Trump’s Team USA: We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Laws

Well folks, here we are. The newly elected but not inaugurated President of these United States is busy filling slots on the casting list for the final season of America.

The incoming administration is moving quickly in part because they know Democrats are too stunned and divided to mount an aggressive campaign to disrupt the process. Average humans will be able to identify the bad guys in this struggle on the left-center by looking to see who appropriates right wing talking points about identity politics. 

Anger and frustration at high prices was the driving force behind Donald J Trump’s win, capturing voters who said inflation caused severe hardship by 50 points. Institutionalists like Ambassador to Japan Rahm Emanuel and pundits like Maureen Dowd would like us to believe that “woke” drove the electorate. Somebody’s actually campaigning for Emanuel to head the Democratic party.

They have it all wrong. “Woke” is driving the machinery of the incoming administration because it’s a performative distraction from the lack of any actual governance. And what “woke” will mean in practice will be loyalty tests (both formal and information) affirming fealty to Dear Leader. 

The Trump team has yet to sign a legally required (Trump signed the original law) ethics agreement that applies to the entire transition workforce. As you can expect to see throughout this process, legality is barely on the incoming administration’s checklist.

Trump is demanding that the Republican-led Senate surrender its power of advice and consent and shut down for 10 days so he can make recess appointments of high officials in his administration.

The Supreme Court’s 9-0 ruling severely limiting when recess appointments are appropriate is apparently of no concern. Three conservative Supreme Court justices will be expected to do an about face and maybe discover a footnote in the Federalist papers making recess appointments, something the founders thought was necessary.

This explains the apparent lack of concern about character and/or qualifications as Trump nominates sycophants to run government agencies.

The House of Representatives will continue to be a mess as the Republican majority is eroded by Trump’s appointments. Speaker Mike Johnson will remain ringmaster, and says he doesn’t support internal GOP rules proposal to punish members who prevent caucus backed bills from coming to the floor.

Discerning the reasoning and intentions of Trump’s transition team has become an art form among observers, as names are floated and sailed (or sunk) for the next administration. Lil’ Senator Marco Rubio is sitting perilously in the dry dock waiting for a Secretary of State job, as some MAGAs are not as forgiving as Dear Leader.

Let's get to the known appointees as of midday Wednesday.

White House Chief of Staff: 

• Susie Wiles, aka the “ice maiden,” was manager for Trump’s 2024 election campaign.

White House Deputy Chief of Staff and Home Security Advisor: 

• Stephen Miller, known for his striking resemblance to Hitler Aide Joseph Gobbels. Jean Guerrero’s book Hatemonger is a necessary read.

Assistants to the President: 

• Dan Scavino, longtime aide and social media whisperer, without a specific portfolio. He started out as a caddy for Trump’s golfing excursions.

• James Blair, 2024 campaign political director, as deputy for legislative, political and public affairs 

• Taylor Budowich, director of communications for the Save America PAC, as deputy chief of staff for communications and personnel. 

National Security Advisor:

• Rep. Mike Waltz of Florida is Green Beret combat vet to oversee what promises to be a realignment of U.S. posture around the globe.

• Via Politico: In an op-ed in The Economist published days before the election with Matthew Kroenig from the Atlantic Council — who worked in the Pentagon during the Bush, Obama and Trump administrations — Waltz listed priorities for the use of American power globally, demanding that the U.S. shift its focus from the Middle East to the Indo-Pacific and specifically, China.

Secretary of Defense:

• Pete Hegseth reportedly looks the part, based on his position as Weekend Host for Fox and Friends. He served in the Army National Guard in Iraq and Afghanistan, and by his account was asked to leave, having been labeled as an extremist. Has no experience qualifying him to run a Department with 1.3 million employees, but has plenty of experience criticizing the military for being too “woke.” San Diegans might remember him as the face of efforts (successful) to rehabilitate accused war criminal Chief Petty Officer Edward Gallagher of the Navy SEALs. 

Ambassador To The United Nations:

• Rep. Elise Stefanik, no foreign policy experience, first member of GOP leadership in Congress to endorse Trump’s presidential bid in 2022, gained prominence last year after a congressional hearing, pressed three university presidents about antisemitism on college campuses following Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel. 

• As reported in Responsible Statecraft, Stefanik is a hawk on foreign affairs and always has been. She “has no background in international relations or diplomacy that would prepare her for representing the United States at the international body, but then the point of sending her is probably to pick fights with other states rather than trying to resolve them.”

Border Czar: 

• Tom Homan, former acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, in charge “of all deportation of illegal aliens back to their country of origin.” He was one of the architects behind the controversial family separation policy during Trump’s first term. Does not require Senate confirmation. Homan says they are going to use US Special Operations to “wipe cartels off the face of the Earth.”

EPA Administrator:

• Former Rep. Lee Zeldin: Voted against clean water legislation at least a dozen times, and clean air legislation at least half a dozen times. A loyalist who voted against certification of the 2020 election, he’s expected to carry out plans to dismantle landmark climate regulations.

National Security Adviser: 

• Rep. Mike Waltz, a retired Green Beret & Army National Guard officer known for his hawkish views on China and Iran. In recent years, he’s become a fixture on Fox News on matters of foreign policy.

Department Of Homeland Security: 

• Gov. Kristi Noem, who falsely bragged in a book, published to give her higher visibility as a Vice Presidential candidate, about having stared down North Korean Leader Kim Jong Un. She was banned from lands belonging to nine of South Dakota’s indigenous tribes, after baselessly accusing tribal leaders of cooperating with Mexican drug cartels. And then there’s the dog killer thing. 

Ambassador To Israel:

• Former Gov. Mike Huckabee, a Baptist minister and longtime fixture in Christian broadcasting. Appointed to placate Israel’s Netanyhu and GOP's Christian Zionist base, Many evangelicals believe that total occupation of Israel by Jews signals the coming of the Rapture.

CIA Director:

• Former Rep. John Ratcliffe served as director of national intelligence during Trump’s final year of his first term. He gained Trump's attention after his strong defense of the president during impeachment hearings. He was subsequently named to be a part of Trump's defense team.

White House Counsel:

• William McGinley, White House Cabinet secretary between 2017 and 2019 during Trump’s first term. He is expected to be the primary conduit between Trump and the Justice Department. His background includes providing legal advice to the Republican National Committee.

Special Envoy To The Middle East:

• Steve Witkoff’s only qualification for this post is as a campaign donor and golfing partner for Donald Trump.

Last, but not least; or maybe it is a non-starter, there’s the prospect of “the Great Elon Musk, working in conjunction with American Patriot Vivek Ramaswamy” running DOGE (the Department of Government Efficiency - also the name of a Musk-favored cryptocurrency). 

Once again, there’s the matter of rule of law: the President needs Congressional assent to create an agency. And the leaders of DOGE will need to pass background checks and sign conflict of interest documents as a start.

The prospects of “efficiency” with two wild card Silicon bros, already has people guffawing in back rooms in DC.  

Trump’s announcement said that Musk and Ramaswamy would “work together to liberate our Economy, and make the U.S. Government accountable to ‘WE THE PEOPLE.’ Their work will conclude no later than July 4, 2026—a smaller Government, with more efficiency and less bureaucracy, will be the perfect gift to America on the 250th Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. I am confident they will succeed!” 

If you’ve kept up with reporting on now-officially rehabilitated Project 2025, you’ll remember that the transition team is charged with drafting executive orders for Day One.

 According to the New York Times, Trump’s transition team has already:

• Prepared a slate of executive orders and presidential proclamations on climate and energy. They include withdrawing the United States from the Paris climate agreement, eliminating every office in every agency working to end the pollution that disproportionately affects poor communities and shrinking the size of national monuments in the West to allow more drilling and mining on public lands.

Purging the Generals…According to the Wall Street Journal, Donald Trump’s transition team is drafting an executive order to create a military review body that could allow his administration to remove three- and four-star officers more easily.

Purportedly, this “warrior board” would consist of retired senior military personnel. The Journal, whose reporters have seen a draft of this order, says it allows the removal of officers “lacking in requisite leadership qualities” as quickly as 30 days from their review and could force them to retire.

Dan Pfeiffer at The Message Box has some ideas for getting through the wall of awful sounds coming out of the transition team. Following is a teaser, meaning you should read the whole damn thing..:

• If the past is prologue, Trump will give us daily — if not hourly — outrages to which we will feel compelled to react. There will be massive amounts of corruption, rank and dangerous corruption, and violations of countless norms. There will be a temptation to swing at every pitch. To find the nearest mountaintop and scream as loud as possible about each and every one of them. 

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Wednesday News to Peruse

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Scientists propose “DNA of the universe” is gap in Einstein’s hunt for unified physics theory by Matthew Rozsa at Salon:

• When molecular biologist Francis Crick tripped on the psychedelic drug LSD in 1953, his mind famously pulled together all of his previous research on human DNA to conceive of the image of a double helix. More than seven decades later, mathematician Robert Monjo believes he has discovered a similarly significant double helix — but this time not as the structure of human DNA, but as the structure of spacetime itself.

• “Our study completes the work of Albert Einstein in his attempt to relate gravity and electromagnetism forces in the same geometric theory,” Monjo, a professor of mathematics at Saint Louis University in Spain, told Salon. While it may seem like an odd coincidence for spacetime to follow an analogous engineering blueprint as the human body, Monjo argues this is perfectly logical.

• “The actual connection between physics and molecular biology is that curvature and torsion are the most probable solutions (minimum energy when forces are acting) for particle paths and for designing stable structures,” Monjo said. “The simile with the DNA is more a metaphor but in some way, there exists the connection as mentioned for solving paths.”

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We Study Climate Change. We Can’t Explain What We’re Seeing by Gavin Schmidt and Zeke Hausfather at the New York Times (Gift link)

• The earth has been exceptionally warm of late, with every month from June 2023 until this past September breaking records. It has been considerably hotter even than climate scientists expected. Average temperatures during the past 12 months have also been above the goal set by the Paris climate agreement: to keep global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius over preindustrial levels.

• We know human activities are largely responsible for the long-term temperature increases, as well as sea level rise, increases in extreme rainfall and other consequences of a rapidly changing climate. Yet the unusual jump in global temperatures starting in mid-2023 appears to be higher than our models predicted (even as they generally remain within the expected range).

• While there have been many partial hypotheses — new low-sulfur fuel standards for marine shipping, a volcanic eruption in 2022, lower Chinese aerosol emissions and El Niño perhaps behaving differently than in the recent past — we remain far from a consensus explanation even more than a year after we first noticed the anomalies. And that makes us uneasy.

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Abu Ghraib Detainees Awarded $42 Million in Torture Trial Against U.S. Defense Contractor by Sanya Mansoor at The Intercept

• The jury awarded a total of $42 million to three Iraqi men — a journalist, a middle school principal, and fruit vendor — who were held at the notorious prison two decades ago. The plaintiffs’ suit accused Virginia-based CACI, which was hired by the U.S. government to provide interrogation services at Abu Ghraib, of conspiring with American soldiers to torture detainees. 

• Tuesday’s verdict marks a rare victory for plaintiffs seeking to bring American corporations to justice for playing a part in the country’s so-called war on terror. 

• “What the jury did today is send a very clear message that the contractors who go to war or go work with the government overseas, they will be held accountable for their role in whatever violations their employees may commit,” said Katherine Gallagher, senior staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights, which represented the plaintiffs, at a press conference on Tuesday afternoon. “They need to have far better oversight over their employees to ensure that something like what happened at Abu Ghraib never happens again.”