Hello and happy Saturday. We got our first peek at what the second Trump administration might look like this week, as the president-elect announced several Cabinet selections. And when we asked our Magic 8 Ball what to expect, it shook violently, dropped to the floor, and rolled into a dark corner.
Donald Trump has appointed a handful of experienced politicians to key positions, including Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York to serve as U.N. ambassador and Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida to be secretary of state. But Matt Gaetz, his nominee for attorney general, was at one point under federal investigation for sex trafficking. Tulsi Gabbard, his nominee for director of national intelligence, has shared Russian propaganda. Robert F. Kennedy, his nominee to head the Department of Health and Human Services, has a long history of vaccine skepticism and is unabashedly pro-choice. Pete Hegseth, his nominee to lead the Department of Defense, served in combat as a member of the National Guard, but he’s best known as a Fox News personality.
After Trump announced several of those nominations, Kevin argued that Rubio is joining the “Mount Rushmore of Putzes.” “None of these people has any meaningful experience relevant to the post in question,” he wrote. “Gaetz might be a threat to the intern pool, and Hegseth a threat to the general dignity of the U.S. government, such as it is, but Gabbard would represent a critical threat to U.S. national security in the role for which she has been selected.”
Jonah had a slightly different take, arguing that Gaetz is the worst pick:
America can handle a flibbertigibbet in the DNI’s office. It can handle a dangerous loon at HHS. It can even handle an anti-woke cable news host as defense secretary. But an attorney general whose only “qualification” is to be a MAGA version of the Hand of the King, makes the burden of handling those other things infinitely more burdensome. Gaetz would not see getting to the bottom of executive branch excesses as part of his portfolio—he would see defending and enabling those excesses as central to his mission.
Of course, these nominees need to be confirmed by the Senate, which made the contest to succeed Mitch McConnell as Senate majority leader all the more interesting. In The Morning Dispatch, we detailed how Sen. John Thune of South Dakota won out over Sens. John Cornyn and Rick Scott. Thune and Cornyn emerged as the favorites last spring when McConnell first announced he would step down from leadership after the 2024 election, but Scott quickly became the favored candidate of MAGA figures like Elon Musk and Tucker Carlson. Scott stated that he would acquiesce to Trump’s request for recess appointments, a process by which the president-elect could avoid the confirmation process for his Cabinet selections. Thune emerged victorious, and he’s seen as a “continuity pick” as one source TMD. But Thune has also vowed to be less “top-down” than McConnell and has invited input from rank-and-file members.
The Dispatch Politics team also reported on the kind of headaches the Gaetz confirmation process will cause for Thune and his Senate colleagues:
The four-term congressman is a firebrand in the House of Representatives, a mainstay on far-right media, and the leader of the successful effort last fall to eject Kevin McCarthy as House speaker.
But a bigger obstacle ahead for Gaetz’s confirmation may be his personal character and whether enough Republican senators will look past allegations of sexual misconduct.
The coming weeks and months will be … interesting. We appreciate your support, and we hope you know you can count on us to cover whatever craziness to come with the same sober approach we’ve taken to everything the last five years. If you are interested in better access to our work and would like the chance to hang out with us from time to time, we’ve launched a new subscription option: Dispatch Premium.
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Thanks for reading, and have a good weekend.
Be wary of reading too much into the election results, Yuval Levin writes in The Monday Essay. Donald Trump’s victory does not herald a significant Republican majority or reflect a policy agenda that voters care about. Ignoring the fact that many voters were voting against Kamala Harris, Levin writes, “People around Trump—even in the more distant reaches of his camp—are all inclined to think they’ve won a mandate for their pet cause even though voters have no idea who they are or what they want, and likely wouldn’t be on board if they did.” Traditional conservatives unhappy with the election result can take some comfort, he suggests—the lack of interest in policy from Trump supporters means his populism may not endure. But for now, conservatives have to recognize their place in the coalition. “Conservatives cannot abandon the right—and one look at the left will easily demonstrate that we have nowhere to go in any case,” he writes. “But conservatives must do a better job of understanding ourselves as a distinct faction on the right, with a strong claim on its direction.”
The Founding Fathers built competition and checks and balances into the Constitution for a reason—to keep any one branch from having too much power. The House “was intended to be the receptacle of democratic energy, one part town hall meeting and one part constitutional drunk tank,” Kevin writes in Wanderland—and it was supposed to be the accelerator of government, with the Senate and president applying the brakes. But now all of Congress is sluggish, and it has ceded too much power to the executive branch. Kevin writes: “And so, from the point of view of Adams, our republic is both upside down and out of balance: We are using the brake for an accelerator and the accelerator for a brake.”
Kamala Harris wasn’t the only loser on Election Day. Donald Trump’s sweep of the swing states and popular vote victory can be credited to a coalition of voters who are not traditional conservatives, and the future of Reagan conservatism in the GOP looks dim. Trump’s vice president, J.D. Vance, is a populist who favors industrial policy and big government but is skeptical about American involvement overseas. Will populism endure? David Drucker spoke to some Republicans who aren’t so sure: “‘The coalition is going to fray,’ one Republican operative predicted, explaining the GOP is currently made up of so many factions—on the right but not only on the right—that it will be nearly impossible to hold together under the strain of governing.”
Finally! Back when we launched The Dispatch, our goal was to make live events a feature of our business. COVID quashed that idea for a while, then a hurricane canceled another event we’d planned. But on Tuesday at the National Press Club, we hosted 300 of our members to hear what Mike Pence and Paul Ryan had to say about the election and the future of the GOP. Sarah interviewed Judge Jame Ho, a likely candidate for any Supreme Court opening that might arrive, and Steve talked to Steve Case, the founder of American Online. Check out the summary and stay tuned for announcements of future events.
Here’s the best of the rest.
- It was the inflation, folks. That’s what voters told pollsters about why they didn’t vote for Kamala Harris. In Capitolism, Scott Linciome looks back at the Biden administration’s poor spending choices at bad times and their subsequent failures to understand Americans’ concerns over high prices.
- The U.S. election will have repercussions outside our borders, of course. Charlotte reports on how Trump’s victory, combined with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s decision to fire Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, shakes up the Middle East.
- One big challenge for the new Congress will be the expiration of many provisions in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017. Alex Muresianu lays out which measures expire and what it will cost to reimplement them, and points out that many Americans could see their rates increase.
- On the pods: It’s an Advisory Opinions/Dispatch Podcast crossover! Sarah, David French and Steve discuss the Gaetz appointment in a special episode. On The Remnant, Jonah welcomes his old friend John Podhoretz of Commentary for some election punditry and a discussion of U.S.-Israeli relations, among other topics.
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