The real reason Trump picked a sex fiend, dog killer, and anti-vaxxer for his cabinet

It sounds strange, but the words that best explain the insanity that’s happening in American politics right now were uttered way back in 2004 — a simpler time when George W. Bush had just lied his way into a deadly and senseless war, and most of us lacked the imagination that things were about to get even worse than that.

It’s the famous anonymous quote from a top Bush aide (possibly Karl Rove, although he denies it) to journalist Ron Susskind explaining that the “reality-based community” of journalists and others who clung to an old world order around objective truths failed to understand how America wielded power in the 21st century.

“We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality,” the Bush aide told Susskind. “And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study, too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors ... and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

In 2024, moving rapidly to cement what the media is calling a mandate even after more than half the electorate voted for someone else, Donald Trump and his inner circle have pushed the button for a shock-and-awe bombardment of America’s political psyche with mostly outrageous cabinet nominations. It’s a rogues’ gallery that in some cases could never pass an FBI background check and that in almost every case supports ideas or holds values that are 180 degrees opposed to the missions of the federal agencies they would lead as soon as January.

If I wanted to, I could write a series of Captain Obvious columns between now and New Year’s Day giving earnest reasons why it’s a bad idea to put the supposed subject of a damning, but not released, House Ethics Committee report about alleged paid sex with a 17-year-old atop the U.S. Justice Department, or why it’s dangerous — and could even get good people killed — to have a propagandist for American adversary Vladimir Putin overseeing our intelligence agencies, or about the craziness of making bizarro-world Jonas Salk the nation’s anti-vax health guru.

That would be playing the game as Trump 47 wants us to play it. I had to laugh Saturday morning when I clicked on the Washington Post and saw an entire row of utterly sincere op-ed columnists explaining why a troublesome trio — Fox News host Pete Hegseth, ex-Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — simply cannot be confirmed by a GOP-led Senate. They are falling perfectly into the trap of studying the president-elect’s choices with facts — judiciously, as they will.

It’s urgent to understand that Trump is not selecting his cabinet as much as he is creating his own reality, and daring our broken institutions like Congress, the Democratic Party, and the mainstream media to point out that these picks are buck naked as they parade criminally down Fifth Avenue on horseback. The reality-based community — from Maureen Dowd to Rep. Hakeem Jeffries to America’s fireside von Hindenburg in President Joe Biden — are all treating the incoming Trump like another president when he is busy turning his unreality into our new reality and ruling as a dictator.

» READ MORE: After 248 years, America prepares for life under a king | Will Bunch

It says so much about the current moment that South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem — who utterly reviled the American public this summer and took herself out of vice presidential speculation by publishing in her own book that she murdered her 14-month-old family hunting dog, Cricket, and tossed him in a gravel pit (along with a goat, for good measure) — is Trump’s unqualified pick for the critical post of homeland security secretary, and it got like 25 seconds on the news.

To some extent, Trump is following the Steve Bannon model of flooding the zone with a fire hose of excrement, but it’s also more than this. We ought to be paying less attention to the utter absurdities of these nominations and focus more on how he plans to impose them on an American public that mostly just wanted lower prices at Chipotle, not get a health and human services secretary telling them not to eat there. At the risk of making the world’s worst dad joke (which is redundant), the president-elect might be spending every waking moment with the Tesla guy, but he is telling America he plans to rule by Fiat.

There are already plenty of “tells” that Trump plans to exploit every crack and loophole in the democratic “norms” so imperfectly followed by the 44 men who’ve come before him. Prime example: Trump has made it clear he has no intention of following the modern tradition of FBI background checks for prospective cabinet members. After all, Trump — with 34 felony convictions just this year — could never pass one, so why impose this burden on Matt Gaetz, who was once investigated by that same FBI (and cleared) over sex trafficking, or would-be Defense Secretary Hegseth, who paid money to a woman accusing him of a 2017 sex assault in California.

This may come as a shock on Capitol Hill or in the Post’s opinion enclave, but it won’t matter what the presumedly biased private investigators learn about Gaetz, or Hegseth and his Christian nationalist tattoos, or what’s really going on with Gabbard and Russia. Team Trump is playing a game that it can’t lose. The preferred Plan A is probably to bully and pressure at least 50 of the likely 53 GOP senators into supporting his nominations, to establish dominance over Congress and castrate its role as a check on presidential power while making the notion of “advise and consent” an 18th-century anachronism.

Or maybe the real agenda is to jump directly to Plan B, which would be to conspire with House Speaker Mike Johnson — who owes his precarious hold on the job to Trump and feasted on Big Macs with the president-elect aboard Trump Force One this weekend — to gin up a phony adjournment crisis on Capitol Hill against the bipartisan wishes of Senate leaders. That would allow Trump to make a mockery of his Article I powers in the Constitution to impose the Dirty Dozen as recess appointments, who’d have two unimpeded years to wreck U.S. governance as we’ve known it.

Ever since the end of Trump’s chaotic first term, the oxymoron of “right-wing thought leaders” have urged a would-be Trump 47 to rule as an unchecked “red Caesar” crushing any liberal opponents, and the president-elect has taken their ideas to heart. His campaign agenda focused on two things — imposing large new tariffs and an unprecedented mass deportation of undocumented immigrants — that can’t be stopped by Congress or anyone else.

Now that he’s won, Team Trump seems fixated on barely street-legal ways to remove anyone who might stand in his way — especially in the military that blocked his 2021 coup ambitions and is needed now to aid in deportations. It’s floated the idea of a so-called blue-ribbon panel to purge any recalcitrant three- or four-star generals, and maybe even court-martialing the brass involved with the Afghanistan pullout (even though it was originally Trump’s idea). These dictator moves matter more than the confirmation hearings for the outrageous Gaetz which are probably never even going to happen, especially after any protest of the new attorney general is met by tanks in the street.

Does none of this feel real to you? The unreality is the point! The Trump empire is creating its own reality. And when the old fact-based order that’s busy writing investigative articles about Hegseth that too few people will read — or while Senate Democrats try to woo their Republican colleagues for a vote that will probably never be held — finally, belatedly, figure this out, they, and more importantly, the American people, will feel disoriented and become more disengaged, just as many felt waking up on Nov. 6 to news of Trump’s reelection.

“Authoritarian leaders believe they are above the law, and they also believe that they are above the truth in that they reserve the right to determine what is truth and what is fiction,” New York University historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat, the expert on dictators whose book Strongmen just entered the New York Times best-sellers list, wrote earlier this year. “Just as they transform the rule of law into rule by the lawless, so do they make lies into party and state doctrine.”

Trump is creating an American kakistocracy — that’s a clown government, bro, to paraphrase the punditry of Bryce Harper here — in part to obliterate the layers of government that would prevent a “red Caesar,” in part to speed up the persecution of his enemies list, and in part to clear the road for the corruption of the oligarchs like Elon Musk who helped install the 47th president. But it’s mainly because he can — to turn the fiction that a U.S. president is a king into his reality ... our reality.

It’s going to be very hard to stop this, at first, but I believe this can and will be undone. Eventually. The only thing I can say now with any certainty is this: We’re not getting anywhere until the delusional reality-based community wakes up from the dream state where it currently resides. The truth is going to keep losing until we acknowledge that it’s a new brave world, and we take the fight to the sphere of unreality where an American monarch is rapidly building his castle fortress.

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