If there’s one thing that should be uncontroversial to observe about Donald Trump’s spectacular political comeback from humiliation and perdition following his ferocious reluctance to accept defeat in the 2020 presidential election, it’s that no matter what happens over the next few weeks, months and years, the American political scene is already exceedingly entertaining — in a macabre sort of way.
We might as well laugh while we still can. With the bumbling, scandal-riddled and unpopular Trudeau government hanging on after nine years in power, Canadians have nothing to crow about. But Canada doesn’t matter in the world. The United States matters, and the incoming, inward-turning Trump has given every possible signal that he will do nothing to stand in the way of the United Nations’ torture-state bloc continuing its steamrolling, 17-year advance across the face of the earth.
So it’s grim, but for now at least, it’s amusing. Apart from the hilarious excuses the Democrats have been making for themselves for having been shellacked by Trump’s Republicans in the House, Senate and White House races — it’s because American voters are misogynists, racists, xenophobes and so on, they say — there’s a strong carnival sideshow vibe coming from the slew of cabinet picks Trump has been rolling out over the past few days.
It’s exactly what you would expect from a real-estate hustler from Queens, whose meteoric political ascendancy only a decade ago from within the liberal-dominated American celebrity firmament was launched from his cartoonish status as a WrestleMania host, reality-television star and tycoon endorser of such brands as Pizza Hut, Pepsi and Oreo.
In all his cameo appearances in such television shows as the “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air,” “The Nanny” and “Sex and the City,” and movies like “Two Weeks Notice,” “Home Alone 2” and “Zoolander,” Trump was pleased to play a buffoonish caricature of himself. In the appointments he’s been rolling out over the past week, Trump is still “in character,” so to speak.
You don’t need to be afflicted with “Trump derangement syndrome” to simply notice this, and you don’t need to rely on the histrionics of teary-eyed late night talk-show funnymen to pick up on the astonishment and dismay that’s accompanied Trump’s bizarre cabinet choices. Several senior Republicans are suitably aghast.
Notable among Trump’s picks: the conspiracy-theorist, vaccine-obsessive Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as health secretary, the dangerously weird Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence and the obnoxious Florida frat boy former congressman Matt Gaetz as attorney general. By resigning from the House in anticipation of taking up his new job, Gaetz managed to dodge an ethics committee probe into allegations that he has been engaged in such sordid pastimes as sex trafficking, wild drug parties and the exploitation of minors.
Gaetz can count sober Republican senators and nouveau-right libertarians among his detractors. Former Federalist magazine publisher and current Fox News contributor Ben Domenech calls Gaetz a “sex trafficking drug addled lying philandering piece of s–t,” noting that, “He is abhorrent. His eyes are permanently rimmed with the red rings of chemical boosters. In person, he smells like overexposed Axe Body Spray and stale Astroglide.… The man has less principles than your average fentanyl addicted hobo.”
Before Kennedy abandoned his own quixotic presidential bid in August in order to throw himself at Trump’s feet, the American news media was already having its hilarious way with him. There was the bit about him decapitating a dead whale and his use of its skull as a kind of hood ornament on his minivan. There was the story about him dumping a dead bear in New York’s Central Park as some sort of a prank. Then there was his boast about having a freezer full of roadkill. The story about him eating a dog in Thailand, however, appears to be false.
Far more disturbing than any of that, and quite apart from his reputation as a womanizer and serial philanderer, RFK Jr. is one of the best-known traffickers in the conspiracy theory that the 1963 assassination of his uncle, President John F. Kennedy, was the fruition of a plot carried out by the Central Intelligence Agency. He’s gone so far as to suggest that there’s something suspicious about the assassination his own father, Robert F. Kennedy, in 1968.
Among his more outlandish claims: the COVID-19 virus is a Chinese bio-weapon that targets Caucasians and Black people but oddly tends to spare Chinese people and Ashkenazi Jews; and the United States is spending hundreds of millions of dollars on a network of bio-weapon laboratories in Ukraine to collect Chinese and Russian DNA so “we can target people by race.”
The fictional network of U.S.-funded Ukrainian bio-weapon laboratories, the function of a Moscow-orchestrated disinformation project, has been picked up by Gabbard, as well. The day Russia began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Gabbard said it was all NATO’s fault. In Moscow, Gabbard is known as “Russia’s girlfriend.”
Presented as a telegenic and impeccably diverse young American-Samoan Hindu from Hawaii, Gabbard emerged about 20 years ago as a rising star in the Democratic party. After backing maverick Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders in 2016, she was briefly a contender for the Democratic presidential ticket in 2020.
While celebrated as the first person to swear a congressional oath on the Bhagavad Gita, it escaped notice that Gabbard was in fact raised in a cultish offshoot of the Hare Krishna sect called the Science of Identity Foundation, and one of her first political campaigns in Hawaii targeted what she called “homosexual extremists.”
The Science of Identity Foundation was established by the hippie surfer and yoga instructor Chris Butler, who took the name Siddhaswarupananda and began amassing followers in the early 1970s. Gabbard calls Butler her spiritual master.
A combat veteran, Gabbard has no experience in the field of national security or intelligence. She joined the Republican party only last month. If she’s confirmed by the Senate, Gabbard would be responsible for advising Trump on national security issues and co-ordinating the work of all 18 U.S intelligence agencies.
While she was a serving congresswoman, Gabbard paid a courtesy visit to Syrian dictator Bashar Assad in 2017 and returned to the U.S. encouraging Americans to be “skeptical” about Assad’s thoroughly documented use of poison gas to slaughter Syrian civilians. She described the mass uprising against the hated Assad regime as an American-orchestrated “regime-change war.”
Gabbard loudly protested the Trump administration’s 2020 targeted killing of the Iranian Quds Force commander Qasem Soleimani, the principal animateur of Hamas, Hezbollah, the Yemeni Houthis’ Ansar Allah terrorist group and Iraq’s Kata’ib Hezbollah. Soleimani’s death was widely celebrated by pro-democracy Iranian dissidents.
In announcing her nomination for the post of director of national intelligence, Trump said: “I know Tulsi will bring the fearless spirit that has defined her illustrious career to our intelligence community, championing our constitutional rights and securing peace through strength.” This will strike a reasonable person as a funny thing to say about her.
Then there’s Vivek Ramaswamy, who distinguished himself during his run for the Republican presidential ticket by suggesting the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrectionist violence carried out on Capitol Hill was “an inside job,” a conspiracy theory that relies on the proposition that the entire episode was fomented by undercover FBI agents acting as provocateurs in the crowds.
Trump has nominated Ramaswamy, along with billionaire Tesla, X and SpaceX owner Elon Musk, to head up a swamp-draining, bureaucracy-slashing “Department of Government Efficiency.” DOGE will be a federal department in name only. The acronym comes from Dogecoin, Musk’s favourite cryptocurrency.
To be fair, Trump’s cabinet picks are not all circus freaks and Bond villains.
Marco Rubio is a perfectly respectable and sensible Republican choice for secretary of state. If you want somebody to turn the $900-billion Defence Department inside out, appointing Fox News personality Pete Hegseth makes a certain kind of sense. The appointment of “border czar” Tom Homan to secure America’s borders and oversee “all deportation of illegal aliens back to their country of origin” is a serious bit of business, given the wreckage of the American immigration system, which is almost as broken as Canada’s.
Holman, the no-nonsense former acting head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, has identified the porous U.S.-Canada border as an “extreme national security vulnerability.” This can’t be called a conspiracy theory. U.S. Border Patrol agents nabbed 19,000 individuals from 97 different countries who were trying to sneak into the U.S. from Canada during the 12 months preceding Oct. 2, in just the Quebec and eastern Ontario border section. That’s as many border jumpers as were apprehended in that section in total between 2007 and 2023.
It’s a pleasant surprise for Ukrainians that Trump’s pick for national security advisor is the Congressman Mike Waltz, who has been sharply critical of the Biden administration for going easy on Ukraine’s erstwhile European allies and preventing Ukrainians from firing long-range missiles at launch sites and airfields deep inside Russia.
But Kennedy, Gaetz and Gabbard, just by themselves, are comedy gold, and things have become positively farcical in the unfinished legal business Trump has to contend with.
The proposed elevation of Gaetz to the attorney general’s post is widely understood to be consistent with Trump’s determination to avenge his prosecution on charges that he conspired to overturn the 2020 election that put Joe Biden in the White House. Gaetz himself has vowed to defund special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation into Trump’s election meddling, and has further pledged to go after Biden’s son Hunter, who is currently awaiting sentencing on tax fraud and gun charges.
The Florida federal case against Trump for allegedly holding onto classified documents after leaving the White House in January 2016 was dismissed by a U.S. District Court judge on the grounds that Smith’s appointment was illegal. This is where Trump’s nomination of Todd Blanche as deputy attorney general comes in.
Blanche was one of Trump’s criminal defence lawyers in his conviction on 34 felony counts related to “hush money” payments to a pornographic film star. Blanche later petitioned to have the conviction overturned, following the U.S. Supreme Court’s contentious decision on presidential immunity in July. In any case, it’s long-standing Justice Department policy that presidents cannot be prosecuted.
The courts have postponed the case now that Trump is the president-elect, and it isn’t clear that sentencing will occur at all. Funny how all that sorted itself out.
National Post