The Worst Pick

By Jonah Goldberg

Friday, November 15, 2024

 

Namaste. 

 

On the one hand, I have plenty of time to write this “news”letter. Delhi is 10 1/2 hours ahead of Washington, D.C. On the other hand, it’s after 10 p.m. in Delhi and I just concluded a festive dinner with some really impressive Indian dignitaries. This is one way of saying I’m really not all that prepared to dive into a lengthy G-File. So we’ll just see how this goes. 

 

I want to save up my observations about India until I have more of them, but I will say that I have already learned a great deal. I’ve learned even more about how much more I need to learn. In other words, I have acquired in my short time a modest amount of knowledge, but I’ve acquired a vast amount of awareness of the knowledge I am lacking. 

 

Not to go all Zen koan on you, but one way in which my knowledge has been expanded is the discovery of the lack of knowledge of others. Last night, I watched an English language news—or perhaps “news”—channel in my hotel room. An anchor was interviewing what appeared to be an Indian correspondent in the U.S. via Zoom or some such. The topic was Tulsi Gabbard’s nomination to be director of national intelligence. At one point the host asked whether her appointment would lead to a change in America’s posture toward Israel and the Gaza war. 

 

“I don’t think so,” their man in Washington (I think it was Washington) said. He then went on to say (quoting from memory), the incoming Trump administration “remains dominated by Presbyterians and Methodists” who are still very supportive of Israel. 

 

The anchor just nodded with an “Oh, that makes sense” expression. 

 

Look, I was jet-lagged, brushing my teeth, and half-listening, so I might have missed some nuance. But I was dumbstruck. From my perspective, the guy could have said, “I don’t think so because Trump surrounds himself with people who don’t like vanilla ice cream as well as people who were born on odd-numbered days.” In short, I think he was wrong, and if an American-born-and-raised expert said something like that I would leap at the opportunity to say “that’s ridiculous” at great length. 

 

But I was more interested in why he was so confident he was right, or even mostly right. If he’d said “evangelical Christians” or some such I’d have an easier time understanding what he was getting at, right or wrong. But Presbyterians and Methodists, specifically? I think it’s fascinating that foreign students of America think this makes sense. 

 

I’ve run into a lot of that in the short time I’ve been here. And in doing my homework, I’ve found a lot of Americans have a similarly odd view of India—from the perspective of Indians. 

 

Again, I don’t want to go too far down this road, because my trip is really only just beginning. But the opportunity to get pulled outside the categories of politics that seem obvious and natural to me is a welcome break. More on all this to come. 

 

Outside the fishbowl.

 

It is very weird watching the Trump administration take shape from 7,480 miles away. It’s also more than a little embarrassing. 

 

At the inaugural Dispatch Summit—a smashing success, if I do say so myself—Paul Ryan and Mike Pence were pretty upbeat about the appointments so far. Of course, about four hours after the summit, Trump announced that he intended to name Pete Hegseth as secretary of defense. And the next day he announced his plans for Tulsi Gabbard. Not long after came the news about Matt Gaetz and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. 

 

There’s a robust discussion on the right about how bad these picks are, and I’ll say this in defense of Hegseth—he comes out as the least bad. I don’t think he’s a good choice. But that’s mostly because I don’t think he has the skill sets to run one of the largest, most complicated and important organizations in the world. And while I have plenty of issues with Hegseth, I am confident that he starts from defensible, patriotic assumptions about America that make him the least objectionable of the group. I don’t like his effort to seek—and get—pardons for accused war criminals. But if you stipulate that his version of the facts was correct—which I believe he believed—it was defensible.

 

Some folks think Gabbard is the worst pick. She’s a seriously unserious person with a penchant for blame-America-first arguments and flip-flopping like a wounded moth trying to find the limelight. The director of national intelligence should be a stolid, solid man or woman in a gray suit, an answer to a tough trivia question, not a political and ideological exotic.

 

Others think Kennedy is the worst pick. I have to agree that he’s the worst person of the bunch, and I say this even if all of the allegations against Matt Gaetz are true (and I’m open to the possibility that some aren’t). Kennedy is a profoundly dishonest and dishonorable man. In 2001 alone, he cheated on his wife 37 times. This isn’t gossip. This is his own account. And it wasn’t bragging. That number comes from his own diary. His wife found the journal, and it apparently played a role in her suicide. 

 

We can come back to his shoddiness in a moment. But I am happy to concede, as an intellectual matter, that an adulterous sleazeball could make for a competent Health and Human Services secretary. His grotesque personal behavior should be a reason to disqualify him from any honored role in public life—yes, I’m one of those judgy conservatives—but reasonable people can disagree about such things. But it is his “professional,” public behavior that should make him unacceptable. 

 

For starters, there’s nothing in his résumé that qualifies him to oversee 1 in 4 dollars spent by the federal government. Then there’s the fact that he’s a crank and fabulist who insists, to name just two examples, that cell phones and Wi-Fi cause cancer. Think about how much you’ve been exposed to Wi-Fi and cell phone signals over the last 20 years. It’s certainly true that massive exposure to electromagnetic radiation is best avoided. But if he was right, you’d think we’d see an increase in the cancers he says are caused by moderate exposure. There has been none. The Heritage Foundation and others think he’s a hero because of his anti-vaccine crusade in the COVID era. I think that’s all nonsense for the most part. But he was anti-vax when conservatives were mocking anti-vaxxers as left-wing loons. His anti-vax group directly contributed to the deaths of 83 Samoan children from measles, and the supposedly science-driven Kennedy simply lied about it.

 

Kennedy is an intellectual lightweight hungry for respect as an expert. So he talks like an expert with the hope that people won’t notice that he’s just making stuff up. In a secret recording, he just made up nonsense about COVID being bioengineered to target black and Caucasians while sparing Jews and Asians. It was all nonsense. So by all means … let’s give him a $2 trillion budget? 

 

And then there’s Matt Gaetz. Personally, I think he’s the worst pick, because the attorney general is a lodestone of the executive branch. I totally get how under the theory of the unitary executive, the attorney general is just an extension of presidential authority. But there’s a longstanding expectation that the attorney general is supposed to be a de facto—if not necessarily a de jure—check on abuses of executive authority. This is why conservatives complained so bitterly about previous attorneys general being too chummy with the president, starting in the modern era with Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s father. 

 

Over the years, thousands of right-wing op-eds and cable news diatribes have excoriated Janet Reno, Eric Holder, Merrick Garland et al. for too much water-carrying for Democratic presidents. The factual merits of those indictments vary, but the principle they invoked was correct. The only argument for Gaetz boils down to “we should do it too!” If you believe that overly politicized AGs are bad, if you wax righteous about the rule of law, and if you decry politicized prosecutions (accurately or not), arguing “now it’s our turn” is not an honorable, moral, or patriotic argument. But that is the only argument for Gaetz. 

 

America can handle a flibbertigibbet in the DNI’s office. It can handle a dangerous loon at HHS. It can even handle an anti-woke cable news host as defense secretary. But an attorney general whose only “qualification” is to be a MAGA version of the Hand of the King, makes the burden of handling those other things infinitely more burdensome. Gaetz would not see getting to the bottom of executive branch excesses as part of his portfolio—he would see defending and enabling those excesses as central to his mission. Trump wants a Roy Cohn to run the Department of Justice, and that alone is reason to reject his preferred choice. 

 

Indeed, that’s the real problem with all of these picks: the picker. Trump wants loyalists, enablers, and TV pitchmen to staff his administration. There’s nothing we can do—now—to change that. He was legitimately and decisively elected president. But every senator was elected to be a senator, too. And, according to the Constitution, their job isn’t to “support the president,” but to protect and defend the Constitution and, with that in mind, to advise and consent to presidential appointments. I understand that the unwritten commandment of the GOP is to empower Trump, but that is not the oath these people took.