The Infidelity Administration

Assessing Trump's Cabinet line-up. Plus, Democrats in PA try to steal an election.

The news of the past ten days has been dominated by Trump’s nominations for various cabinet positions. Before we go into the pros and cons of each one, it’s worth dwelling on the sheer number of them who have sexual peccadillos which rival even Trump’s own philandering. Admittedly, (as far as we know) Donald Trump is the only one who has been credibly accused of sexual assault, although Matt Gaetz is almost unquestionably guilty of statutory rape and in a just society would be serving his time. I suppose this is what happens when you elect an adulterer to restore Christian piety and virtue – you end up with an administration of adulterers. 

Extramarital affairs may be irrelevant to the job of the secretaries of Defense and Health and Human Services. But American society has long suffered from a lack of serious moral scolding combined with too great a tolerance for disgracefulness in public life. What is social conservatism for if not to hold the line on moral scandals? 

FDR, JFK, LBJ, and Clinton were philanderers. Some of them were sexual abusers. That doesn’t make infidelity okay. Zero tolerance means zero tolerance. I criticized Vice President Harris for dating a married man. I will criticize Republicans for infidelity, too. 

Pete Hegseth, Trump’s SecDef nominee, talks an awful lot about the family for a guy on his third wife who openly fathered a child (at least one) out of wedlock and has never been faithful to a woman. Matt Gaetz – nominee for attorney general – is, well, Matt Gaetz. A man who brags on the floor of Congress about sleeping with teenagers and abusing erectile dysfunction medication. Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s first wife committed suicide because of how many affairs he had (at least thirty-seven in one year). Elon Musk – who will not be in the cabinet, but who is being tasked with an effort to slash the size of the federal bureaucracy – has fathered at least one child out of wedlock and has retained multiple mistresses over the years. And surely, I’m leaving someone out. This administration is already developing a reputation for sleaziness, and it hasn’t even begun yet. 

From here, I will move on to breaking down some of the nominations and offering commentary on the notable ones. 

The Good

I was pleased with the pick of Marco Rubio for Secretary of State. If anyone can clean out the fifth-column of Hamas supporters critics of Israel in the State Department, he can. He is sufficiently hawkish for my tastes, having sounded tough on China and Iran over the years. While he (to his great shame) voted against one package of aid to Ukraine, he has generally been supportive of the Ukrainian cause and anti-Russia. He is staunchly pro-Israel and anti-communist. He can do good work in Latin America. He is serious about defense and intelligence. 

And best of all, he can’t implement any industrial policy at State, which means he’ll finally shut up about the “free market fundamentalists” who have supposedly been running Washington for the past thirty years. 

Michael Waltz is also a hawk, and a great pick for National Security Advisor. He is a veteran, a congressman, and proud believer in peace through strength. Indeed, when Trump nominated him, he praised Waltz as a “tremendous champion of our peace through strength.” I am pleased that Trump is at least willing to give lip service to this idea, and I am glad he will have a member of the “Raytheon Party” whispering in his ear on major foreign policy decisions. I’m optimistic that the new administration will reinstate the maximum pressure campaign on Iran and be willing to use violent force if necessary. 

Elise Stefanik is not my favorite congresswoman, but she will do well representing the U.S. at the U.N. Perhaps it is too much to hope that Donald Trump will pull out of the United Nations (while remaining in NATO), but at least Stefanik will give our enemies and erstwhile allies hell. Plus, she will be out of Congress, which is an added bonus. 

The Okay

I’m mildly optimistic about Pete Hegseth at Defense. I would have preferred Mike Pompeo, but that wasn’t in the cards. Hegseth served in combat in Iraq and Afghanistan and he speaks grunt. This is an underrated asset in bridging both the civilian-military divide and the brass-grunt divide. I think he’s right about wokeness in the military, which should be spending all of its time and money on being the most lethal fighting force in the history of the world, with an overwhelming technological advantage over any and all enemies. Hegseth sounds serious about the real problems our military has with recruiting, retention, and readiness. At the same time, he doesn’t have the experience managing a large, bureaucratic organization which would seem invaluable to running the Pentagon. I wonder how effective he will be, but I will be rooting for him to pursue a major military buildup – especially of the Navy. 

Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy have been tapped to lead a new “Department of Government Efficiency” or “DOGE” (an acronym Musk almost certainly coined himself), which will not be a part of the federal government (i.e., because Congress would have to establish it), but which will comb the administrative state looking for areas to cut waste. 

Musk is, of course, famous for being a modern Howard Hughes – an eccentric and at times off-putting man who has been extraordinarily successful building companies which have moved the needle in areas of technological progress thought to be intractable. During the Republican primaries, Ramaswamy ran away with the “most annoying” division and clowned himself by talking about warmongering “neocons” and 9/11 potentially being an inside job. But at NatCon 4 – the fourth annual conference of “national conservatives” – Ramaswamy took the bold move of making the case for dramatic cuts to the size and scope of government in front of a very unsympathetic audience. He talked of “national libertarianism” and said, "I don’t care to replace a left-wing nanny state with a right-wing nanny state," to a group of people whose organizing principle is that they do want to replace a left-wing nanny state with a right-wing nanny state. 

Unfortunately, to really reform government spending, cuts to Social Security and Medicare need to be on the table. Even more unfortunately, president-elect Trump has refused to countenance any. 

There is also a hard limit to how much can be cut without Congress’s buy-in, but if anyone can corral Republicans to vote for dramatic cuts to the administrative state, it might actually be Donald Trump. Not that he is some kind of small-government libertarian, but that if he wanted to do it on a whim, he could make trouble for any Republican legislators who didn’t go along. 

I am not optimistic that the DOGE will be successful in its task, but I am rooting for it. We need dramatic cuts to the size and scope of government, cuts which go beyond eliminating regulations, downsizing the bureaucracy, and reducing spending (much as those measures are important). Austerity may be required to ward off our coming fiscal apocalypse (real austerity, not “austerity” as the Democrats call it, which means a smaller-than-expected increase in spending).  

Still, there is a smart way to do something and a dumb way to do it. I worry that Musk and Ramaswamy will choose the latter. Both are intelligent and hardworking and Musk has been underestimated many times in the past. But fully addressing the problem will require pain, and this country doesn’t appear ready to endure pain. 

The Bad

It’s never a good sign when the consolation for Tulsi Gabbard’s nomination is that the Director of National Intelligence isn’t all that important anyway. That may be so, but it doesn’t excuse the nomination of an Assad apologist to a position overseeing America’s secrets. I don’t trust Tulsi Gabbard with classified information, and unlike Michael Brendan Dougherty, I take seriously the fact that she has been placed on the TSA’s “Quiet Skies” watchlist. While he and others decry this as an egregious abuse of the system, I would not at all be surprised if the FBI had solid evidence that Gabbard has been selling secrets to America’s enemies. Unfortunately, I think Gabbard will probably be confirmed by the Senate. 

It is a little concerning that the aforementioned (alleged) statutory rapist, Matt Gaetz, has been nominated to be America’s top cop. Gaetz is also known for supporting Donald Trump’s unconstitutional efforts to remain in power last time around and for hiring the white-nationalist-adjacent Darrin Beaty after Beaty was fired from his job as a White House speechwriter in the first Trump administration. Unlike Marjorie Taylor Greene, Gaetz is intelligent. Which means he has less of an excuse for his execrable behavior in Congress. Luckily, his nomination is perhaps the least likely to succeed in the Senate. As long as Governor DeSantis appoints Marco Rubio’s replacement before Gaetz’s nomination is shot down, this would shut Gaetz out of government entirely (at least until the next election) given that he has already resigned his seat in the House. 

Finally, it has been a little odd to see so many self-described Republicans cheering on Robert F. Kennedy Jr. the past couple years. This was a man who said that Hurricane Katrina was nature’s revenge on red states for climate denial. His nomination to lead the Department of Health and Human Services relates to his anti-lockdown position during COVID (except in that forgotten window of March 2020 when he was pro-lockdown, both for pandemic and environmental reasons) and his opposition to COVID vaccines (which Donald Trump used to champion). It’s worth putting on record for the youth (and the adults suffering from short attention spans) that I can remember a time when the right made fun of crunchy, organic antivaxxers in California who worried simultaneously that vaccines caused autism and that corporations poisoned our food supply with hormone-killing pesticides. I’m with Phil Klein – RFK Jr.’s support for single-payer healthcare and abortion up through birth is disqualifying for the position of HHS secretary. I hope the Senate will shoot him down, but I won’t hold my breath. 

Before we conclude, it’s worth spending a moment on the idea of recess appointments. Donald Trump apparently wants the Senate to adjourn so he can appoint whomever he likes and have them take office immediately. Luckily, no serious person takes this seriously. Unfortunately, the bootlicker caucus in right-wing media-tainment is attempting to drown out the serious people. While it seems unlikely that anything will come of this in the end, I wouldn’t put it past an incoming Trump administration to try. 

Coda – Stealing an Election?

For most of this column, I have trained my fire on the incoming Trump administration, for the primary reason that this is where the action in American politics is. It isn’t with our senile, lame-duck president. 

But it is worth noting before we go the deplorable conduct of Senator Bob Casey and various Democratic officials in key Pennsylvania counties who are pursuing extralegal measures to attempt to overturn the result of a free and fair election. Casey is refusing to concede and Democratic election officials are violating court orders to obey the law regarding invalid votes. 

What was that? Only Republicans engage in election denialism and pursue creative shenanigans to stay in power? Think again. Casey’s intransigence is a gift to Republicans, who will now be able to shrug off complaints about Trump’s 2020 election tomfoolery by saying, “Look, everybody does it.” 

In all seriousness, I do think Trump’s attempt to steal an election in 2020 was worse, but that doesn’t excuse Senator Casey’s conduct, and he deserves to have an asterisk next to his name in the history books. 

In other words, taking a long look back at the last nineteen-hundred words, I am confirmed in my view that both parties deserved to lose. A plague upon both their houses.

Ben Connelly is a writer, long-distance runner, former engineer, and author of “Grit: A Practical Guide to Developing Physical and Mental Toughness.” He publishes short stories and essays at Hardihood Books. @benconnelly6712