The most asked political question today is why do Senate Republicans support Trump’s unqualified and dangerous cabinet picks. The most common answer –they fear being primaried by a challenger backed by Trump and financed by Elon Musk. The take-away is clear. The intimidated Senate Republicans are willing to endanger Americans’ health, risk a nuclear crisis, and sacrifice our Democracy to keep their jobs.
Ironically, their obedience to Trump and lack of courage and conscience are likely to be the catalysts for losing their jobs and replacing them with candidates that are not aligned with or puppets of Donald Trump.
Many voters are alarmed – even panic stricken — at Trump’s extreme behavior, such as his handing authority to unelected and unconfirmed Elon Musk to take actions that violate the laws of Congress. The callers include farmers, small business owners and people who have never called their representatives before. They’ve called to say they’re troubled by threats to freeze federal funds, and don’t understand how Musk has been granted access to sensitive information even though he’s never been granted security clearance. Musk commandeered the White House Office of Personnel Management and sent out legally questionable emails pressuring more than two million federal employees to either quit or retire.
Rep. Chellie Pingree from Maine agrees with them, “you should not have an unelected billionaire shutting down departments of government, making spending cuts, deciding issues of international health or domestic education or any of the things that he’s involved in doing.” Issues around spending should be going through Congress, which controls the government’s purse strings. Instead, Trump has cast laws and rules to the wind and forced his priorities by doing “whatever it takes to get what they want.” Indeed, spending a quarter-billion dollars on Trump’s reelection campaign has allowed Elon Musk to buy the federal government.
Here are the unqualified and dangerous nominees Republicans are supporting. Start with Pete Hegseth whose been confirmed as Secretary of Defense. Trump’s last Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Milley, had to stop Trump from misusing our nuclear arsenal in the last month of his presidency, and had to call the head of China’s military to assure him there was no such plan in order to avoid a crisis. Who will be there to stop him next time? Fox News co-host Pete Hegseth who promises to purge all generals who push back on Trump’s decisions. So if Trump reaches for the button again, his Secretary of Defense will cheer him on. Hegseth also urges conservatives to “crush our leftist opponents”, to “attack first” and end their “sedition,” and threatens to unleash the military on our enemies if Democrats win an election. Hegseth also has a history of drunkenness. So, if Republicans bend to Trump’s threat, America’s Secretary of Defense may well be drunk during a military crisis.
Next is Kash Patel, Trump’s choice to head the FBI. That institution
has saved countless lives and arrested millions of criminals and stopped millions of crimes from being committed, such as murder, drug trafficking, child sex trafficking, cyber-attacks and kidnaping. But Kash Patel will end all that because he picked Patel to castrate the FBI and use its agents to hunt down immigrants, target his enemies, the free press, FBI agents who don’t follow his retribution agenda, and jail President Biden for cheating to win the presidency in 2020 – all without a scintilla of evidence. Patel has vowed to purge the FBI of all employees who refuses to cooperate. Patel is good news for the criminals because there won’t me enough agents left to pursue them. Moreover, Patel will diminish domestic and international respect and trust in the FBI, which will cost it the essential international cooperation it need to fight crime here and abroad and access to qualified employees.
Then there’s RFK, Jr who Trump picked to run the Department of Health. He grossly exaggerates — even invents — the side effects of proven vaccines, and is bent on limiting their use. He had his lawyer petition the government to revoke the approval of the polio vaccine – a vaccine that protected millions from a virus that paralyzes and kills. He discourages the use of the Covid vaccine with his false claims that they cause autism, even though unvaccinated adults were 97 times more likely to die from COVID-19 than fully vaccinated. According to the Center for Disease Control the death rate among the vaccinated is 5 times lower than among the unvaccinated. Astonishingly, Trump announced that he’ll “let RFK Jr. go wild on health … and medicines,” and allow him to, as RFK, Jr. has promised, to purge entire groups from the Health Department if necessary to carry out his agenda.
Add to that Republican support of Trump’s tariffs in the face of sixteen Nobel Prize economists’ warnings that they’ll “reignite’’ rampant inflation. The Peterson Institute predicts that, in addition to his tariffs, his mass deportation will lead to a labor shortage that will increase wage inflation and drive consumer prices up by as much as 9% from nearly the 2% they plummeted to last year under Biden.
Perhaps inflation will be the most powerful motive to replace Trump’s Republican puppets with rational and courageous Senators.
