Trump's Nominations So Far Proving His Determination to Destroy Our Institutions
I lived in Russia for 28 years. Weak institutions brought the world Putin, and this is what is in store for us now - get ready.
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My public service announcement ends. Now, onto the meat and potatoes. Donald Trump hasn’t yet assumed power, and already he is wrecking our government. If you don’t believe me, look at what the NY Post wrote yesterday about Trump’s choice to head the Health and Human Services Department, Robert “a worm ate part of his brain” Kennedy:
“Donald Trump won on promises to fix the economy, the border and soaring global disorder; his team needs to focus on delivering change on those fronts — not spend energy either having to defend crackpot theories or trying to control RFK Jr.’s mouth,” the board wrote.
“We fear the worm that he claims ate some of his brain some years ago is contagious and there’s been an outbreak at Mar-a-Lago,” the board concluded (NY Post on Trump Cabinet Pick).
Let me ask the question: Did the NY Post think it would be any different? Were they paying attention? Unfortunately, like most on the right, they spent all of their time hating Kamala Harris and Biden and no time listening to Trump’s insanity. The Donald said he was going to do these things, and now people are finding it shocking, or, in the words of the NY Post, a head-scratching spaghetti of what we can only call warped conspiracy theories.
Trump’s choice for the defense secretary is his favorite weekend news anchor on “Fox and Friends.” His choice for attorney general is even more disturbing, the ex-respresentative from Florida and child molestor Matt Gaetz. Project 25 called for the removal of non-Trump loyalists from the federal bureaucracy. It seems that the expected purge won’t need to take place, after all, if Trump keeps choosing completely inexperienced if not incompetent MAGA loyalists. Gaetz should be in jail, but Trump is preparing to make him the most powerful law enforcement officer in the nation.
In the history of Cabinet appointees, Gaetz would almost certainly be the worst. He is friendly with members of the Proud Boys, even though his department is supposed to serve as a defense against treasonous paramilitary groups. He invited a Holocaust denier to attend the State of the Union as his guest, even though his department is charged with hunting Nazis. The organization he stands poised to lead once investigated him for sex trafficking, before apparently concluding that it didn’t have a sufficiently strong case. In his quest to destroy institutions, Gaetz shamelessly manufactures controversy, invents conspiracy theories, and traffics in ridicule. As the ultimate Trump fanatic, he will gleefully execute the president’s orders, even if those orders destroy the foundations of the justice system.
To the civil servants mulling their future, Gaetz is a clarifying choice. Although some courageous bureaucrats will stay in their job, committed to preserving the institutions they revere, his nomination will also trigger a rush to the doors. Many will arrive at the quite reasonable conclusion that remaining in their job would be soul-sapping, morally corrosive, and futile (Already Destroying the Government).
When institutions become compromised, as we have seen on the right, almost nothing can be said or done to change the views people form. Especially when the cult leader, in the case of MAGA, spends his every waking moment casting doubt on them. Trump’s assault on every institution that used to be the bedrock of the nation’s democratic foundation has been ongoing since he first took office in 2017.
He attacked the FBI for investigating him for ties to Russia; he challenged the election results even though he won. Throughout his presidency, he challenged the existence of every institutional guardrail put in place by the Founding Fathers and others over the centuries that prevented him from becoming a dictator. Then, when the pandemic “made him look bad,” he challenged Health and Human Services and claimed it was politicized against him. Finally, as the election neared and it looked like he could lose, he went after the US Postal Service to show that he could not be trusted to deliver the mail-in ballots, and then he launched the great voter fraud lie of 2020, which led us to where we are today.
All of this lying and defrauding of his base has been done to destroy the institutions that had worked perfectly in preventing him from becoming a dictator. Donald Trump, in the service of Donald Trump, is willfully destroying the underpinnings of our democracy to give him unconditional power. With SCOTUS fully compromised and a trifecta majority of the White House and the Congress, there is nothing that can stop Trump from turning us into Putin’s Russia.
As many readers know, I lived in Russia for a long time — from 1994 to February 2022. I watched as the country struggled to find itself in the post-Soviet era. I watched the early and sometimes ugly stages of democracy taking hold. I then watched as Boris Yeltsin handed over the government to Vladimir Putin, who then systematically rebuilt the entire system in his image. He destroyed the institutions that by 2000 had started to gain independence from the ever-changing government by placing loyalists in the leading positions. He empowered the bureaucracy to steal from the people so long as it remained loyal to him.
By removing the just influence of the institutions in society and making them merely puppets in his grand theater, Putin turned Russia into a playground in which oligarchs ruled. The main and most powerful oligarch in Russia is Putin himself. Every Russia knows that money will always win out over what’s right. They also know that the institutions supposed to serve them exist to protect only the interests of one man, Vladimir Putin. Because of this situation in Russia, Russia is a weak and cowardly society, and that is why Russians were not able to fight against the war of genocide in Ukraine. Today, Russia’s schools have been compromised, and there is no independent thought, and Russia ignorantly stumbles in reverse.
This is now our future.
Sadly, most MAGidiots can’t even imagine this scenario. They actually think they are freer today than ever. Oh, how masterfully Trump has duped them!