Can Trump Fail Without America Also Failing?

And If Trump Chokes On A Big Mac And Croaks... J.D. Vance

Most of what RFK Jr says about health is just plane insane— and in terms of public health, dangerous. But, on a podcast last week, he did make some sense about Trump’s diet. I suspect Trump, who values loyalty above almost all other attributes, was not to happy when this started circulating: “The stuff that he eats is really, like, bad. Campaign food is always bad, but the food that goes onto that airplane is, like, just poison. You have a choice between— you don’t have the choice, you’re either given KFC or Big Macs. That’s, like, when you’re lucky, and then the rest of the stuff I consider kind of inedible.” Well, over the weekend…

Yesterday, Kennedy was just one little part of David Remnick’s portrait of Trump’s cabinet of wonders. “Trump,” he wrote, “is uninterested in conventional notions of expertise (which smacks of élitism). Nor is he focussed on assembling a council of constructive disagreement, a team of rivals (which smacks of disloyalty). As his personnel choices rolled out in recent days, it became clear that they pointed wholly to his long-held priorities— and they are not the common good. The nominations of Matt Gaetz as Attorney General, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., as Secretary of Health and Human Services, Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense, and Tulsi Gabbard as the director of National Intelligence are the residue of Trump’s resentments and his thirst for retribution.”

Remnick continued that “In Gaetz, who faces allegations of illegal drug use and having sex with an underage girl, Trump sees himself, a man wrongly judged, he insists, as liable for sexual abuse. In Kennedy, an anti-vax conspiracy theorist, he sees a vindication of his own suspicion of science and his wildly erratic handling of the covid crisis. In Hegseth, who defends war criminals and lambastes ‘woke’ generals, he sees vengeance against the military establishmentarians who called him unfit. In Gabbard, who finds the good in foreign dictators, he sees someone who might shape the work of the intelligence agencies to help justify ending U.S. support for Ukraine. In other words, Trump’s nominations— in their reckless endorsement of the dangerously unqualified— look like the most flagrant act of vindictive trolling since the rise of the Internet. But it is a trolling beyond mischief. All these appointees are meant to bolster Trump’s effort to lay waste to the officials and the institutions that he has come to despise or regard as threats to his power or person. These appointees are not intended to be his advisers. They are his shock troops.”

Like many others, conservative NY Times columnist David French sees the Trump clown car as an indication he’s already failing, even if it’s really not much more than another indication that the U.S. is continuing to fail. French acknowledged that “The corrupt, incompetent and extremist men and women he’s appointing to many of the most critical posts in his cabinet are direct threats to the well-being of the country, but they’re also political threats to Trump and to his populist allies.” Non-MAGAts who voted for Trump because they saw him as a “normal, conventional” candidate running as an alternative to an unsatisfactory status quo were looking for things Trump promised in his ads: lower prices, crime-free streets, protected Social Security and Medicare. They may be in for an unpleasant surprise now.

French wrote that “Throughout the campaign, Trump ran with two messages. On the airwaves, he convinced millions of Americans that they were electing the Trump of January 2019, when inflation was low, and the border was under reasonable control. At his rallies, he told MAGA that it was electing the Trump of January 2021, the man unleashed from establishment control and hellbent on burning it all down. But here is his fundamental problem: The desires of his heart and the grievances of his base are ultimately incompatible with the demands of the majority, and the more he pursues his own priorities, the more he’ll revive his opposition. He’ll end his political career as an unpopular politician who ushered in a Democratic majority yet again… Senator Roger Marshall of Kansas defended the Gaetz pick, saying, ‘Trump was elected to turn this place upside down.’ That’s what Trump thinks. That’s what MAGA thinks. But MAGA should beware. If Trump’s cabinet picks help him usher in the chaos that is the water in which he swims, then the question won’t be whether voters rebuke MAGA again, but rather how much damage it does before it fails once more.”