By David A. Graham
Tuesday, November 19, 2024
At a rally in Las Vegas in September, the reggaeton star
Nicky Jam came onstage in a Make America
Great Again hat and endorsed Donald Trump.
“We need you. We need you back, right? We need you to be the president,” he
said. But after a comedian at Trump’s rally
at Madison Square Garden last month called Puerto Rico “a floating island
of garbage,” the singer—whose father is Puerto Rican and who was raised partly
on the island—had second thoughts.
“Never in my life did I think that a month later, a
comedian was going to come to criticize my country and speak badly of my
country, and therefore, I renounce any support for Donald Trump,” Nicky Jam said.
He had no right to be surprised. Trump himself had
previously gone after Puerto Rico—he punished its leaders for criticizing him
after Hurricane Maria, and sought to swap it for Greenland—but even if Nicky
Jam had missed or forgotten that, he had to know who Trump was.
Nicky Jam was ahead of the curve. Since the election,
Trump has moved swiftly to do things he’d said he’d do, and yet many
people—especially his own supporters—seem stunned and dismayed. This is absurd.
Surprise was perhaps merited in late 2016 and early 2017, when Trump was still
an unknown quantity. But after four years as president, culminating in an
attempt to erase an election he lost, Trump has demonstrated who he is.
Somehow, the delusion of Trump à la carte—take the lib-owning, take the
electoral wins, but pass on all of the unsavory stuff—persists.
In an article about how Trump’s transition is “shocking
the Washington establishment,” Peter Baker of The New York Times writes:
“Nine years after Mr. Trump began upsetting political norms, it may be easy to
underestimate just how extraordinary all of this is.” He’s right that the
aberrant nature of the picks may be overlooked, as I have warned,
yet it is also true that the actual unpredictability of them is overestimated.
On K Street, Politico
reports, health-care-industry lobbyists can’t believe that Trump has
nominated Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead the Department of Health and Human
Services. They were “expecting a more conventional pick,” even though Trump emphasized
Kennedy’s “Make America Healthy Again” agenda late in the campaign, and even
though Kennedy said that Trump had promised
him control of HHS. To be sure, Kennedy is a shocking and disturbing pick, as Benjamin
Mazer and my colleague Yasmin
Tayag have recently written for The Atlantic, but his nomination
should not come as a surprise—especially for people whose entire business
proposition is being highly paid to advise clients on how Washington actually
works. (The influence peddlers reportedly hope that senators will block
Kennedy. The fact that they’re still waiting for someone else to solve their
problems is further evidence of how little they’ve learned, years into the
Trump era.)
Meanwhile, the New York Post, a key pillar of
Rupert Murdoch’s right-wing media juggernaut, is similarly jittery about the
Kennedy choice. Back when Kennedy was a thorn in President Joe Biden’s side,
threatening to run against him in the Democratic primary, the Post’s
editorial board was
all too happy to elevate him. Now the board condemns
his nomination and tells us that it came out of a meeting with him last year
“thinking he’s nuts on a lot of fronts.” The columnist Michael Godwin,
who beamed on November 9 that Trump’s
victory “offers the promise of progress on so many fronts that it already
feels like Morning in America again,” was back a week later to complain
that “it’s not a close call to say” that Kennedy and Matt Gaetz, Trump’s pick
for attorney general, are “unfit” for the roles.
The lobbyists and editorialists are in good company, or
at least in some sort of company. On Capitol Hill, Republican senators
say they are shocked by many of Trump’s Cabinet picks. Senator Susan Collins of
Maine, who notoriously professed
surprise when Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh voted to overturn Roe
v. Wade, is “shocked”
at the Gaetz nomination. Gaetz’s House Republican colleagues are “stunned
and disgusted.”
Reactions to Pete Hegseth’s nomination as secretary of
defense are less vitriolic, if no less baffled. “Wow,” Senator Lisa Murkowski
of Alaska told
NBC. “I’m just surprised, because the names that I’ve heard for secretary
of defense have not included him.” Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana was even
blunter. “Who?” he said. “I just don’t know anything about him.”
If this is true, the senators could perhaps do with some
better staff work. Hegseth was a real
possibility to lead the Department of Veterans Affairs in the first Trump
administration; more to the point, he was a prominent figure on Fox News, which
is a dominant force in the Republican Party, from whose ranks Trump has
repeatedly drawn appointees.
Staffers at the affected agencies have also expressed
shock and horror at the prospect of an Attorney General Gaetz, a Defense
Secretary Hegseth, or a Director
of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard.
Ordinary Americans may also be taken aback. As I reported
last month, Trump critics were concerned about a “believability
gap,” in which voters opposed some of Trump’s big policy ideas, sometimes
quite strongly, but just didn’t trust that he would really do those things.
Although they perhaps deserve more grace than the Republican officials and
power brokers who are astonished, they also had ample warning about who Trump
is and how he’d govern.
Throughout his presidential campaign, Trump vowed to
deport undocumented immigrants en masse. He’s appointing officials such as Stephen
Miller and Tom Homan who are committed to that, and yesterday morning,
Trump confirmed
on Truth Social a report that he would declare a national emergency and use the
military to conduct mass deportations. And yet, when the roundups start in
January, many people are somehow going to be taken by surprise.
No comments:
Post a Comment