It’s a funny question because we want America to succeed and we want Trump’s hideous agenda to fail at every step. Simple example: we want inflation to continue to go down and we want Trump’s programs that will make inflation go up— tariffs (trade wars) and mass deportations to fail. Simple concept, right? Right. Any indications of how that’s going to go. Yep, there are a few.
Let’s start with the House, which under the best of circumstances has been a dysfunctional mess under Republican leadership. Currently 219 Republicans have been elected to the 119th Congress. One— Matt Gaetz— has already resigned, which brings the number down to 218, the minimum number for the GOP to organize the House. BUT… Trump has taken two off the board: Michael Waltz (FL) and Elise Stefanik (NY), unlikely to be replaced, along with Gaetz, before April (at best). On top of that, there are 3 Republican incumbents— Mariannette Miller-Meeks (IA), John Duarte (CA) and Michelle Steel (CA)— whose races haven’t been called and who are hanging on by a thread. Steel has almost surely lost her seat to Democrat Derek Tran, who has a growing 613 vote lede. Duarte’s lede has gotten smaller everyday and he lost it completely yesterday as Gray took a 182 vote lede. Miller-Meeks is in a slightly better, but still precarious position— she leads by 800 votes (0.19%). If all three districts were to be decided for the GOP, it would give MAGA Mike 219-213 vote margin. If all three districts were to be decided for the Democrats, it would leave MAGA Mike with a 216 votes to face 216 Democrats… until Gaetz, Stefanik and Waltz are replaced in the spring.
And if that wasn’t bad enough, a report yesterday from Axios indicates there are some Republicans just reelected who might resign in pursuit of big paydays. “At least five House lawmakers,” wrote Andrew Solender and Juliegrace Burke, “quit Congress early in the last two years to pursue private-sector paychecks. Another four resigned early for other reasons, two died in office and one was expelled. If similar patterns play out over the next two years, Johnson's majority is permanently at risk.”
But in terms of his own cockamamie agenda, Jonathan Last urged his readers to “remember Trump’s ‘Muslim ban.’ He signed a couple of executive orders, the courts halted them. Lawyers did a lot of pro bono work. After a few weeks everything was business as usual. Remember when Trump tore up NAFTA? Except that he never did. He simply negotiated a ‘successor’ agreement that was little more than new paint on the same vehicle. Remember when Trump built the wall that Mexico paid for? Trump replaced about 400 miles of existing barriers and built 52 miles of new fencing— 52 miles! The U.S. government paid for all of this. This is Trump’s modus operandi. He promises his base crazy shit. He then announces that he’s about to do the crazy shit. The media freaks out at the prospect of said crazy shit. Trump then wriggles out of doing the crazy shit and— this is the key part— his voters give him credit for the crazy shit anyway. That’s Trump’s secret sauce: The fact that his voters are never let down. No matter how little he actually does for them, no matter how many promises he breaks or fails to deliver, they never feel betrayed by him.”
And if we can judge how chaotically things have been going in Mar-a-lago for the past 2 weeks, we can make some assumptions have the dysfunction we can expect in the White House starting January 20. Tara Palmeri reported about the mess the transition has turned into. She noted that the process of filling his cabinet “was even more freewheeling, complicated, and downright nasty than it was during Trump’s first transition to the presidency. Back then, of course, Trump had few experienced hands around him, beyond his family (Jared and Ivanka) and a handful of operatives (Reince, Bannon, Kellyanne…). The defining battles of that era, over who was and wasn’t a ‘globalist,’ seem quaint in retrospect. Incredibly, despite the anonymous sniping in the press (much of it powered by background-quote back-channeling), Trump ultimately assembled a mostly standard-issue Republican cabinet, with appointees who wouldn’t have been out of place in a Bush White House. For Trump’s second tour of duty, a decidedly more chaotic process has taken place— fueled by the triumvirate of Susie Wiles, Elon Musk, and Donald Trump Jr. in his ear, with supporting characters like Boris Epshteyn and Howard Lutnick running up and down the sidelines. (At one point, according to the Washington Post, a squabble between Epshteyn and Lutnick got physical.) Musk, in particular, has openly campaigned on behalf of preferred candidates, pontificating on Twitter that Lutnick would ‘actually enact change’ as treasury secretary while Scott Bessent represented ‘business-as-usual.’”
In past eras, this kind of overt politicking would have been too ham-fisted even for Bannon— he left such things to his minions at Breitbart. But Musk, the world’s richest man, who put $119 million toward Trump’s campaign, has more power in Trump’s current inner circle than Bannon ever did, despite the latter’s grip on the Mercer family purse strings. Trump, of course, has little patience for allies who upstage him. And there are already whispers about when, not if, “Uncle Elon”— now a fixture on the Mar-a-Lago patio— will overstay his welcome. In Trump’s first term, Saturday Night Live portrayed Trump as Bannon’s puppet, rapidly souring that relationship. I’ve heard many around Trump muse that, once Musk starts getting similar late night treatment, that bromance, too, could go south. (Notably, Trump ultimately picked Bessent over Lutnick.)
Wiles, who will serve as White House chief of staff, is perhaps the most intriguing character in this drama, and she’s already chalked up several wins. She maneuvered to secure posts for her Florida pals including Marco Rubio at State, Pam Bondi as A.G., and Mike Waltz as national security advisor, and has filled out special assistant roles with her own loyalists like James Blair and Taylor Budowich. But she also seems to have learned from Priebus about the futility of playing gatekeeper to Trump. Instead, she has sat back and allowed the various warring factions to duke it out. Lutnick, for instance, frustrated his colleagues by using his job as transition co-chair to lobby on his own behalf for treasury secretary, and got shunted over to Commerce in the process. Wiles, on the other hand, has emerged unscathed.
Wiles also has a much larger cast of hangers-on to contend with, including first-gen Trump supplicants like Epshteyn, who has served as Trump’s legal counsel and, more recently, has accumulated substantial influence over administration appointments. It was Epshteyn, after all, who, during a midflight conversation, convinced Trump to tap Matt Gaetz for attorney general while Wiles was in another part of the plane.
At first blush, that episode would seem to illustrate the limits of Wiles’ influence. Yet it also evinces the cardinal rule of Trumpworld: Overreach at your peril. Gaetz, of course, was a largely unvetted pick, who was forced to withdraw from consideration a week later amid a flood of stories about the House Ethics Committee investigation into his alleged sexual misdeeds. And Epshteyn, too, now appears to be in hot water. On Monday afternoon, CNN reported that Trump’s lawyers were investigating whether Epshteyn had sought to profit off his influence with Trump, and recommended he be removed from the president-elect’s orbit. “Multiple sources familiar with the matter” ensured the story got out.
Such a mess that Senate Democrats instead of fighting all the transgressive nominations, the Democrats will leave it in the hands of the Republicans to deal with the mess. Semafor reported that “Schumer and his deputies seem perfectly happy with keeping the onus on Republicans to deal with potentially problematic Trump picks. ‘We should make a good faith effort to exercise our constitutional responsibility. I am not for foot-dragging. The president ought to have this team in place,’ Senate Democratic Whip Dick Durbin of Illinois told Semafor. Senate Democrats can’t stop Trump’s top nominees, but they can delay confirmations and aggressively circulate damaging details about the picks. While most presidents try to get as many of their nominees confirmed as possible on Inauguration Day, a single Democratic senator can object and force the majority party to burn time on procedural votes on nominees. Republicans routinely forced that kind of delay on President Joe Biden’s nominees, and Durbin acknowledged some Democrats might be looking for payback once Trump takes office: ‘Whether they follow through or do that, I can’t tell.’... That doesn’t mean no fights over Cabinet picks, but it may mean that Democrats end up leaning back and letting Republicans struggle among themselves over riskier picks like Kennedy, Hegseth and Gabbard.”