November 12, 2024
The backdrop for today’s news is that Republicans in the Senate will vote by secret ballot tomorrow for a new Senate majority leader. That person will control the Senate calendar, deciding what measures will be taken up by the Senate for consideration and thus wielding power over Trump’s legislative plans.
Trump and his sidekick Elon Musk, along with MAGA leaders and influencers, are backing Florida senator Rick Scott, who has signaled a willingness to do whatever Trump wants. Senators John Thune (R-SD) and John Cornyn (R-TX) are also staunch party members but are not as closely associated with the MAGA faction of the party.
MAGA control of the Senate is at stake, and Trump and his team are pushing their extremist agenda so aggressively it will be impossible for Senate Republicans to pretend they didn’t know what was at stake if they vote to empower the MAGAs.
Today the Trump transition team floated the idea that Trump could sign an executive order creating a board of retired senior military personnel that would review high-ranking officers and recommend removing any they deemed unfit for leadership. Vivian Salama, Nancy A. Youssef, and Lara Seligman reported in the Wall Street Journal that such a board would enable Trump to purge the military of the generals whom he considers insufficiently loyal to him. Generals who refused to carry out what they considered unconstitutional orders—including using the military against U.S. civilians—infuriated Trump during his first term.
The chairman of VoteVets, retired major general Paul Eaton, warned that such a plan would turn the U.S. military into Trump loyalists. Eaton also warned military personnel what that would mean for the troops, suggesting that folks should “take a look at Stalin’s officer purges in early WWII that resulted in the Soviet, now-Russian Army, enduring incompetence and the use of its rank-and-file troops as cannon meat. The American military is the envy of the world’s militaries, given its efficiency for military effect and stunningly low casualty count. Probably a good model to keep.”
Transition spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said, “[T]he American people re-elected President Trump by a resounding margin giving him a mandate to implement the promises he made on the campaign trail. He will deliver.” But Trump’s claims of a mandate are wrong. As vote counts continue to come in, it appears that Trump’s margin of victory was actually quite slim.
Trump has also vowed to eliminate the Biden administration’s policies to address climate change, promising to “drill, baby, drill” and make the U.S. energy independent by increasing production of fossil fuels. In fact, the production of oil and gas hit an all-time high during the Biden administration and the U.S. exports those products, but so long as the U.S is tied to fossil fuels, it will likely always import them because the oil it exports is a different kind than it uses.
It is not clear that even MAGA Republicans want to kill the green energy initiatives in the Inflation Reduction Act that have brought new factories and good jobs to more Republican-dominated states than Democratic-dominated states.
Today, chair and chief executive officer of ExxonMobil Darren Woods asked the incoming administration not to change Biden’s climate policy dramatically, saying that the lack of consistency on climate change is bad for the economy. “I don’t think the challenge or the need to address global emissions is going to go away,” he said. “Anything that happens in the short term would just make the longer term that much more challenging.”
Exxon has invested heavily in the carbon capture industry. In 2023, Woods predicted that the company’s low-carbon business could generate more money than its traditional oil and gas products in as little as a decade, telling investors he expects carbon capture to be a multitrillion-dollar business.
Trump and his team, apparently led by Elon Musk, have begun to float names for different administration posts, all of whom appear to be picked to replace nonpartisan federal experts with right-wing culture warriors.
For secretary of homeland security, Trump has proposed loyalist Kristi Noem, currently governor of South Dakota. Noem had been under consideration for vice president, but fell out of the running after boasting that she had shot her dog for misbehaving. Earlier this year, Noem appeared to suggest that Texas, which became a state in 1845, was one of the original signatories to the Constitution. She has been a Trump loyalist focusing on the border.
For U.S. ambassador to Israel, Trump has picked former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, an evangelical Christian who denies Palestinian rights to the West Bank, instead supporting Israeli settlements in that land and saying that “Israel has title deed” there, calling the area by the biblical name “Judea and Samaria.”
For secretary of defense, Trump has tapped Fox News Channel host Pete Hegseth, a combat veteran and host of the weekend edition of Fox & Friends, a show Trump reportedly enjoys. As national security expert Tom Nichols points out, the Secretary of Defense has access to the nuclear command-and-control procedure. The secretary oversees about 1.3 million active-duty troops and another 1.4 million in the National Guard and employed in Reserves and civilian positions, as well as a budget of more than $800 billion.
Hegseth lobbied Trump to intervene in the cases of service members accused of war crimes, and he cheered on Trump’s January 6, 2021, rally. He became popularly known after accidentally hitting a man with an ax on the Fox & Friends show in 2015. Then, in 2019, he regained notoriety when he volunteered that he had not washed his hands in ten years because he does not believe germs are real. Hegseth has said women do not belong in combat and has been vocal about his opposition to the equity and inclusion measures in the military that he calls “woke.”
Lolita C. Baldor and Tara Copp of the Associated Press reported that the news that Trump has tapped the inexperienced Hegseth to run the world’s largest and most powerful military “stunned the Pentagon and the broader defense world.” While some Republicans say they look forward to getting to know him better, others appear to share the Pentagon’s concerns.
But the news that Trump wants a Fox News Channel host in one of the most important positions in the United States government got overtaken quickly by Trump’s announcement that “the Great Elon Musk, working in conjunction with American Patriot Vivek Ramaswamy,” an entrepreneur who challenged Trump for the presidential nomination, will lead a new “Department of Government Efficiency” under his administration. Their advice will, Trump announced, “pave the way for my Administration to dismantle Government Bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure Federal Agencies.”
Their project is nicknamed “DOGE,” an apparent reference to Musk’s favorite cryptocurrency and meme coin, known as “Dogecoin.” That cryptocurrency surged after the announcement of the new DOGE under Trump, adding to the gains of 153% since Election Day.
By law, a president does not have the power to create a new department or agency, and participating in one would require Musk and Ramaswamy to get rid of their conflicts of interest.
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!”
Trump appears to see himself as the founder of a new United States of America while, ironically, the real winners of the chaos he is ushering into the government will be Russia, China, and the other autocratic states eager to dismantle American democracy.
Trump’s demonstration of his plans just before Senate Republicans have to choose their leader seems an attempt to jam those who might stand against him into his camp. And yet, the Framers of the Constitution believed that the Senate would be the key guardrail to stop the rise of an autocrat who would destroy democracy and install himself as a king. They expected that the determination of senators to guard their own power would protect the nation.
Almost two hundred and fifty years into their experiment, we’re about to find out if they were right.
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Notes:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/11/12/what-numbers-actually-say-about-2024-election/
https://www.thedailybeast.com/right-now-elon-musk-seems-to-be-trumps-vpnot-jd-vance/
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/11/12/exxon-ceo-us-climate-policy-00188927
https://meidasnews.com/news/sd-governor-noem-thinks-texas-was-one-of-the-original-colonies
https://www.cnn.com/2024/11/12/politics/mike-huckabee-israel/index.html
https://thehill.com/homenews/media/392248-man-sues-fox-friends-host-after-hes-struck-by-axe-on-set/
https://amp.theguardian.com/media/2019/feb/11/germs-are-not-real-fox-news-host-pete-hegseth
https://apnews.com/article/257e4b17a3c7476ea3007c0861fa97e8
https://apnews.com/article/trump-hegseth-defense-secretary-pentagon-2d8030921ecef933778cf92afd40ec72
https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/LSB/LSB10158
X:
yashar/status/1856497846696186007
RadioFreeTom/status/1856501049109905564
AdamKinzinger/status/1856510929124364555
votevets/status/1856466903042056655
Thanks as always for your words of wisdom today Heather (if I may!)
[An earlier version of this post began: "I see today that Stephen King was banned from X for referring to Musk as 'the first lady'." It has been pointed out to me that this is incorrect and I apologize for the mistaken information. It does not alter that Musk has excess power in the administration and I stand by the rest of the comment. Sincere apologies for the error. There, I just did something Trump has never done, never could do, and never will do. Now to resume with our regular programming . . . ] So, a modest proposal. Going forward Musk will be known as First Lady Elon Musk, or FLEM for short. Yes, that is supposed to be a reference to phlegm, because he, his bromance Trump, and his lackeys think he’s sane and smart, but he's not.
Sorry to go low. Anything to keep me sane right now.
As a European, of course I worry about what effect trump's regime is going to have on the rest of the world.
But my overwhelming emotion is deep sorrow. I still can't believe, let alone understand, how Americans have allowed this to happen - how a country with such great capacity for love and goodness can have voluntarily chosen to go down such a dark and stupid path. This is America on Oxycontin. It has taken what it sees as an "easy" solution to pain - and is now entrapped in the coils of addiction to hatred.
So, so sad. . .