was for—if this is the monument they had in mind. Sen. Rubio certainly has arrived. 

 

Welcome to the circus, senator.