RFK Jr.'s revenge: Trump's controversial health secretary pick is payback for COVID

Well, President-elect Donald Trump certainly is off to a roaring start, isn't he? Ensconced at his Mar-a-Lago beach club with the richest man in the world glued to his side every moment, he's busy getting a whole new band together for his second term. Aside from his choice of Florida Sen. Marco Rubio for Secretary of State, this time there's nary an establishment figure anywhere to be seen as he chooses his new Cabinet and White House staff. Trump is going directly to the lifeblood of MAGA and picking the most controversial, lib-triggering extremists he can find.

I mentioned his first group of nominees earlier this week, none of whom have anything to particularly qualify them for these jobs but who at least have some government experience behind them. The choice of Fox News celebrity Pete Hegseth for Secretary of Defense was the first inkling that this was about to go seriously off the rails.

Hegseth has no experience running anything and has no government experience beyond serving as a National Guard officer in Iraq and Afghanistan and a prison guard at Guantanamo prison. From his perch as a talking head on Fox News, he was able to convince former president Trump to pardon war criminals against the wishes of the Pentagon, so he does have that going for him. And aside from the fact that Trump chose him because he "has the look," as Salon's Amanda Marcotte reported, he is a fierce critic of the military brass and suggests that at least a third of the 800 general and flag officers are "complicit" in the "politicization" of the military. He claims he will clean house and that's what Trump has hired him for.

Hegseth's startling choice was soon overshadowed by the absolutely shocking announcements naming former Hawaii representative Tulsi Gabbard as the Director of National Intelligence and (now former) Florida congressman Matt Gaetz as Attorney General. I would guess that most of America either gasped or laughed when they heard. I suspect that only picking Georgia firebrand Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene for Surgeon General would have been more stupefying.

Gabbard never served on any of the intelligence committees during her eight years in Congress and has no relevant outside experience. Her claim to fame is as a Democratic apostate with very bizarre foreign policy ideas, including a soft spot for Syrian strongman (and Russian ally) Bashar al-Assad, with whom she personally met, and Russian President Vladimir Putin. She claims that America wants to destroy Russia and provoked it into invading Ukraine in order to impose draconian sanctions on the country. She has put forward Russian propaganda so often that the country's state media even calls her "our girlfriend." She also grew up in and remains a member of a cult called the Science of Identity Foundation whose leader is heralded by members as a deity in his own right.

Gabbard and Trump share a weird affection for Vladimir Putin but they also share a belief that they are being persecuted by the U.S. Intelligence community, which Gabbard claims has put her on a secret domestic terrorist watch list which no one can confirm.

And then there's Matt Gaetz. Apparently, he wasn't on anyone's shortlist but was on Trump's plane this week and they had a chat after which Trump concluded that he wanted the Florida congressman for Attorney General. He is totally unqualified for the job. He barely ever practiced law and spent his entire time in Congress as a political gadfly. He did defend Trump on television and he and Trump share an antipathy for the Justice Department having both been criminally investigated. Both men remain bitter and vengeful about that, which is undoubtedly the main reason Trump believes that Gaetz will be a perfect Attorney General. A Trump adviser told Marc Caputo at the Bulwark:

“None of the attorneys had what Trump wants, and they didn’t talk like Gaetz,” the adviser said. “Everyone else looked at AG as if they were applying for a judicial appointment. They talked about their vaunted legal theories and constitutional bullshit. Gaetz was the only one who said, ‘yeah, I’ll go over there and start cuttin’ fuckin’ heads.’

This nomination isn't some four-dimensional chess as some are suggesting. Trump wants Gaetz confirmed and there's no reason to think he won't get that done.

Just when you thought it couldn't get any worse, on Thursday Trump announced that he had chosen Robert F. Kennedy Jr for Secretary of Health and Human Services. He is a conspiracy theorist who claims he had a worm in his brain and admits to picking up a dead bear on the side of the road and dumping it in Central Park for a laugh.

David Corn at Mother Jones did a deep dive into RFK Jr.'s twisted reality and reported that he once told Trumpy podcasters Joe Rogan and Theo Von that "a global elite led by the CIA had been planning for years to use a pandemic to end democracy and impose totalitarian control on the entire world." He also said “Covid-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese" which is such utter nonsense it makes my head hurt to read it. And that's just the tip of the iceberg.

Kennedy has done some real harm already. He's closely linked to a measles outbreak that led to the deaths of more than 80 people in Samoa, most of them children, with his fearmongering about vaccines:

It is mind-boggling that such a person could be put in charge of the vast US government health care agencies. But all signs say that's exactly what's going to happen because the Republican Senate is composed of MAGA cultists and/or inveterate cowards who are going to try to blame the Democrats for making the confirmations difficult so they can say they have no choice but to allow Trump to give them all recess appointments.

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It seems clear that the only way these people will not be appointed is if Trump changes his mind and withdraws the nomination. And he has no reason to do it. Trump will never have to run for president again and, in his mind, his legacy is secure as the greatest president, maybe the greatest human, who ever lived. If he feels like rewarding people who supported him, he can do that — but it's purely at his discretion and he is not a generous person. Unless someone has something on him that's so devastating that it will destroy him, he is completely without restraint. He's already a convicted felon, a fraudster, a sexual assaulter, a proven pathological liar who stole classified documents and refused to give them back so it's hard to imagine what that might be. At this point, Donald Trump believes he is invincible.

And what that means is that he no longer has anything to lose and there are only two things he really cares about. It's not taxes or tariffs and it's not even mass deportation. Sure, he'll do those things if he can but they were mostly arguments for getting elected so he'll leave that in the hands of his henchmen and take credit for whatever they manage to do. What he really cares about is money and revenge, the same things he's always cared about.

He's worth billions and he's got the richest man in the world opening up his checkbook. He can now concentrate on what really makes him happy — vengeance. That's what he's hiring these crackpots to do for him. He wants payback against the DOJ for all the investigations, the military brass for refusing to abandon their oaths when he wanted them to, the intelligence community for saying the Russians were helping him, and the scientists and health professionals who exposed his lies during the pandemic. They all made him look stupid and he won't rest until they pay for it.

The following quote is making the rounds on social media in light of these absurd Cabinet nominations:

“Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.” - Hannah Arendt in “The Origins of Totalitarianism”

I don't think I expected totalitarianism to come in service of one very petty narcissist's wounded ego but it appears that that's what's happening. And right now there doesn't seem to be any will to stop it.