MAGA Shock & Awe and the United States Senate
If you were a president-elect, and if your fondest ambition were to be like Orban or Putin, a high priority would be control of the power agencies: the Justice Department, the FBI, and the military. You would select three plausible appointees as Attorney General, FBI chief, and Secretary of Defense—people whose backgrounds would make it hard for a Republican senator to oppose. These choices would be evil, but highly intelligent. You would conspire with these three picks, getting them to commit to your authoritarian goals, but promising to conceal their goals until it’s too late to stop them. These people would not be Matt Gaetz or Kash Patel or Pete Hegseth.
Now, I have long since concluded that trying to read the mind of the Orange God King is a fool’s errand. And, by the way, I am no fool, and neither are you.
But, reflecting on Mango Jesus’s deeds (not his thoughts), I can say this. He has acted as if his fondest desire was to spit on our country’s main institutions of law and order, to order the 53 Republican senators to eat a meal of shit sandwiches, and to force them all to say—to make every mother’s son and daughter of them say—”Thank you, SIR. May we please have some more, SIR?”
And how did Lizard Brain try to bring this about? Well, you will remember that he first demanded—DEMANDED—that the Republican senators agree not to exercise their constitutional duty and right to advise and consent to presidential appointments.
Whoops! That didn’t work.
Then he tried to force Matt Gaetz down their throats as the new Attorney General.
Whoops! That didn’t work, either, so he picked someone else. (A few posts from now, we’ll get to Pam Bondi. I promise you.)
Then he served up an inexperienced, dishonest, drunken lout, Pete Hegseth, as his choice for Defense Secretary.
Then, when that selection ran into Republican opposition, he talked about replacing Hegseth with a more palatable choice.
Then someone realized that, with repeated Shock & Awe stunts going pear shaped, Trump was in imminent danger of getting a reputation as an incompetent old fool.
Then the folks around Trump began leaking that, while Hegseth’s nomination might be in deep doodoo, it was all a very clever ploy to use the nominee as a “heatshield,” to take attention away from the ghastliness of other nominees like Tulsi Gabbard, Kash Patel and RFK Jr. (See, e.g., Mark Caputo, Hegseth Brings His Nomination Back from the Brink.)
Friends and neighbors, if you think Trump and his henchpersons are playing three-dimensional chess, then please let me know, because I have a fine, fine bridge in Brooklyn that I can let you have at a cheap price.
And What Will the 53 Republican Senators Do About the Shock & Awe Bullshit Nominees?
Three points. First: I don’t know what they’re going to do, and I won’t try to predict what they are going to do. Second: One can always hope, but I have zero expectation that their decisions will be based on patriotism, principle, and reason. Third point: All that said, the most reliable means of predicting human behavior is careful analysis of motivation and incentive. Accordingly, I strongly recommend
Martin names ten of them: McConnell, Collins, Cassidy, Tillis, Ernst, Murkowski, Grrassley, Young, Moran, and the yet-to-be-named (by Governor Mike DeWine) person from Ohio to replace J.D. Vance, and he takes a careful look at each of them—their individual situations, their likely motivations, and their incentives. See also
In Sum
There will be 53 Republican senators in the next Congress. To Trump’s absurd nominees, one may expect at least 43 of them to say, “SIR, thank you for the shit sandwich, SIR. SIR, may I please have another one, SIR.”
But, for Trump, 43 will not be enough. He needs 50 (so that Vice President Vance can break the tie).
How many will he get?
Que sera sera.
Posted by Ron Davis, Dec. 7, 2024
Facing MAGA 