The new team of vipers
It remains mind-boggling that grown men and women worship the hapless Wile E. Coyote of American politicians. They attend the would-be strongman’s rallies, buy his shitty merch, and mimic his dance to the gay national anthem. Even Elaine Benes finds his dance stupid. His entire adult life, Donald Trump complained that the world was laughing at the U.S. (him). Then he got elected president and United Nations ambassadors from around the world laughed at him. Wile E. didn’t understand that another ACME product blew up in his face.
Half of American voters rehired the man last month. The world doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry as Trump announces a series of defective appointments to his new administration. Trump’s recruiting leans heavily on Fox News regulars or “central casting” stereotypes. But in fact, most feature in the ACME catalog.
On Saturday, Trump proposed son-in-law Jared Kushner’s father as ambassador to France. The man pleaded guilty in 2005 to “18 counts of illegal campaign contributions and tax evasion, as well as witness tampering after he retaliated against his brother-in-law, William Schulder, who was cooperating with federal investigators.”
Social media’s JoJo from Jerz (Joanne Carducci) reminds Threads users just how Kushner wound up in jail.
View on Threads
Trump also nominated Kash Patel as FBI Director on Saturday. Patel has been a faithful promoter of Trump propaganda. He played a role in the conspiracy to overturn the 2020 presidential election Trump lost to Joe Biden. Special counsel Jack Smith’s may have dropped his prosecution of Trump for that act, for inciting the Jan. 6 insurrection, and for stealing national security documents. But when (not if) his report sees the light of day, Patel’s role may be implicated in it, Marcy Wheeler reminds us:
Then there’s another aspect to the timing. Trump announced this pick — as he did the decision implanting all his defense attorneys at DOJ — while Jack Smith’s prosecutors are working on their report. And Kash should show up in that report, at least to lay out his false public claims that Trump had declassified all the documents he took with him (and possibly even his demand that he got immunity before giving that testimony). I’m not sure how central that will be to a report. But Trump had a choice about how confrontational to be with how he installed Kash in a place to dismantle the so-called Deep State, and his choice to be maximally confrontational may have a tie to this report.
People are currently thinking of all the other ways Kash has helped serve Trump’s false claims in the past — the false claim that the Russian investigation was predicated on the Steele dossier, efforts to override Ukraine experts during that impeachment, attempts to misrepresent the Russian investigation. But the Smith report may well explain that Trump’s FBI Director nominee played a more central role in Trump’s effort to spin Trump’s efforts to take hundreds of classified documents home. So when Kash gets a confirmation hearing, it will put the veracity of the Smith report centrally at issue. If Senators find the report convincing, they should have renewed cause to reject Patel’s nomination, but Trump has almost without exception forced GOP Senators to believe his false claims to avoid scary confrontations with him, so I wouldn’t bet against Trump and Kash.
Trump has spent eight years sowing propaganda about his own corruption and crimes. Not just Patel’s nomination to a position in which he could thoroughly politicize rule of law, but also the means by which Trump made that nomination, is part of that same project.
As George W. Bush might ask: Is our reporters learning? So far, no, Wheeler concludes. They continue to soft-peddle Trump’s propaganda and the “weird” aspect of his nominees. The way in which he’s rolled out his new team of vipers is all part of his efforts to deconstruct reality, and to make it “far more difficult to sort out truth from crime anymore.”
Or a real tunnel from a false one. It’s increasingly difficult to bet our nation’s future as a democratic republic on Trump’s haplessness.