A Lesson for Trump 47?

An early blunder will turn into a boon, if the President-Elect will learn from it.

We have had no end of a lesson./ It will do us no end of good. – Rudyard Kipling, commenting on British fiascos in the Boer War

While I don’t by any means qualify as a fan of Donald John Trump, he will soon be President again, and our country will be better off if his Presidency is a success. His first term went well for three years, until he was sucked under by the Covid quagmire. This time around, he will step directly into quagmires from horizon to horizon, ranging from a highly likely longshoremen’s strike that will close the East and Gulf Coast ports less than a week before his inauguration to wars in Ukraine and the Middle East. “Hit the ground running” is a cliché, but there have been few better occasions to intone it.

Last week, the President-Elect offered a proposal that I assumed – naively, it now seems – was aimed at smoothing the running track. Senate confirmation of key appointees has become bogged down, even when the President’s party has a Senate majority. Trump’s idea seemed ingenious: Let the Cabinet nominees start work, via recess appointments, while the Senate debates their merits. I outlined what seemed to me to be obvious conditions for ensuring that this extraordinary remedy wouldn’t circumvent the Senate’s authority to “advise and consent”. Trump hadn’t spelled out any conditions, but he doesn’t have a taste for dealing with details. Those would be worked out in a mutually satisfactory way between his aides and the Senate majority leader, who certainly would not give away his chamber’s Constitutional role.

At the time when I posted my thoughts, the Trump 47 Cabinet looked like it would be put together the same way as Trump 45’s, drawing from the ranks of experienced, respected Republican conservatives, almost all of whom would be confirmed without any controversy save for reflexive howls from the far left bleachers.

Trump floated his new concept just before the GOP Senators chose their next leader. The three contenders proffered vaguely worded endorsements. Fire and brimstone erupted from Trump skeptics. That was to be expected. I imagined that, once the flesh was put on its bones, the creature would frighten only the sort of people who can’t let go of the “Trump is Hitler” meme.

Then came the nominations of Matt Gaetz, Tulsi Gabbard and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., which rendered it reasonable to conclude that the purpose of the recess appointment proposal was not to give well-qualified nominees a head start in doing their jobs but to sidestep the need for Senate approval of some who were less, let us say, conventional, namely, an attorney general candidate who last practiced law almost 15 years ago, has never held a management position (which is what the AG-ship primarily is) and has a few other strikes against him that cannot be expatiated in a family friendly blog, a director of national intelligence candidate who disagrees with the entire foreign policy of the Trump 45 Administration, and a Health and Human Services candidate who lambasted Trump 45’s warp speed drive to formulate a Covid vaccine, has advocated silencing dissenters who question “climate change” propaganda, supports abortion on demand and thinks that overseeing Americans’ diets is a proper task for the federal government.

Those personnel choices were so strange as to seem almost irrational, yet a method lies behind them. Each nominee appeases a particular pro-Trump constituency. The trio are performers in a balancing act, reminiscent of President Franklin Pierce’s attempt to construct a Cabinet that incorporated all of the sectional and ideological factions in the divided Democratic Party of 1852.

• Matt Gaetz represents the advocates of doing unto others as they did unto you. One can easily envision his finding his own Jack Smith to contrive criminal cases against, for instance, Jack Smith and his principal, Merrick Garland, and also against Alvin Bragg and Letitia James and even the hapless Fani Willis.

• Tulsi Gabbard is the face and voice of the decriers of “forever wars”, who would abandon Ukraine and whose logic would lead to withdrawing support from Israel and Taiwan. She is, indeed, on the far left fringe of that faction, as dovish toward the Iranian mullarchy as she is toward Tsar Vladimir.

• Robert Kennedy, Jr. expresses suspicion of the medical establishment, whose reputation was tarnished, not wholly unjustly, by the Covid policies of the Trump 45 and Biden Administrations.

In each case, the nominee’s faction will face strong opposition within the Trump Administration itself.

After seeing the devastation wrought by the Biden DOJ’s lawfare campaigns, many conservatives look forward to a return to the status quo ante, to the time – not that long ago – when “Show me the man, and I will show you the law” was not the reigning principle at the Justice Department.

The next attorney general will have the opportunity to restore equality before the law for friend and foe alike, if he wants to. Lawfare was Merrick Garland’s top-down decision. It wasn’t the demand of woke subordinates; the Department of Justice is not the New York Times. It is significant, I think, that AG Garland’s response to the dismissal of the classified documents case against Donald Trump, on the ground that Jack Smith could bring a prosecution only if he acted under Justice Department control rather than as a putative independent counsel, was to appeal the ruling rather than take the simple step of placing Smith under the supervision of the local U.S. Attorney. The AG evidently didn’t trust regular DOJ lawyers to continue the case with the Javert-like vigor that he desired.

What the Department of Justice needs is a leader with the legal skills and prestige to put it back on course. Matt Gaetz is not that man. He is likewise almost certain to fail if he tries to turn lawfare against Democratic targets. Not only will the career lawyers be unenthusiastic, but the originalist and textualist judiciary put in place by Trump 45 will hinder retribution against his tormentors.

Let us turn to Tulsi Gabbard. Despite what the title seems to connote, the Director of National Intelligence doesn’t direct anything. The position’s function is to aggregate and summarize for the President conclusions reached by the CIA, the DIA and the other agencies that comprise the “intelligence community”, none of which reports to the DNI. Should DNI Gabbard massage their views rather than convey them accurately, they will have ample routes to circumvent her. I doubt that she will be confirmed. If she is, I predict a short and tempestuous tenure before she resigns and moves on to her natural home in the Green Party.

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is so far out of step with the rest of the prospective Trump Administration that discussion is otiose.

Giving voices to all parts of a diverse political coalition is a wise idea. Internecine war within a Presidency isn’t.

If I believed in The Donald’s alleged genius at 4-D chess, I would suspect that he intends for Gaetz, Gabbard and Kennedy to be rejected by the Senate and has floated the recess appointment work-around so that he can say to their supporters that he did everything he could in their behalf. The RINOs’ refusal to go along with a scheme for circumventing Senate confirmation isn’t his fault.

Whatever motives underlie these strange appointments, Trump 47 will be fortunate if they (motives and appointments both) disappear quickly, leaving behind only a lesson for the Presidency-to-be.