‘Deluded themselves’: Republicans’ fantasy about a second Trump term brutally shattered

It sounds stupid, after all these long years of Donald Trump dominating politics, but his own party appears to have misjudged him.

Analysis

This admittedly sounds rather stupid after nine years of Donald Trump showing us all, over and over again, what his priorities are, but I think his supporters among elected Republican politicians were, somehow, genuinely surprised by what he served up this week.

Republicans in Congress seem to have deluded themselves into thinking a second Trump administration would look pretty much identical to the first. The President-elect’s nominees for key government jobs have shattered that fantasy.

Mr Trump on stage during his election night victory speech. Picture: Jim Watson/AFP

At this point in 2016, after his victory over Hillary Clinton, Mr Trump was announcing his nominees for these same jobs, and for the most part they were reassuringly serious.

His pick to lead the Justice Department was former prosecutor and state attorney-general Jeff Sessions. His defence secretary was the decorated general Jim Mattis. The treasury secretary was investment banker Steve Mnuchin. Another respected general, John Kelly, was chosen to be the secretary of homeland security. Dan Coats, a long-serving US senator and diplomat, was Mr Trump’s director of national intelligence.

All qualified, sober people. Yes, there were a few less conventional picks: oil company executive Rex Tillerson as secretary of state, and the rather eccentric retired surgeon Ben Carson as head of the housing department, for example.

But on the whole, it was a cabinet that would not have looked too out of place under any other Republican president in recent decades.

Mr Trump with his first attorney-general, Jeff Sessions. Picture: Nicholas Kamm/AFP

His first defence secretary, General James Mattis. Picture: Mandel Ngan/AFP

His first head of homeland security, General John Kelly, who went on to become the White House chief of staff (and then a fierce Trump critic). Picture: Jim Watson/AFP

Compare those names to the following.

This time around, Mr Trump’s nominee for attorney-general is Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz. Former congressman now, actually. He abruptly resigned from his job on Thursday, US time, in what was quickly interpreted, even by his fellow Republicans, as an attempt to avoid the release of an ethics committee report into his behaviour.

Mr Gaetz has been under investigation by the House’s ethics committee over allegations that he “engaged in sexual misconduct and illicit drug use, accepted improper gifts, dispensed special privileges and favours to individuals with whom he had a personal relationship, and sought to obstruct government investigations of his conduct”.

He was previously subject to a criminal investigation, as part of a broader sex trafficking case, into whether he had sex illegally with a teenage girl. That investigation was ultimately closed without charges being brought against him.

This is the person Mr Trump has selected to be America’s chief law enforcement officer.

Then consider Mr Gaetz’s qualifications for the job. The aforementioned Mr Sessions had a long career as a prosecutor and state attorney-general before he entered the Senate.

Mr Gaetz graduated from law school in 2007, worked for about two years in private practice, and then ran for Congress. That is the full extent of his legal experience.

He also gives off the vibe of a sentient Ken doll but we shan’t dwell on that too much. Picture: Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP

Another comparison. Mr Trump has nominated former congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, who was a Democrat for many years, to be his director of national intelligence, whose role is to oversee US intelligence agencies and act as their liaison with the president.

Ms Gabbard is a military veteran but she has no experience whatsoever in intelligence; she served in Iraq as part of a medical unit and in Kuwait as a member of a police unit.

She also has a history of credulity, particularly when it concerns murderous dictators. Ms Gabbard infamously met with the Syrian ruler, Bashar al-Assad, during his country’s civil war, and expressed scepticism about his well-documented war crimes (he used chemical weapons against his own people, among other things).

In recent years she has been consistently sympathetic towards Russian President Vladimir Putin, blaming NATO for his invasion of Ukraine and opposing American aid for the country, which has relied on the international community, and the United States in particular, to help it defend itself against Putin’s aggression.

The charitable explanation for Ms Gabbard’s views is that she’s stridently anti-interventionist, and thinks the United States should stay out of the world’s affairs. The harsher explanation is that she’s a dupe.

Whichever you pick, this serial apologist for the world’s worst regimes, who also happens to have no relevant experience, will soon be overseeing America’s intelligence agencies.

Tulsi Gabbard. Picture: Brendan Smialowski/AFP

Next up we have Pete Hegseth, another military veteran, who in recent years has been a TV host on Fox News. Mr Hegseth, by most accounts a quite genial and unobjectionable man, has been selected to run the Department of Defence.

Mr Hegseth served in Iraq and Afghanistan; there is no problem with his military resume. But the department he is now slated to run is no joke. We are talking, here, about an organisation that costs $US900 billion each year. It has 700,000 civilian employees. It oversees about 2.5 million troops, including the reserves and national guard.

There are few organisations on the planet whose leaders have such vast, humbling responsibilities, and this man is a TV presenter who has never run anything larger than a platoon in his life.

Pete Hegseth interviewing Donald Trump. Picture: Kevin Lamarque/Reuters

Our last example, and the most recent major nominee put forward by Mr Trump, is Robert F. Kennedy Jr, the anti-vaxxer conspiracy theorist who has been tapped to run America’s federal health department.

This nomination aligns with Mr Trump’s pledge, offered shortly before the election, to let Mr Kennedy “go wild” on health policy – an apparent reward for the former Democrat dropping his independent presidential bid and endorsing Mr Trump.

The New York Post, a conservative newspaper (which also endorsed the President-elect, for what it’s worth), published an editorial overnight describing Mr Kennedy’s views on health as “a head-scratching spaghetti of what we can only call warped conspiracy theories”.

The paper’s editorial board recalled an interview it conducted with Mr Kennedy last year, in which he expressed a series of bizarre beliefs.

“We came out thinking he’s nuts on a lot of fronts,” the board noted, adding that giving someone like Mr Kennedy such a powerful office could do real harm to Americans’ health, leading people to “wind up harmed or even dead”.

To pick one of his weird views at random, here is something he said about Covid.

“Covid-19. There is an argument that it is ethnically targeted,” said Mr Kennedy.

“Covid-19 attacks certain races disproportionately,” he added.

“It is targeted to attack caucasians and black people. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.”

So Covid was engineered to attack everyone except Chinese and Jewish people. In case you missed his meaning, there. (Need I say there was never any evidence to back that up? I would hope not.)

Mr Kennedy has also said that a second Trump administration would, among other things, ban fluoride from water, citing thoroughly debunked theories about its effects.

This is the person Mr Trump wants to run health policy; to be in charge of massive health programs like Medicare and Medicaid; to oversee the CDC, which played such a pivotal role during Covid, and the FDA, which regulates medicines; and to be in charge of the American government’s investment in medical research and drug development (something Mr Kennedy has said he wants to stop, entirely, for a period of eight years).

Making this guy the head of a health department is like appointing a Holocaust denier to run a World War II museum.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Picture: Olivier Touron/AFP

The point, here, is that Mr Trump’s second administration will look nothing like his first.

We heard quite a bit, before the election, about the President-elect’s critics using overblown rhetoric. Do not concern yourselves with Mr Trump’s more extreme promises, we were told, because he didn’t follow through on them during his first term. Don’t be an alarmist.

But this isn’t his first term. Matt Gaetz is not Jeff Sessions. Tulsi Gabbard is not Dan Coats. Robert F. Kennedy Jr is not Tom Price, the equivalent nominee from eight years ago, who was an orthopedic surgeon before he entered politics (RFK’s pre-politics career was as an environmental lawyer, if you’re interested).

Where previously he chose serious people to fill the most important roles in government, now Mr Trump is picking loyalists, kooks and extremists. The difference matters. These people are not being selected for a reality show, they’re going to run the most powerful government on the planet, and oversee bureaucracies that collectively employ millions.

One last point: we have received reassurance in recent days from conservative media personalities, particularly regarding Mr Gaetz, that we need not worry because the Republican-controlled Senate will not confirm him.

“Trust the Senate. He won’t be confirmed,” was the stance of pro-Trump conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt, for example.

First of all, some scepticism is required here. Congressional Republicans do not have great form when it comes to defying Mr Trump’s wishes; their first instinct has always been to tick off on whatever he wants.

Putting that aside: if Mr Gaetz is such an obviously, manifestly unacceptable pick to become attorney-general that the likes of Mr Hewitt are saying these things, what conclusions can we draw about the judgment of the man who nominated him?

Mr Trump unambiguously, unrepentantly wants Mr Gaetz to be the attorney-general. And we have people on his own side of politics acknowledging that it’s a terrible idea, while declining to criticise the person whose idea it was.

It’s like complaining about the muscle aches and congested nose you’re enduring during a bout of the flu without mentioning the virus itself, as though the symptoms and their cause are entirely unrelated.

If you think Mr Gaetz, Mr Kennedy, Ms Gabbard, Mr Hegseth and the rest are inappropriate nominees for serious government roles, but you have nothing to say about the person who put them forward for those roles, then what are you?

No, honestly, what are you? I’ll leave that question hanging in the air, because we all know there is no good answer.

Twitter: @SamClench