It’s been a hallucinatory week, which I hope explains my momentary lapse of reason in believing that an unshackled and restored Trump might follow through on his vow to drive the neocon contagion from the halls of executive power, if only out of revenge for plotting against him for the last eight years. After all, this was the man who evicted John Bolton. (The right side of my brain reminds me that this was also the man who hired John Bolton and the equally evil Elliot Abrams.)

The early visions were promising. Trump slamming the door firmly in the face of two neocon job applicants, Nikki Haley and Mike Pompeo, the man who plotted the assassination Julian Assange, acted on my political psyche with the chimeric allure of Lemon tekking a dose of Psilocybe cubensis, which are currently popping up in pastures all along the Oregon coasts. But before reaching peak high, the whole exciting illusion began to melt into some Daliesque hellscape populated by a grotesquerie of neocons, Christian nationalist end-timers, and billionaire defense contractors.

First, news broke that Trump had tapped Lil Marco Rubio for Secretary of State, then a mini-Goebbels himself, Stephen Miller, as his deputy Chief of Staff. This was quickly followed by the termagant from Albany, Elise Stefanick, as UN ambassador, resumé-embellisher John Ratcliffe at the CIA, Christian fundamentalist Mike Huckabee as ambassador to Israel, and FoxNews star Pete Hegseth to run the Pentagon. The fantasy had dissolved into another Bad Trip.

Like capitalism itself, neoconservativism seems endlessly adaptable, capable of filling any void, assuming any visage, from Rumsfeld to Hillary Clinton. Trump’s rogues gallery aren’t the apex neocons of the Bush-Obama-Clinton-Biden era. There’s no pretense of intellectualism. These are the grunts. This is neoconservatism run by the gut. The very wise Stephen Walt referred to Trump’s national security peaks as a Team of Lackeys. But in the Man’s own coarse, simplistic language, they’re just Trump’s Chumps, hand-picked for their obsequiousness and blind fealty to their boss. People who follow orders and don’t ask questions. Whether they’re competent enough to implement Trump’s plans remains to be seen.

Trump rolled out his cabinet of curiosities like a carnival barker at a tent show, with the introduction of each new act yielding a louder gasp from the audience…  Rubio is the most peculiar case. But then, he is a peculiar man who has fashioned his political career in Florida out of a histrionic hostility toward Cuba while largely concealing the fact that his family fled the island to escape the dictatorial grip of Fulgencio Batista. Some may find it odd that Trump picked Rubio off the trash heap where he’d flung him after Rubio signed on to a Senate report documenting Russia’s courting of the 2016 Trump campaign, particularly its entreaties to Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort. But there’s no loyalty stronger than the rehabilitated man. And Rubio had been put through a process of Trumpian operant conditioning: abuse, humiliation, exile, supplication, return, reward. Rubio has bent the knee, licked the boots (or Ferragamo’s in Trump’s case), and kissed enough ass to be sent forth to excoriate the rest of the world with his juvenile style of bluster and bombast.

Rubio’s hectoring brand of anti-diplomacy will accompanied by the coruscating keening of his backup singer, Elise Stefanick, who impressed Trump with her McCarthyite scolding of Ivy League presidents for their laxity in not violently crushing the campus anti-genocide protests last spring. It’s hard to envision a UN ambassador more ill-equipped for the job than Biden’s Linda Greenfield-Thomas, the hapless enabler of Palestinian genocide, may fill the bill as Trump’s one-note Jeanne Kirkpatrick–one shrill note at that.

Someone said that instead of a cabinet to Make America Great Again, Trump had drafted a team to Make Greater Israel. You’ll scan futilely for any peacenik libertarians or even hardcore isolationists in this gung-ho retinue, all of whom seem eager to greenlight the immediate annexation of the Occupied Palestinian Territories on route to more glorious (and insane) confrontations against Iran, Cuba, Venezuela, China and any stubborn nation that refuses to hand over its lithium to Elon Musk. Not only aren’t there any guardrails in sight, there’s not even a handbrake.

+++

+ Craig Mokhiber, human rights lawyer: ‘Donald Trump has drained the swamp – and appointed every loathsome swamp creature he found there to his administration. In January, the US will be governed by a hodgepodge of white nationalists, Christian fundamentalists, fascists, Zionist loyalists, neocons, Islamophobes, xenophobes, and racists. To which people in the Middle East reply, “So, more of the same?”’

+ Sure, Rubio’s a neo-con hawk, but can he play guitar while he runs diplomatic cover for a genocide?

+ NBC reported on Tuesday that some Democrats in Congress are “pleasantly surprised” by several of Trump’s picks, such as Marco Rubio. “Some Democrats” have replaced “Florida Man” as the annual favorite in the Darwin Awards…

+ Rubio introduced a bill last year to prevent a future president from leaving NATO, and Biden signed it into law.

+ What’s the over/under in the number of months before Trump starts bad-mouthing Rubio?

+ Sen. John Fetterman: “Unsurprisingly, the other team’s pick will have political differences than my own. That being said, my colleague Sen. Marco Rubio is a strong choice, and I look forward to voting for his confirmation.” Ladies and gentlemen, the future leader of the Democratic Party, according to no less of an authority than Chuck Todd…

+ Elise Stefanick is so abrasive that she might even alienate those three or four Pacific Island nations that tag along with the US votes, shielding Israel from UN sanctions. So maybe it’s not all bad, at least on Gaza, where it could scarcely get much worse.

+ Ivana would have been the better choice…

+ So, no long-desired cabinet post for poor Lindsay Graham, always a bridesmaid, never the bride…

+ Trump’s pick to run the CIA, John Ratcliffe, has accused Iran of committing “acts of war” against the US by allegedly hacking Trump campaign emails and allegedly plotting to assassinate Trump. Ratcliffe wants the US to conduct joint attacks with Israel on Iran.

+ This is the third time Trump has nominated John Ratcliffe for a top intelligence post. In 2016, Ratcliffe withdrew his nomination to become director of National Intelligence after it was revealed that he had  “exaggerated” resume by claiming he was a terrorist-fighting federal prosecutor in East Texas under George W. Bush, even though court records showed no there were “no significant national security prosecutions in that jurisdiction during his tenure.” Ratcliffe also took sole credit for a major crackdown on the employment of undocumented immigrants by a poultry producer when the case was actually “a multistate, multiagency operation.”

+ In 2020, Trump again nominated Ratcliffe to head the DNI, and this time, Ratcliffe narrowly won the approval of the Senate after vowing to be impartial and apolitical. A few weeks later, the NYT reported that Ratcliffe had “approved selective declassifications of intelligence that aim to score political points, left Democratic lawmakers out of briefings, accused congressional opponents of leaks, offered Republican operatives top spots in his headquarters and made public assertions that contradicted professional intelligence assessments.”

+ For Ratcliffe’s old job as DNI, Trump has tapped the Harris-slayer, Tulsi Gabbard. In 2019, Gabbard told Trump’s pals (and financial underwriters), the Saudis where to stuff it…

+ Of course, as always with Gabbard, we must confront the question of what animates her anti-Saudi animus: the murder and dismemberment of Jamal Khashoggi, their genocidal war on Yemen, their involvement in the 9/11 attacks, or her well-documented Islamophobia?

+ A Middle East History Moment with Pete Hegseth: “Open up your Bible. God granted Abraham this land.  The twelve tribes of Israel established a constitutional monarchy in 1000 BC. King David was their second king and established Jerusalem as the capital. Jews were fighting foreign occupiers for centuries, ultimately maintaining a presence there. And right now, Palestinians, Arabs, Muslims, are trying to erase the Jewish ties to Jerusalem, as we speak. I’ve been there multiple times. They’re trying to make it look like Jews were never there. The most important aspect of this is the international community granted sovereignty to the Jews, to the Jewish state, after World War II, and Israel has had to fight defensive war after defensive war, with every country coming to crush it, ever since then just to exist.”

+ Of course, this was almost precisely the position Bill Clinton took when he scolded Arab-American voters in Michigan for being hesitant to vote for Harris.

+ More Hegseth: “Zionism and Americanism are the front lines of Western civilization and freedom in our world today.”

+ Back in 2019, Hegseth bragged on FoxNews about never washing his hands and claimed he couldn’t remember washing them once in the past 10 years.

+ Hegseth wants women on KP duty, not in combat: “I’m straight up just saying we should not have women in combat roles. It hasn’t made us more effective, hasn’t made us more lethal, has made fighting more complicated.”

+ Sen. Tammy Duckworth responding to Pete Hegseth saying women shouldn’t be allowed to serve in combat: “I would ask him, ‘Where do you think I lost my legs? In a bar fight?’ I’m pretty sure I was in combat when that happened.”

+ Using his direct pipeline to Trump as a FoxNews contributor, Hegseth convinced Trump to pardon three service members convicted or accused of war crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq, including Eddie “the Blade” Gallagher.

+ From 2012 to 2015, Pete Hegseth was CEO of Concerned Veterans for America, an NGP funded by the Koch brothers’ network, whose top priority was privatizing Veterans Administration health care. Hegseth’s leadership of the organization came under scrutiny after he hired his brother at an annual salary of $69,497.

+ A social conservative, Hegseth’s two marriages ended in divorce after extra-marital affairs, one with a staffer and another with a FoxNews producer who later bore his child.

+ Vanity Fair reported that on Thursday, the Trump transition team held an emergency meeting over newly surfaced allegations of sexual misconduct by Pete Hegseth involving a woman he had what is described as an “inappropriate” encounter with in Monterey, California, in 2017. Hegseth apparently told the transition team that the relationship was consensual and had been investigated by the Monterey police, who declined to file charges. A case “he said, she said,” according to Hegseth, which is hardly the most exculpatory denial. Say this much, Trump hasn’t picked a team of incel fanboys.

+ Paul Rieckhoff, founder of Independent Veterans of America: “Hegseth is undoubtedly the least qualified nominee for SecDef in American history. And the most overtly political. Brace yourself, America.”

+ In picking Hegseth, Trump passed over Iowa Senator Joanie Ernst, who’d been lobbying for the post. Ernst is best known for castrating hogs in a campaign ad, which I guess would have qualified her to run the biggest porkbarrel feedlot on the Hill…

+ Mike Huckabee, Trump’s pick for Ambassador to Israel, on the principles guiding his approach to the Middle East:  “I believe the scripture. Genesis 12: Those who bless Israel will be blessed; those who curse Israel will be cursed. I want to be on the blessing side, not the curse side.” Megiddo Now!

As National Security Advisor, Trump tapped Mike Waltz, an ultra-rightwing congressman from Florida. Waltz is a former Army Green Beret who said he wants to “take the handcuffs off of the long-range weapons we provided Ukraine.”  The Wall Street Journal called Waltz “among the most hawkish members of Congress on China.”

+ In 2017, Walz argued at the CPAC conference that the US should be ready to remain in Afghanistan for several generations until the very “idea” of radical Islam is defeated.

+ Kristi Neom, Trump’s choice to run the Dept. of Homeland Security, is banned from stepping foot on every tribal reservation in South Dakota after repeatedly slandering the tribes as acting like subsidiaries of the Mexican drug cartels…

+ The party that obsessed over the seizure and killing of P-Nut the Squirrel and Fred the Raccoon is about to make a confessed puppy killer the head of a national department that can do warrantless no-knock raids, where dogs are often killed merely for barking.

+ Sen Markwayne Mullin on Trump’s AG pick Matt Gaetz: “The first time I ever met this guy, he walked up to me, and Kristi Noem was at the podium. We were just elected, so we were going through orientation. And he walked up to me and said, ‘Man, she’s a fine bitch!’” Cabinet meetings should be a blast! Does Corey Lewandowski, with whom Noem has become especially intimate, according to reporting by Ken Silverstein, know about this?

+ Back in April, Rep. Tony Gonzalez (R-Arizona) had this to say on CNN about Matt Gaetz: “I serve with some real scumbags. Matt Gaetz, he paid minors to have sex with him at drug parties.”

+ “I hereby resign as a US representative…effective immediately, and I do not intend to take the oath of office for the same office in the 119th Congress. To pursue the position of attorney general in the Trump administration. Signed, sincerely, Matt Gaetz.”

+ The House Ethics Committee has been investigating Gaetz since 2021. Gaetz resigned from Congress on the same day Trump announced his plans to nominate him for Attorney General and two days before the House Ethics Committee was set to vote on releasing its “highly damaging” report outlining its investigation into the Republican for sexual misconduct. The committee loses its jurisdiction over Gaetz after he leaves Congress.

+ John Clune, the attorney for the woman at the center of the child sex trafficking allegations involving Gaetz, is urging the committee to release its report, saying, “She was a high school student, and there were witnesses.”

+ After being told of Gaetz’s nomination for Attorney General, Rep. Mike Simpson (R-Idaho) said: “Are you shittin’ me?”

+ Charlie Sykes, a former Republican congressman from Ohio: “Appointing Gaetz as attorney general is designed to trigger the Libs. In reality, it is humiliating the Senate’s new GOP majority. Before they even take office.”

+ To Gaetz’s credit, he has called on Trump to pardon Edward Snowden…

+ Why Gaetz may have a shot at confirmation by the Senate, despite allegations of drug use and sexual misconduct: He’s married to Ginger Luckey, the sister of Oculus V.R. founder Palmer Luckey, who, along with three Palantir executives, started the surveillance technology company Anduril, which has won several billion dollars worth of Pentagon contracts for counter-drone weapons and “Advanced Battle Management Systems”…

+ Still, it’s ludicrous to think that Matt Gaetz could further debase the office of Attorney General, where the likes of Mitchell Palmer, John Mitchell, Richard Kleindeist, Ed Meese, Janet Reno, John Ashcroft, Alberto Gonzales, Jeff Sessions and Bill Barr have already roosted…

+ Trump’s pick for “border czar,” Thomas Homan, developed the “child separation” policy in 2014 while he headed ICE under Obama. A year later, Obama gave him an award for how well he had done his job of deporting people. Now he’s going to reprise his role on steroids under Trump. Homan said he plans to enlist the military to execute Trump’s plan to track down, detain, hold in concentration camps, and deport more than a million immigrants under the Alien and Sedition Act of 1797.

+ Cecilia Vega asked Homan on 60 Minutes: “Is there a way to carry out mass deportation without separating families?”

Homan: “Of course there is. Families can be deported together.”

+ Richard D. Wolff: “A strong, growing economy attracts and integrates immigrants. A weak, declining economy deports them. What made America great was immigration, not deportation. Don’t be fooled.”

+ According to Politico, Trump is expected to nominate RFK Jr to head the Department of Health and Human Services, which, given Jr.’s views on vaccines, would make a strange repudiation of one of Trump’s best policies during his first term, Operation Warp Speed, which demonstrated that the federal government could actually spring into practical action. (The main reason Trump might want to elide it from the collective memory.)

+ During a TikTok town hall in June, RFK Jr. said he would order NIH to stop all research on drug development and infectious disease for 8 YEARS.

+ Meanwhile, H5N1 avian flu creeps on, steadily picking up lethal momentum…

+ What will Trump’s blood pressure come in after RFK transitions him from his normal McDonald’s fare to the roadkill diet?

+ Andrew Jackson had his “kitchen cabinet,” while Trump’s cabinet of curiosities seems destined for the outhouse.

+ JD Vance may well end up being the least weird person at Trump cabinet meetings.

+ On Wednesday, Trump gave a victory speech to House Republicans with Elon Musk tagging along: “Elon won’t go home. I can’t get rid of him. Until I don’t like him.” He’s beginning to sound like Henry XIII after the gout had set in….”and then it’s off to the Tower with him.”

+ Word on the Hill is that Musk has warned Republicans that he will finance a primary challenge to anyone who votes against Trump’s cabinet nominees or legislative priorities.

+ Elon keeps throwing around the word, Doge, which most of us associate with the rulers of Italian city-states like Venice and Genoa–doge, duce, duke. But a mere dukedom is too petty a domain for Musk. He uses the term as an abbreviation for a Department of Government Efficiency, which he believes Trump has appointed him and Vivek Ramaswamy to command. However, as Nathaniel St. Clair points out, two people running a Department of Efficiency isn’t evidence of efficiency. It’s actually a proposal for a commission (a department posting would require Elon and Vivek to open up their financial holdings), like the Cat Food Commissions of old. Musk claims he’s going to save the taxpayers tens of billions and fire thousands of federal workers who do nothing but enforce regulations that make his life more difficult. Good luck finding something left to cut. After nearly forty years of neoliberal austerity and regulation-slashing, there’s not much fat left to carve, except in the Pentagon, which will require real courage and some very sharp knives.

+ Speaking of Elon  Musk, Humza Yousaf, the former first minister of Scotland, has accused Musk of scouring through his private DMs in a campaign to “besmirch” his reputation. Yousaf described the owner of X and Tesla as “one of the most dangerous men on the planet.”

+ Meanwhile, JD Vance has threatened European leaders that the US will withdraw from NATO if they impose regulations on Musk’s corporate operations in Europe–which, all things considered, probably isn’t the best way for the US to finally get out of NATO. Vance also said that “Germany and other nations” will have to finance the reconstruction of Ukraine, not Russia. A government of, by and for the peop…uh…Elon.

+ Good luck filling these jobs after the Great Deportation…

+++

Biden, 2020: “Nothing fundamental will change.”

+ Did Neville Chamberlain yuk it up like this with Hitler at Munich in late September 1938?

+ How disinterested and lax have the Democrats become? Senate Democrats have yet to confirm Biden’s last NLRB nomination, even though this would maintain a Democratic majority on the board through late 2026.

+ I speculated in my column last week that the premature unwinding of Medicaid may have contributed to Harris’s defeat in some battleground states. Now, there are some numbers to back this up. Consider that in Pennsylvania, for every vote that Harris lost by, 3.5 people lost their Medicaid coverage during the great unwinding. In Wisconsin, the ratio was 5.5:1; in Michigan, it was 6.5:1. (h/t Artie Vierkant for crunching the math.)

+ Stephen Semler assembled these revelatory polling numbers…

Biden approval rating after passing the American Rescue Plan: 57% (highest of the entire term)

Biden approval after most pandemic aid programs expired: 43%

Biden approval after all pandemic aid programs expired: 37%

+ In 2025, when Obamacare subsidies are set to expire, millions of Americans are projected to lose their health care. What a top-to-bottom scam Obamacare turned out to be.

+ John Oliver on the persistent calls that the Democrats must migrate even further to the right: “If what you want is a centrist campaign that’s quiet on trans issues, tough on the border, distances itself from Palestinians, talks a lot about law and order, and reaches out to moderate Republicans, that candidate existed and she just lost.”

+ Since Clinton, the Democrats have been willing to sacrifice 100,000 votes to curry the favor of one banker or CEO. Ultimately, they ran out of votes to offer on Wall Street’s sacrificial altar.

+ Julie Roginsky, Democratic strategist, on CNN: “Hey college kids, if you’re trashing a Columbia University campus over some sort of policy…” What a strange way to admit that the genocide was a policy…

+ Before he started droning American citizens, Obama won the Democratic nomination and was elected president by running against the Iraq war. Kamala Harris lost to Trump by running with the people who instigated it.

+ James Zogby: “[Liz Cheney] accused [Obama] of being a traitor. Why? Because he criticized torture — which was her father’s thing. At what point does this person become somebody who’s going to win votes for us?”

+ If there was a single issue Harris stayed somewhat consistent on during the campaign, it was reproductive rights, which she undercut by going out on the road with an anti-abortion zealot like Liz Cheney.

+ Biden has issued the fewest pardons and clemencies (26) of any president in modern times and The Atlantic is pushing for him to give one to…Liz Cheney?

+ Biden, Pelosi and Harris seem to have missed the announcement about the Brown Acid circulating at the DNC…

+ Harris had the worst performance with the youth vote since John “I was for the war before I was against it” Kerry…

Harris: +12

Biden: +24

Clinton: +19

Obama: +23

Obama: +34

Kerry: +9

+ In 2009, during the debates over whether to bailout GM and Chrysler, the man many Obama staffers, including David Axelrod (who often speaks for the Man himself), want to become the new head of the DNC, erupted during a meeting over the entirely sensible demands the autoworkers should have a say: “Fuck the UAW!” That Axelrod would really prefer Rahm Emanuel over Shawn Fain tells you a lot about why the Democrats are in such a wrecked state and why their recovery looks very doubtful, indeed.

+ David Axelrod:  “Dems need a strong and strategic party leader, with broad experience in comms; fundraising and winning elections. One thought I surfaced … is Ambassador Rahm Emanuel. There may be others, but he is kind of sui genesis: Dude knows how to fight and win!”

+ If Rahm lands the job, it will be another case of the Democrats committing “suicide right on the stage…”

+ Rebuffing calls from liberal Democrats, Justice Sonya Sotomayor, who is 70 and a severe diabetic who often travels with a nurse, says she has no plans to step down from the court and allow Biden to nominate a new justice. So, nothing was learned from the Ruth Bader Ginsberg debacle. The Supreme Court has been lost for a generation, not that it ever represented much of a force for progressive values or even a fail-safe for the rights of minorities and the poor. For most of its history, it’s been the most reactionary branch of government, a guardian of power, property (including humans as property), and economic privilege.

+++

The Earth endured its second warmest October in the last 175 years and is on its way to its warmest year on record.

+ Ilham Aliyev, president of Azerbaijan, which is hosting the latest global climate conference (CO29), called reports of his country’s soaring carbon emissions “fake news” and said that nations should not be blamed for developing and using fossil fuels like coal, oil and natural gas, which Aliyev said were “God’s gifts.” At least Aliyev showed up, unlike some of the leaders of the world’s biggest emitters, including Biden, Macron and Modi.

+ Mark this ignominious distinction down on the Biden-Harris legacy: Despite the lofty pledges by Western nations at COP28 last year, global carbon emissions have hit new highs, and there is no sign of a transition away from fossil fuels.

+ According to a new study in Nature, the emissions from private flights by rich people increased by 46% between 2019 and 2023: 70% of these flights came from the US, and half were shorter than 500 kilometers–in other words, the Democrats’ new base…

+ Even though the kill quota set by the state of Montana had already been filled, a fifth Yellowstone wolf has been killed just north of the Park, all five from the same pack. Three more are missing.

+ I spent much of the last week in Astoria, Oregon, at an aging hotel on the waterfront docks, about a quarter mile away from a vast log loading yard for NW Forest Link, a log export company, which manages the storage and loading of timber cut in the Pacific Northwest onto giant cargo ships bound for Asia before the logs have been sawn in American mills by American workers. On this rainy November weekend, the caterpillars, log loaders, and trucks were working round the clock to fill the cargo holds of the Pan Nova, a 700-foot long, 100-foot wide ship flagged in Panama. Despite the MAGA movement, the US continues to export nearly $3 billion in raw logs a year and thousands of jobs, mainly to China, Japan, Canada, South Korea, and Vietnam. The Pan Nova started its voyage north from Los Angeles harbor, docked in Astoria, gobbled up thousands of logs of Doug-fir, redcedar and Western hemlock, then departed up the Pacific Coast to Grays Harbor in Washington’s Olympic Peninsula to cart off even more of the ravaged temperate rainforests of the Northwest.

+ Trump selected climate denier Lee Zeldin to head the EPA, which the Trump team has vowed to move out of DC. This is not a bad idea. They should move it to Cancer Alley. Zeldin said his priorities will be “to restore US energy dominance, revitalize our auto industry to bring back American jobs, and make the US the global leader of AI.” None of these have much to do with the mission of the agency he is poised to run.

+++

+ Walter Benjamin’s 13 rules for writing…

+ Of course, if you’re in a rush, you can set ChatGtp to Benjamin mode, which is almost guaranteed to generate its own “death mask of conception.”

+++

Booked Up
What I’m reading this week…

You Can’t Please All: Memoirs 1980-2024
Tariq Ali
(Verso)

When the Ice is Gone: What a Greenland Ice Core Reveals About Earth’s History and Perilous Future
Paul Bierman
(Norton)

Karla’s Choice: a John LeCarré Novel
Nick Harkaway
(Penguin/Random House)

Sound Grammar
What I’m reading this week…

Complex Emotions
The Bad Plus
(Mack Ave.)

Songs of a Lost World
The Cure
(Capitol/Polydor)

Last Leaf on the Tree
Willie Nelson
(Sony)

Welcome to the Psycho Stage of Late-Capitalism…

The Liberals and the Con Man

“Liberals had nine years to decipher Mr. Trump’s appeal — and they failed. The Democrats are a party of college graduates, as the whole world understands by now, of Ph. D.s and genius-grant winners and the best consultants money can buy. Mr. Trump is a con man straight out of Mark Twain; he will say anything, promise anything, do nothing. But his movement baffled the party of education and innovation. Their most brilliant minds couldn’t figure him out.”–  Thomas Frank

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