The Curtain has been pulled back.

Heather Cox Richardson

Today, former Florida representative Matt Gaetz withdrew his name from consideration for the office of attorney general. He did so shortly after CNN told him that they were going to report that the House Ethics Committee had been told there were witnesses to yet another sexual encounter between Gaetz and a minor in 2017. There was already evidence that he had sent more than $10,000 to two women who later testified in sexual misconduct investigations. The notes explaining the payments said things like: “Love you,” “Being my friend,” “Being awesome,’ and “flight + extra 4 u.”?

Trump transition spokesperson Alex Pfeiffer told Will Steakin of ABC News that discussions of Gaetz’s payments “are meant to undermine the mandate from the people to reform the Justice Department.”?

Gaetz’s withdrawal turns attention to Trump’s pick for secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth. As host of the weekend edition of Fox & Friends, Hegseth has no relevant experience to run a crucial United States government department, let alone one that oversees close to 3 million personnel and a budget of more than $800 billion.?

According to Heath Druzin of the Idaho Capital Sun, Hegseth has close ties to an Idaho Christian nationalist church that wants to turn the United States into a theocracy.?

Jonathan Chait of The Atlantic did a deep dive into Hegseth’s recent books and concluded that Hegseth “considers himself to be at war with basically everybody to Trump’s left, and it is by no means clear that he means war metaphorically.” Hegseth’s books suggest he thinks that everything that does not support the MAGA worldview is “Marxist,” including voters choosing Democrats at the voting booth. He calls for the “categorical defeat of the Left” and says that without its “utter annihilation,” “America cannot, and will not, survive.”?

Like Gaetz, Hegseth is facing stories about sexual assault. Yesterday, officials in Monterey, California, released a police report detailing a 2017 sexual assault complaint against Hegseth. The report recounts chilling details of a drunk Hegseth blocking a California woman from leaving a hotel room and then sexually assaulting her. A nurse reported the alleged assault after the woman underwent a rape exam. Hegseth says the encounter was consensual, but he paid the woman a settlement in exchange for a nondisclosure agreement. He was never charged.

Trump’s pick for secretary of education, Linda McMahon, is also short on experience in the field of the department she has been tapped to oversee. She once incorrectly claimed to have a bachelor’s degree in education when she was trying to get a seat on the Connecticut Board of Education and is known primarily for her work building World Wrestling Entertainment. And she, too, has been entangled in a sex abuse scandal. In October, five men filed a lawsuit claiming that she and her husband, Vince McMahon, were aware that former ringside announcer Melvin Phillips was assaulting “ring boys” who were as young as 13.

A spokesperson for the Trump transition said of McMahon’s misrepresented credentials: “These types of politically motivated attacks are the new normal for nominees ready to enact President Trump’s mandate for common sense that an overwhelming majority of Americans supported two weeks ago.”

But Trump’s pick for director of national intelligence makes McMahon look like a prize. As military scholar Tom Nichols points out in The Atlantic, former representative TulsI Gabbard is “stunningly unqualified” to oversee all of America’s intelligence services, including the Central Intelligence Agency. Nichols notes that her constant parroting of Russian talking points and her cozying up to Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad make her “a walking Christmas tree of warning lights” for our national security.??

Former Republican governor of South Carolina Nikki Haley suggested that Gabbard is “a Russian, Iranian, Syrian, Chinese sympathizer” who has no place at the head of American intelligence. A Russian state media presenter refers to Gabbard as “our girlfriend” and as a Russian agent.

And then there is Trump’s tapping of Robert Kennedy Jr. to head the Department of Health and Human Services. Kennedy has no training in medicine or public health and, in addition to being a prominent critic of the vaccines that have dramatically curtailed disease and death in the U.S., is an outspoken critic of the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the National Institutes of Health.

There are a number of ways to think about Trump’s appointments. The people he has picked ?have so little experience in the fields their departments handle that Erin Burnett of CNN suggested that he is simply choosing them from “central casting”—a favorite phrase of his—to look as he imagines such officials should. Indeed, as Zachary B. Wolf of CNN pointed out, while President Joe Biden vowed to make his Cabinet look like America, Trump’s picks look “exactly like Fox News.” Trump has actually tapped a number of television hosts for different positions.?

That so many of his appointees have histories of sexual misconduct is also striking, and underlines both that they share his determination to dominate others and that they do not think rules and laws apply to them.?

But there is another pattern at work, as well. In a piece he published on November 15 in his “Thinking about…” newsletter, scholar of authoritarianism Timothy Snyder explained that destroying a country requires undermining five key zones: “health, law, administration, defense, and intelligence.” The nominations of Kennedy, Gaetz, Hegseth, and Gabbard, as well as the tapping of billionaires Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to run the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, to destroy the administration of the government, are, according to Snyder, a “decapitation strike.”?

“Imagine that you are a foreign leader who wishes to destroy the United States,” Snyder writes. “How could you do so? The easiest way would be to get Americans to do the work themselves, to somehow induce Americans to undo their own health, law, administration, defense, and intelligence. From this perspective,” he explains, “Trump's proposed appointments—Kennedy, Jr.; Gaetz; Musk; Ramaswamy; Hegseth; Gabbard—are perfect instruments.? They combine narcissism, incompetence, corruption, sexual incontinence, personal vulnerability, dangerous convictions, and foreign influence as no group before them has done.”

But that destruction of the United States is so far still aspirational. The constant references to Trump’s supposed “mandate” are misleading. He did not win 50% of the vote, meaning that more voters chose someone other than Trump in the 2024 election than voted for him, and even many of his voters appear to have misunderstood his policies.?

According to Jonathan Karl of ABC News, Trump’s loyalists have tried to shore up support for his nominees in the Senate by threatening the Republican senators: "If you are on the wrong side of the vote, you’re buying yourself a primary. That is all. And there’s a guy named Elon Musk who is going to finance it.”?

That threat is a direct assault on the Constitution, which gives to the Senate the power to advise the president on senior appointments and requires their consent to a president’s choices, and one that also hands the U.S. government over to an international billionaire. Forcing a leader’s political party to get into line behind that leader is the first task of an authoritarian, who needs that unified support in order to attack political opponents.?

But, so far, the threat hasn’t worked: it could not save Gaetz in the face of public outcry.?

Almost as soon as Gaetz withdrew his name, Trump presented former Florida attorney general Pam Bondi as his replacement for the attorney general post. In March 2016, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) found that the Trump Foundation illegally donated $25,000 to support Bondi at a time when she was considering joining a lawsuit against Trump University. Her office ultimately decided not to join the lawsuit.?

Bondi defended Trump in his first impeachment trial, during which she was a frequent guest on the Fox News Channel. She supported Trump’s campaign to insist—falsely—that he won the 2020 presidential election. She is also a registered lobbyist for Qatar.?

Meanwhile, Republican perceptions of the economy have changed abruptly. As Philip Bump of the Washington Post notes, since Trump’s election, there’s been a 16-point drop in the percentage of Republicans who say they were doing worse a year ago than they are now.?

While that change is due to Trump’s election, in fact Biden’s policies continue to deliver. White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters today that for the second year in a row, the average price of a Thanksgiving dinner has fallen. According to the American Farm Bureau, that price fell 5% this year, with the cost of turkey down 6%. Gasoline to travel for the holiday is also down to its lowest point in more than three years, by about 25 cents per gallon since this time last year, falling to below $3.00 a gallon in almost 30 states.?

Tonight, Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo suggested that Americans should keep scorecards of the country’s economic numbers, “charting where inflation, unemployment and GDP were at the end of Biden’s term and regularly updating it with Trump’s latest numbers.” He noted that “the country is now covered with embryonic factories, businesses, economic redevelopment projects and more courtesy of Joe Biden’s CHIPS act and the Inflation Reduction Act,” and predicted that Trump will claim credit for all Biden accomplished.?

Keeping track would help preserve those projects in the face of threatened Republican cuts and at the same time prevent Trump from being able to claim more credit for his administration than it has earned.?

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