During the campaign, you may recall Donald Trump waxing on interminably during "the weave" about the time he watched Elon Musk's picture-perfect spacecraft landings. He would say, "Elon with his rocket ships that land within 12 inches on the moon where they want it to land..." Trump traveled to Texas yesterday with his best friend Musk to observe the latest Starship SpaceX test of one of those perfect landings. He and the rest of his entourage watched as the spacecraft aborted its second attempt to catch the returning booster at its launchpad and splashed into the Gulf of Mexico instead.
We're all hoping it's a metaphor for Trump's second administration: lots of hype but just can't stick the landing.
But for all the kooks Trump is appointing to some of the top jobs to accomplish his revenge agenda, there are some areas where he's stocking the administration with some people who are determined to fulfill their own.
It's certainly possible. Virtually none of the people the president-elect is choosing to lead the various departments have any qualifications for the jobs he's putting them into and little or no management experience of any kind. He's generally named people he's seen on TV, which I suppose makes sense since that was his only qualification for the presidency and in his mind he's the greatest leader the world has ever known. What other qualifications do you really need?
On Tuesday he even chose another reality show veteran, Fox Business host and former congressman Sean Duffy as Secretary of Transportation. Duffy was on MTV's "The Real World: Boston." Trump also tapped TV talk show host Dr. Oz to head up the CMS which administers Medicare and Medicaid. Oz promised to work closely with the equally unqualified conspiracy theorist Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has been tapped to head the Department of Health and Human Services, so that's a double helping of kookiness.
All of the other nominees we've seen thus far, with a small handful of exceptions, are quacks and hucksters chosen for their loyalty to Trump and their stated eagerness to take a wrecking ball to the departments they've been hired to oversee. The question at this point is whether or not they are capable of doing that or will spend most of their time on Fox News sucking up to the big boss, which is how they got the nod for their jobs in the first place. They will go in knowing next to nothing and will be staffed with cranks and scammers who know even less. Perhaps the best we can hope for in some of these agencies is that they'll flounder about for a while without any serious results.
But for all the nuts and kooks Trump is appointing to some of the top jobs to accomplish his revenge agenda, there are some areas where he's stocking the administration with some people who are determined to fulfill their own. Many of them are Project 2025 veterans.
It's clear that the tag team of Stephen Miller and Tom Homan are prepared to initiate Trump's mass deportation program immediately upon taking office. Trump has said there's no price tag so there is already a tremendous amount of activity taking place in the private sector, with private prison and airplane businesses gearing up for some major government contracts. These people are serious about doing this. It's unlikely that they can accomplish their goal of deporting every undocumented person in America but they're going to destroy a lot of lives in the attempt, including those of citizens who "harbor" them, according to Homan.
Then there is the promotion of FCC chair Brendan Carr, another one of the authors of Project 2025, to head the commission. Carr told Fox News on Tuesday that he may obstruct the planned merger between Paramount Global and Skydance because CBS refused to release the transcript of the Kamala Harris "60 Minutes" interview, a silly Trump conspiracy theory suggesting that they were covering for her. And you will not be surprised to learn that he is a big promoter of expanding internet access through low-earth satellite technology—including Elon Musk's SpaceX’s Starlink and Jeff Bezos's Amazon’s Project Kuiper.
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Trump has also appointed his good pal and transition chief Howard Lutnick to head the Commerce Department. As the longtime CEO of the investment firm Cantor Fitzgerald, Lutnick is at least experienced at running a large organization so that appointment makes some sense. He had reportedly wanted to be Treasury Secretary and was backed by Musk for that job, but according to the New York Times he has annoyed Trump in recent days by hovering too closely and seemingly cozying up for his personal benefit. And anyway, Trump is still looking for that perfect man out of Central Casting who can simultaneously keep the markets calm while helping Trump implement his monumentally idiotic tariff scheme, a job for a magician rather than a financial expert. That appointment is still to come.
And then there is Russell Vought, one of the real movers and shakers of Project 2025. I wrote about him back in June, concerned that the self-described Christian nationalist was going to wind up in an important position in a possible Trump administration. At the time people were talking about him as a good bet for chief of staff but Trump chose his campaign manager Susie Wiles instead. Vought was the person charged with writing the chapter on the executive office of the president for Project 2025 and was said to be in charge of the planning for the first 180 days of a new Trump administration. Politico reported on Tuesday that he may be tapped for the Office of Management and Budget, the job he held in the previous Trump administration in the final years. In that role, Vought would be working closely with Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy:
On [Tucker]Carlson’s show, Vought said he expects to work with their new agency — the Department of Government Efficiency — to use recent court decisions limiting federal agency powers to pursue a “massive deregulatory agenda.” They will also be “as radical or aggressive as you can” in reducing full-time federal employees and contractors, he added.
We knew Trump was lying when he said during the campaign that he'd never heard of Project 2025 while simultaneously insisting that he didn't agree with it. He certainly never read it personally but he knew many of the people involved because they had been in his first administration. They were among the most loyal of the loyal and there was never any doubt that Trump would hire many of them in a second term.
These are not the instruments of vengeance like Gaetz, Gabbard et al, who Trump wants to use to pay back his enemies. These are people for whom Trump is their instrument to achieve their own long standing goals. It looks like they're going to have free rein.
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