Kuttner on TAP: Trump’s Worst Enemy

Trump has moved quickly to appoint ultra-loyalists to key positions. Many have in common the fact that they are totally unqualified for their posts, which makes them totally reliant on remaining in Trump’s good graces and carrying out his demands.

Trump wants the Senate to waive one of its key constitutional roles in vetting and confirming (or rejecting) nominees—this after picking Pete Hegseth to be secretary of defense. Hegseth is a Fox News host with zero qualifications other than the fact that he was supportive of efforts to bypass the chain of command in cases of service members accused of war crimes, and backed Trump’s January 6th ploy.

(The New York Times story, in another example of the disgraceful standards set by executive editor Joe Kahn to be evenhanded, politely termed the appointment of Hegseth as “outside the norm” for defense secretaries. Batshit crazy would be more like it.)

This is a guy who will have access to nuclear codes. To add insult to injury, Trump proposes an extralegal commission to fire generals and admirals who are insufficiently loyal to him.

None of this will play well with the professional military or with the Senate Armed Services Committee. Republican or not, committee members will assert their role in protecting the national defense.

Just to show his disdain for the House as well as the Senate, Trump selected two sitting House members for senior posts: New York Rep. Elise Stefanik as U.N. ambassador and Florida Congressman Mike Waltz as his national security adviser. He did this, apparently without consulting House leaders, at a time when party control of the House will be decided by two or three votes.

The consequences of Trump’s arrogant overreach were evident when the GOP caucus in the Senate overwhelmingly rejected his personal choice for majority leader, Florida’s Rick Scott, in favor of John Thune of South Dakota. Thune and the other less-than-slavishly-loyal choice, John Cornyn of Texas, received 29 and 22 votes, respectively, on the final vote. Scott, not a popular member of the Senate, ran a distant third and was eliminated on the first ballot.

Trump also announced that “the Great Elon Musk, working in conjunction with American Patriot Vivek Ramaswamy,” will lead a new “Department of Government Efficiency (‘DOGE’)” to “pave the way for my Administration to dismantle Government Bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure Federal Agencies.”

The only problem is that this proposed department, with the abbreviation DOGE to promote Musk’s cryptocurrency, cannot be created by decree.

So there will be firewalls. The more autocratic Trump tries to be, the more the antibodies of the body politic will kick in.

Even the Roberts Supreme Court will reject some of Trump’s efforts to govern by decree. The Senate Armed Services Committee, far from rubber-stamping the nomination of Hegseth, will want to grill him on his outlandish views, and is likely to reject Trump’s plan to turn the military into a personal force of loyal generals.

One can imagine a sanity caucus in the Senate GOP, beginning with Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Susan Collins of Maine, and Mitt Romney of Utah. It will take only one more for the Senate to refuse to legislate Trump’s crazier ideas, and there are still a few sane Republicans in the narrowly divided House as well.

Trump’s half-baked, poorly staffed, impulsive schemes may yet save democracy from Trump.