The Brooklyn Rail

As Trump begins to name his rogue’s gallery of new appointments—the undead Stephen Miller as deputy Chief-of-Staff for policy, election-denier Elise Stefanik as ambassador to the United Nations, Lee Zeldin (who wants to gut all climate rules) to run the Environmental Protection Agency, Tom Homan as mass deportation czar, canine assassin Kristi Noem as Secretary of Homeland Security (it was nearly Marjorie Taylor Green!), and RFK Jr. to “go wild on health” (he has said one of the first things he’d do is fire 600 scientists from the National Institutes of Health)—many Democrats are busy taking the wrong lessons from their defeat, including that they need to turn away from their more progressive ideas. Thank goodness some historians are leavening this reactionary doom scrolling with actual analyses of the structural reasons for this election outcome. Heather Cox Richardson on Jon Stewart’s podcast provided one of the best tonics to all this Democratic avoidance with her measured response, as has Timothy Snyder, and Rachel Maddow in her history books and podcasts.

History is the hedge against the current Age of Amnesia. In Trump’s first term in office, at least six of his cabinet officials were tied up in corruption scandals and, in some cases, criminal investigations, and four of them were forced out of office in disgrace. This included Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke, Secretary of Transportation Elaine Chao, Secretary of Labor Alex Acosta, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, Secretary of Health and Human Services Tom Price, Secretary of Energy Rick Perry, and Secretary of Veterans Affairs Robert Wilkie. Numerous veterans groups called for the latter’s dismissal at the time, and Trump is now set to bring Wilkie back, to lead his transition efforts.

It should also be pointed out that a number of Trump’s former cabinet officials later said Trump was unfit for office, including Vice President Mike Pence, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis, and Attorney General Bill Barr, in addition to White House Chief of Staff John Kelly.

Elon Musk is the Joker at Mar-a-Lago, and the Joker is wild. With Elon, Trump now has control of information and the government—a deadly authoritarian combination. And Musk is reportedly having a voice in the selection of Trump’s cabinet and he and Vivek Ramaswamy are going to head DOGE (you know, like the cryptocurrency Dogecoin that Musk promotes), the Department of Government Efficiency, which will “operate outside the confines of government,” but will “create an entrepreneurial approach” to government. Kara Swisher says the Musk-Trump relationship will not end well, but it could do a tremendous amount of damage and lead to massive corruption before that.

For his part, Ramaswamy has proposed to begin by eliminating the Education Department, the FBI and the IRS, cutting the federal work force by 75% in a mass layoff, and slashing foreign aid to Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan.

To this end, Trump is taking steps to eventually eliminate all checks and balances in the US government, but so far, they are still there. Trump is refusing to sign a bipartisan ethics agreement for the transition, and is demanding that the new leader of the senate must agree to allow all of Trump’s appointments to be Recess Appointments, so the senate would not vote on any of them. This is what Alexander Hamilton said about such a move:

He would be both ashamed and afraid to bring forward, for the most distinguished or lucrative stations, candidates who had no other merit than that of coming from the same State to which he particularly belonged, or of being in some way or other personally allied to him, or of possessing the necessary insignificance and pliancy to render them the obsequious instruments of his pleasure. ¹

That’s what Trump wants us all to become: the obsequious instruments of his pleasure.

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And once again, Independent congressman Bernie Sanders came through as a clear voice of dissent, with this opening statement, “The results of the 2024 election have confirmed a reality that is too frequently denied by the Democratic Party leaders and strategists: The American working class is angry—and for good reason. . . . Donald Trump won this election because he tapped into that anger. . . . The Democrats lost this election because they ignored the justified anger of working-class America and became the defenders of a rigged economic and political system.” And he quoted the president of the Painters Union to say, “The party did not make a positive case for why workers should vote for them, only that they were not Donald Trump. That’s not good enough anymore!”

That was my error. I did think that was good enough, this time. I also thought, as Heather Cox Richardson did, that Harris/Walz had a real shot at ushering in a new progressive era, building on the considerable accomplishments of the Biden/Harris administration on behalf of the working class. HCR also recognized that a lot of the people who voted for Trump were angry about things that weren’t true, based on the mis- and disinformation gushing from a seriously compromised communications environment.

I was in Philadelphia at the Democratic National Convention on July 26, 2016, when 120 Bernie delegates walked out of the convention after the Roll Call vote. We interviewed one of these delegates, named Carmen Hulbert, from Red Hook, Brooklyn. A Peruvian immigrant, she was the co-founder of Latinos for Bernie, NY. When she was elected as a national delegate for the Seventh Congressional District in Brooklyn, she mounted a GoFundMe campaign to raise the money to travel to Philadelphia.

As Carmen spoke about what had just happened in the convention hall, she began to cry, out of frustration and disappointment. “The Revolution belongs to us,” she said through tears. “We started this movement, inspired by Bernie, but he chose to give our votes away, to Hillary Clinton. She is a substandard candidate, so Trump will win. I cannot vote for her.”

We will never know what would have happened in a Sanders vs. Trump campaign, but I have thought of Carmen Hulbert often during the subsequent rise of Trump.