Trump's clown car cabinet
It'd be comical if it wasn't horrifying.
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By Lisa Needham
During a get out the vote call Monday, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. disclosed that “President Trump has promised me control of the public health agencies,” including the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Kennedy also said Trump plans to put him in charge of the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA).
Trump has more of less confirmed this publicly. During his don’t-call-it-a-Nazi rally last Sunday at Madison Square Garden, Trump declared he would let RFK Jr. “go wild on health. I’m going to let him go wild on the food. I’m going to let him go wild on medicines.” (Watch below.)
RFK Jr. having so much power is a horrifying thought, as he touches all the bases when it comes to full-fledged conspiracy-mongering. Besides his anti-vax stance, he believes that 5G phone networks are being used for mass surveillance, that wifi causes chronic illness, that chemicals in drinking water are turning people trans, and that school shootings are increasing because kids take antidepressants. The guy shouldn’t be in charge of a local 7-Eleven, let alone running an array of powerful federal agencies regulating public health and medicine.
But Kennedy is far from the only freak show Trump plans to empower in his second term.
Thanks to a leaked Trump transition planning document, everyone is now aware of the entirely depressing and predictable possibility that Judge Aileen Cannon might be Trump’s next attorney general.
And why not? Cannon gave Trump an incredible pre-election gift by slow-walking his classified document case and then throwing it out entirely back in July. She’s proven her worth and usefulness to Trump, exhibiting exactly the kind of moral flexibility required to serve in his cabinet.
Given Cannon’s eagerness to toss the classified document case, there’s really no question that she’d promptly ensure the rest of the federal charges against Trump disappear. And Trump’s threat to fire Special Prosecutor Jack Smith, which has now morphed into Trump threatening to throw Smith out of the country, certainly wouldn’t be met with any opposition from Cannon, given that she ruled that he was improperly appointed.
It’s grim to imagine a Department of Justice under Cannon. Trump is literally campaigning on the idea of weaponizing the DOJ to attack his political enemies. To do that, he’ll need to install loyalists, purging the department of anyone unwilling to do whatever he wants. He’d also need to rearrange leadership staff so that his handpicked henchmen have authority over critical decisions. So, expect Trump to name people like Gene Hamilton, who served in his Justice Department. Hamilton wants to eliminate the FBI’s general counsel, in large part because Republicans are mad that the FBI had the audacity to investigate Trump’s ties to Russia.
A note from Aaron: If you missed it last night, I put together a thread covering the entirety of Kamala Harris “closing argument” speech from the Ellipse in DC. You can check it out here if you still have an X account or here if you don’t.
If Cannon doesn’t get the nod, other options might be even worse. The leaked transition document showed that Trump is also considering Jeffrey Clark, Mike Davis, and Mark Paoletta. Clark, of course, is the former DOJ official who is facing disbarment in Washington DC and criminal charges in Georgia over his role in the Trump’s coup attempt. Davis is a former clerk for Neil Gorsuch, who now spends the bulk of his time being a weird MAGA troll on social media. Paoletta is the author of an embarrassing gauzy soft-focus book about how great Clarence Thomas is and represented Ginni Thomas in her quest to avoid providing testimony to the January 6 committee.
As terrible as it is to contemplate RFK Jr. in charge of public health or Cannon turning the DOJ in into Trump’s personal attack dog, his other likely cabinet picks aren’t really any better.
No adults in the room
Along with Bobby Kennedy, Trump is floating the name of another former faux-Democrat, Tulsi Gabbard.
Gabbard, who recently confirmed what everyone already knew — that she’s a Republican — is currently on the campaign trail stumping for Trump. According to Gabbard, Vice President Kamala Harris is the reason we are all “staring down the barrel of nuclear Armageddon” because she instigated the war in Ukraine. This requires, of course, ignoring the fact that Russia started it openly and brazenly, but Gabbard has been a Putin fan for years now. Gabbard has said she wants a role in foreign policy in the Trump administration. Just what the foreign policy world needs: a backer of murderous Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad and brutal authoritarian General Abdel Fattah el Sisi in Egypt.
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There’s one department where it really doesn’t matter who Trump picks, because that person will be in charge of destroying it forever. Trump has declared he would eliminate the Department of Education, a Republican fixation dating all the way back to the Reagan era. The GOP hates the Department of Education both because it is often a bastion of civil rights protections for students and because they really want to shift money from public schools to private, preferably religious schools. Trump currently thinks failed 2024 candidate Vivek Ramaswamy and former GOP Rep. Lee Zeldin would be dandy choices to dismantle the department. Neither Ramaswamy nor Zeldin have any background in education, but that’s probably not necessary if all you’re there to do is wreck the place.
Linda McMahon, wife of the former head of WWE, Vince McMahon, is being floated as a possibility for Commerce Secretary. McMahon ran the Small Business Administration in Trump’s last term. You’d think a party so ostensibly concerned with the sexual abuse of minors might not be pushing for someone who is currently facing, along with her husband, a lawsuit for allegedly allowing a former WWE announcer to sexually abuse children, but you’d be wrong.
Of course, it’s impossible to talk about a possible Trump cabinet without mentioning the billionaire elephant in the room, Elon Musk. Trump wants Musk to head a currently nonexistent entity, the Department of Government Efficiency. At Trump’s racist jamboree at Madison Square Garden, Musk showed up to say that he will save the government $2 trillion (Watch below.)
Don’t fret though — Trump told Sean Hannity last night that he’s confident “nobody is gonna feel it” when Musk lops off nearly one-third of the federal budget. (Watch below.)
Musk, by contrast, expects there to be some pain. He said during a telephone town hall last week that Trump’s election will bring “temporary hardship.”
No one will be surprised to learn that Musk has no real details about how he will oversee such draconian budget cutting, which is par for the course for someone who has been promising full self-driving cars for a decade but still hasn’t delivered and has an ever-shifting timeline for his colonization of Mars, though apparently colonization of the red planet can only happen if Trump wins.
One name that’s not being floated as a cabinet member is Stephen Miller. Miller has made a post-Trump career out of being an absolute ghoul who sues everyone to make sure that any diversity whatsoever is eradicated. He was also a big Project 2025 backer until Trump decided he didn’t like Project 2025 any longer. But unless the GOP takes the Senate with a healthy margin, it’s unlikely Miller could get confirmed. That doesn’t really matter though, as Trump can just stuff him in as a White House adviser again.
There’s a distinct possibility that Steve Bannon would return to a White House role as well. He got out of prison earlier this week after a four-month stint where he, absurdly, taught other incarcerated people about civics.
All of these people are bad, a wretched combination of greed and hatred. However, they’re all excellent at being sycophantic fans of Trump, and that’s what he truly wants. It would be terrific for him and horrifying for the rest of us.
Can American democracy survive a full-scale assault?
By Aaron Rupar
Tomorrow, I’ll be joined here on Substack by David Nir, founder of The Downballot, for a live conversation at 3pm ET to discuss whether America’s institutions are robust enough to withstand what's coming next.
In the run-up to November, the Substack Election Dialogues are bringing together influential political figures, writers, and commentators for live video conversations on some the most consequential questions of the political moment.
So tomorrow you’ll get to watch David and me in live conversation and even send us questions to answer. To participate, you’ll need to download the Substack app, so go ahead and do that now so you’ll be able to join the conversation. This event is open for ALL subscribers.
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See you for the live conversation.
That’s it for today
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Best Public Notice edition title ever! I visualized it immediately, choking on my coffee. ☕️😂
Kamala’s speed team should run an ad on Fox news in rural communities highlighting the danger of RFK jr in those roles to farmers. No chemicals in food? That horse left the barn a long time ago