Ghouls

Honestly, I do not want to be writing about politics in America.  I’ve got a bunch of cool fragments eagerly itching to be turned into essays.  There’s the story of seeing The Muttonbirds in the Famous Spiegeltent in Auckland 25 years ago and how it led into my recent deep dive into eighties’ New Zealand pop.  I still have things to say about the Bearded Pigs at Rockfish Holler and the amazing Maren Estate.  There’s more wedding stories, more adventures in Libraryland.  I’ve got 1400 words on Grief & Gratitude & Resentment, chock full of good stuff!  It’s got Jessica Lange and Nietzsche’s Zarathustra and my short-shocked spinal cord and Lynn’s cancer and the death of a beloved cat and it’s full of joy and wonder and laughter.  It’s got the angels we don’t believe in.  I don’t know if it’s one essay or five.  I want to find out!  That’s what I want to be working on.

But Matt Gaetz as Attorney General of these United States.  OMG.  Or should I say, WTF.  Here’s Trump, thumbing his nose at the Senate.  Daring them.  He believes that out of 53 Senate Republicans there will not be four willing to stand up to him and say, “No, we cannot allow you to turn the Department of Justice into your personal rage machine.”  He might be right.

So much for those Trump voters who managed to will themselves into believing the rhetoric was all for show, entertainment for his mob, that somehow, once he was back in office he’d set the nasty viciousness aside and focus on the important stuff, like reducing taxes on wealthy people and eliminating all those inconvenient regulations designed to protect health & safety at the expense of greater profits.  Oh, of course he’ll do that stuff too, which will keep the plutocrats content enough to stay out of the way while his toady guts the Department of Justice, deposes the senior military leadership that he deems insufficiently loyal, and he figures out how to divert millions of dollars into the coffers of his family and his wealthy supporters.  Once the Senate caves on his outrageous cabinet he’ll be assured that he’s eliminated the last remaining guardrails and can govern how he likes.

The senior senator from Alabama, Tommy Tuberville (who insists his staff call him Coach, just like in his glory days on the football field where he learned everything he knows about governing) is all in, blustering that they’ll come after every Republican Senator who votes against Trump’s nominees.  Not surprising that he doesn’t know what the job is, that the Senate is supposed to serve as a check on the President’s judgment, as backup to the vetting that the President’s team is presumed to have done before putting forth their nominees, a responsibility more important than ever as Trump’s team has done virtually no vetting of these top Cabinet picks.¹ But as far as Tuberville (and, alas, so many of the others) is concerned, all the vetting that’s needed is that this is what Trump wants, so let’s get them installed as quickly as possible, no questions asked.

And then there’s Kennedy.  That one depressed me even more than Gaetz.  I suppose it’s partly that I was sure Trump was going to sideline him as he has fanboy Elon².  Give him some fancy made-up advisory role with no actual authority, let him churn for a year and make a bunch of recommendations that Trump can wave a vaguely approving arm at and then ignore.  There was a grim, comic absurdity to the Gaetz nomination that kept me from being completely depressed by it.  It’s no doubt more damaging to the nation to have DoJ gutted and turned into Trump’s personal engine of retribution and vengeance, but HHS cuts close to home.  Since that day in March 1983 when I first walked up the hill to interview for the postgrad position at the National Library of Medicine, my professional life has been intimately bound up with HHS agencies.  NIH, principally³; but certainly touching on CDC, FDA, the entire Public Health apparatus.  And, like every other American, my health has been protected by the (yes, often imperfect) work of those agencies.  Think back to Trump’s badly bungled response to the pandemic.  Now imagine Kennedy standing next to him at those ghastly daily briefings instead of Fauci.  Trump gets credit for Operation Warp Speed – the development of the vaccines – but he had to be dragged into it and then he systematically undermined the evidence making the vaccine rollout much less effective than it could have been.⁴ Kennedy’s approach, as far as one can piece it together, would be, “I’m not opposed to vaccines.  Here’s all the things that could go wrong and that you should be worried about, but sure, do your own research, make up your own mind and if you want to get one of the potentially deadly vaccinations, by all means, go right ahead.  Your choice.”  Am I exaggerating?  I guess we’ll find out.

Lynn called them a bunch of clowns, but I said that this time, unfortunately, many of them are not clowns.  “How about ghouls?” she said.  Wikipedia defines it: a demon-like being or monstrous humanoid, often associated with graveyards and the consumption of human flesh. In the legends or tales in which they appear, a ghoul is far more ill-mannered and foul than the commonly mistaken goblin.  Yeah, that sounds right.

The Cabinet picks are grabbing the attention, but it’s the staff slots that are truly terrifying.  Susie Wiles is very smart, very effective, and ruthlessly loyal.  She’ll be an excellent no-nonsense Chief of Staff.  Those who think we’re going to see a repeat of the wildly dysfunctional White House of eight years ago are going to be quite surprised.  Thomas Homan as Border Czar is a perfect fit.  He’s had decades of experience in immigration enforcement and was acting director of ICE in Trump’s last term, overseeing the family separation policy.  He’s already announced that the full scale workplace raids will resume as soon as possible.  He’s going to be very good at his job.  Organizationally, he’ll be in Homeland Security, helmed by shiny toothed dog killer Kristi Noem, but policy will be set by the extremely competent Stephen Miller who’s been whispering into Trump’s ear from the beginning about the horrors of the American carnage⁵ brought about by the floods of rapists, murderers, and drug dealers that the Democrats have been importing for decades.

I could go on.  Trump’s people learned very well from the chaos of his first administration.  Wiles has made it clear they’ve got two years, not four, to accomplish what Trump has in mind, so the Exec orders have already been drafted and are ready to go.  She knows that the party that gains the Presidency almost always loses Congressional seats at the mid-terms and that those voters who are expecting grocery and gas prices to revert to their 2018 levels are going to be mightily disappointed when they start rising again instead.

Fascinatingly, there are still people claiming that Trump isn’t really going to try to do everything he’s said he’s going to try to do.  Now some of them are back to claiming that Trump is playing four-dimensional chess.  They think that when the Senate rejects his most egregious nominees (or they’re forced to withdraw), he’s planning to replace them with more conventional characters who will thus sail through and just nibble around the edges of their departments without doing considerable damage.  That the claims that Trump would attempt to govern as an authoritarian dictator are the overblown fever dreams of a bad case of Trump Derangement Syndrome.  And yet, there he is, barely a week past the election, demanding, with threats explicit and implied, that the Senate abdicate their Constitutional responsibility to serve as a check on the Executive.  And most of the Republicans in Congress appear to be quite willing (if not happy) to go along.

So.  What to do. 

1. Encourage the timorous senators who still have a sliver of conscience to preserve the authority of the Senate.  Write or call your own Senators, of course, but if you’re in a state like mine (Alabama⁶) that won’t have any practical effect.  So identify those Senators who have already stressed the importance of holding hearings and contact them to reinforce their resolve.

2. Demand the release of the Ethics report on Gaetz.  Johnson’s already come out to say he doesn’t think it should be released, so it’ll probably have to be leaked, but that shouldn’t stop you from writing to your Representative, to the Chair of the Ethics Committee, and to the panel members, insisting that they do the right thing.

3. When the hearings start (probably January 4, as soon as the new Congress is sworn in) pick your fights.  Realistically, only one, maybe two, of Trump’s nominees will be rejected or forced to withdraw.  That’s just the way the system works.  Gaetz is the most critical to be opposed (bearing in mind that whoever replaces him will be just as bad for the country, if not quite as loathsome as a human being).  After him?  Who is likely to do the most damage?  Despite my feelings about Kennedy I’m not yet sure he’s my number two.  Gabbard loves dictators as much as Trump does, and the speculation about how close she is to the Russians has to be thoroughly investigated.  Hegseth would be way out of his depth, but he’d happily support Trump’s use of the military for domestic law and order.  So many choices!  And there’s still more than half the Cabinet to be named.

4. Then, once you’ve made your phone calls or fired off your emails, take a deep breath and do something fun.  Go to a museum.  Read poetry⁷.  See a play.  Lean into your friends and let them lean into you.  There is plenty of hope and joy to be found.  Andy Borowitz has an excellent prescription.

As for me, once I’m done badgering a few Senators about their Constitutional responsibilities, I’m going to dig back into my scratches and slivers of essay ideas and see if I can bring something new to life.  Create against destruction.

1. He’s using private security firms to do background checks, rather than relying on the FBI.  What does that tell you?

2. “Elonia” as Maureen Dowd has christened him in the NYT, since he seems to have usurped the role of Consort.

3. NLM functions as one of the NIH institutes.

4. So quickly the nation’s amnesia kicks in.  How many died?  We don’t remember and have no interest in looking it up.

5. He was the principle speechwriter for Trump’s American carnage inaugural address in 2017.

6. Tuberville is the worst of the worst.  Katie Britt is intelligent, highly competent and very experienced in the ways of the Senate, but alas, will follow Trump unquestioningly.  Her vote for majority leader was Rick Scott, which tells you what you need to know here.

7. I highly recommend Ada Limón, the current US poet laureate.