Many Trump dubious cabinet nominations unlikely to be confirmed

by Vijaya Chandrasoma

I would like to explain why I continue writing so shamelessly about a subject about which recent events have proved I know next to nothing.

In my defense, the news I have reported over the years has been always been based on facts and the traditional “reliable sources”. Unfortunately, my opinions and predictions have been personal and out of touch with the current political and social climate prevailing in the United States, which has changed substantially since the turn of the century.

I had little interest in politics in the USA during the two decades I lived there. We spent the 90s struggling for survival, doing menial jobs, which is the lot of most immigrants without American educational qualifications and work experience. But by the time I decided to retire in Sri Lanka 20 years later, we had achieved the one ambition that mattered to us. Our children had grasped the wonderful educational opportunities available during the Clinton years to kids who were prepared to work hard, as mine were. They have been amply rewarded for their efforts.

My imagination was captured by the noble aspirations of Senator Barack Obama, an African-American who, in 2008, was shooting for the skies, against all odds. I was a valued volunteer in the Obama presidential campaign office in Phoenix, Arizona, performing such vital tasks as licking stamps and answering telephones in my thick Sri Lankan accent. When Obama was elected the first black president in US history, I, like many an American, was elated that my adopted country had finally turned the racist corner. Man, were we wrong!

I retired in Sri Lanka after the war at home ended in 2009. I had little interest in Sri Lankan politics, though I was struck with grief and disgust at the way our politicians were stealing our beautiful island blind, robbing from the poorest of the poor. But like many self-serving dilettantes of the privileged class, able to comfortably weather these deteriorating economic conditions, my social conscience was conspicuous in its cynical absence.

In any event, I dared not protest against the corrupt politicians in “power”, who held no brook with those who attempted to publicly exercise their constitutional rights of free speech including publication, armed as they were with their own extra-military goon-squads and the infamous “white vans”. Journalism in Sri Lanka was not, in those days, the healthiest of occupations.

I have every confidence that, prayerfully not too late, we have finally replaced a series of crooked governments since Independence with a patriotic leader and a party of politicians intent only on the country’s prosperity and not on their own. A government elected with enormous goodwill, with the hope that a nation with great resources, human and natural, will be administered competently to finally reach its full potential.

With the kind of integrity, discipline and national pride that has transformed Singapore, a shanty town in the 1960s, to one of the most advanced, prosperous city-states in the world, Sri Lanka in the 1950s was one of the richest of British colonies. We could have surpassed Singapore if we had our own Lee Kwan Yew, who once famously said. “I had to choose between democracy and discipline. I chose discipline”.

There is every hope that our present leader will be that Sri Lankan Lee Kwan Yew, even 70 years too late, who will also choose ruthless discipline against international-scale corruption, political extravagance and departmental wastage, the disgusting hallmark of every past Sri Lankan government, which had reached a crescendo of corruption in the new century.

Democracy is a luxury we can enjoy after we have set our house in order. Just like Singapore, a vibrant, prosperous, disciplined democracy today.

So long as President Obama was rescuing the USA from the near economic recession he inherited from the younger Bush, and doing so with competence, grace, compassion, without a trace of political or personal scandal; and so long as my adopted home was progressing inexorably towards its final destination of that Shining City on a Hill, I found no need to express my thoughts on paper.

Until the nation hit a roadblock, when the despicable Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton, probably the most qualified candidate in history, for the presidency in 2016. An election that proved conclusively that America remained a deeply racially and ideologically polarized nation. In a perverse sort of way, we should thank Trump and the Republican Party for exposing how Americans really feel, which is far removed from the sanctimonious bull shit they have been feeding the world over the years.

I felt compelled to write, for my own pleasure, an essay about the disaster that my adopted home had wrought upon itself. I sent this essay to my aunt, Ms. Vijita Fernando, distinguished Gratiaen Prize winning journalist/author, who had spoilt me relentlessly since I was in my early teens. She encouraged me to submit this essay to my old friend, the editor of the Sunday Island, who, to my surprise, published it. So at age 75, I became a “journalist”, and enjoyed the heady emotion of seeing my name in print. Writing also provided me with the occupational therapy that helped me occupy my time with a pastime I had always enjoyed.

Donald Trump had inherited a booming economy from President Obama, with 75 weeks of consecutive economic growth and the lowest unemployment rate in decades. I will not repeat details of Trump’s disastrous first term, with enormous tax cuts to benefit the wealthiest, moronic claims that climate change was a hoax and deregulation of environmental pollution laws imposed by President Obama; criminal mismanagement of the Covid pandemic which cost over 650,000 American lives; these were just the “highlights”.

I continued writing on a regular basis about Trump’s criminal misadventures, and when the US electorate came to its senses and dumped him in 2020 in a landslide, and elected President Biden, my relief was palpable. I published a book (for friends and family, not for sale, you may call it an ego trip), which ended with the speech of Oliver Cromwell, on the forcible expulsion of the corrupt and duplicitous Rump Parliament in England in 1653. The last words of that speech were:

“Go, get you out! Make haste! Ye venal slaves be gone! So! Take that shining bauble there, and lock up the doors.

“IN THE NAME OF GOD GO!”

Most appropriate words for Trump and his neo-Nazi Republican cronies of 2020.

Only, those venal bastards didn’t go. Instead, the MAGA (Make America Great Again), white supremacist section of the Republican Party, incited by defeated but incumbent President Trump, tried to violently impede the peaceful transition of power, when a white supremacist mob stormed the Capitol. A felony of sedition. Trump left the White House without observing any of the traditional ceremonies for the changing of the presidential guard. In leaving, he stole boxes of top-secret documents which belonged to the National Archives. A felony of espionage.

The leaders of the Republican Party, who initially denounced Trump, and held him accountable for the crime of inciting the insurrection on January 6, endangering their own miserable lives and the lives of their Congressional colleagues, changed their tune, kissed the ring and made him their Supreme Leader.

So I decided to resume writing, with the ambition of compiling a second book when the criminal Trump, saddled with four indictments, 91 felonies, impending sociopathic dementia and dictatorial hallucinations, would surely be decisively defeated in the presidential election of 2024.

I was, yet again, proved spectacularly wrong. I had, yet again, shown my complete ignorance of the national psyche of the modern United States.

A totally different American electorate, one which voted against the incumbent Democratic administration purely because of high prices and inflation; which voted instead for a proven loser who led a Party which openly espoused a campaign of fear and racial hatred. An electorate too myopic to see that these current high prices and inflation were the result of the near recession that the Biden administration inherited, which had, after four long years, been brought under control by rational and bipartisan legislation. They paid no heed to the opinion of leading economists that the US economy was the strongest and the “envy of the world”. And would only get better.

Instead, they opted for an administration whose proposed economic policies of high tariffs and tax cuts for billionaires and corporations will only bring more grief to the working classes; and whose authoritarian, white supremacist policies will spell the end of democracy in the cradle of democracy.

Even women, who had been deprived of their reproductive freedoms by the most corrupt right wing Supreme Court in history; black males and Latinos, who had been the brunt of Trump’s obscene insults; they incredibly supported this obviously white supremacist authoritarian movement.

A movement financed by billionaires, led by the richest man in the world, Elon Musk, who had financed the Trump election campaign and has been his constant companion at Mar a Lago since the election, the honored family guest at Thanksgiving.

I will conclude this essay with a few undeniable facts. Trump’s felonious conduct is beyond doubt. He has been elected president for a second term, with a jail sentence and trials for felony charges for sedition, obstruction of justice and espionage hanging over him, which would have seen him languishing in federal prison for the rest of his life had he lost the election.

Trump’s selected cabinet is composed almost entirely of yes-men and women, singularly lacking in the morals, intelligence and qualifications, even the confidence of traditional allies, to manage the departments of the most powerful country on the world. Their only essential qualification – blind loyalty to Trump.

Trump’s nomination for Attorney General, depraved Congressman Matt Gaetz, was forced to withdraw his nomination when swirling allegations of sex trafficking and raping underage girls made his confirmation impossible by even Trump’s lapdog majority Senate.

His choice for Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, is a doozy. A marine who served two tours in Afghanistan and Iraq, his only “administrative” experience is as a weekend television host on Fox TV. He has numerous police charges for drunken and disorderly conduct, and sexual assault. Hegseth also believes that torture like waterboarding and war crimes are justified under certain circumstances, and women have no role in military combat. He flaunts a white supremacist tattoo on his body. A lifelong alcoholic, who his Fox colleagues say was often drunk on the job, he has sworn to lay off the booze if confirmed. He even got his mommy to plead on Fox TV that her son is “a changed man”, capable of running the largest bureaucracy in the nation, with three million employees worldwide and an annual budget of $850 billion. After all, he did promise to stay sober on the job.

Hegseth will probably not survive the confirmation process in even the most servile Senate in history. Nor will several other of Trump’s highly dubious cabinet choices : Kash Patel (FBI Director), Tulsi Gabbard (Director of National Intelligence), Robert F. Kennedy Jr (Health Secretary), to name just three. But not to worry, there are plenty more of those creepy nutcases around that Trump will ultimately get confirmed. All they’ll have to do to keep their jobs would be to nod.

President Biden had earlier indicated that he would not be using his presidential powers to pardon his son, Hunter, who had been on trial for two minor charges, committed when he was a drug addict. One, for tax evasion – the back taxes have since been fully paid, with late fees. Two, for the purchase of a gun while he was a drug addict, which was never used in the commission of a crime. A Class E felony, which would been dismissed with a slap on the wrist for a first offender, had his name been anything but Biden.

Hunter is completely sober today.

But President Biden, mindful of the retribution threatened by the Trump’s nominees for Attorney General, Pam Bondi and FBI Director, Kash Patel, against Trump’s imagined “enemies”, knew that Hunter would be tormented, and have the book thrown at him, to a maximum of 17 years’ jail time.

So President Biden lied, he undeniably abused his power and went back on his word to grant Hunter a full pardon. Which any father would have done for his son in a heartbeat.

As the saying goes, Democrats are expected to be flawless, while Republicans can be as lawless as they please. Biden’s pardon had the hypocritical Republicans screaming foul, claiming that he was guilty of gross abuse of power. Forgetting the traitors and fraudsters Trump had pardoned during his first term, and has promised to pardon in his second. They are insisting that, as a quid pro quo, Biden should pardon Trump for his conviction of 34 felonies, and other indictments of sedition, obstruction of justice and espionage, for which he is awaiting trial. The moral equivalent of pardoning a traitor as a quid pro quo for pardoning a jaywalker!

President Biden would be well advised to give advance pardons to himself, Special Counsel Jack Smith, Liz Cheney, Dr. Fauci and those named “enemies from within” like Nancy Pelosi and Adam Schiff that Trump has threatened to prosecute and imprison after his inauguration.

Trump has told us exactly what he’s going to do when he is in power, and Wannabe Hitler is not playing games. With white supremacists and neo-Nazi “strategists” like Jason Miller, Stephen Miller and Steve Bannon in Trump’s backroom, and a supporting cast of thousands of Christian nationalists and avaricious billionaires, America had better fasten its collective seatbelts.

The tragedy for the ages is that the majority of the citizens of the most educated, powerful and richest nation in the world has elected to be led, with the powers of a monarch, by a self-confessed white supremacist on the cusp of dementia, an illiterate, cruel wannabe dictator and a political party of violent Nazi Brownshirts.

Shades of the Third Reich in Germany in 1932, with the caricature American Hitler elected as the Fuhrer.

I hope I am wrong, as usual.