Hello. It’s the weekend. This is The Weekender ☕️
It helps me to look at Trump’s most outrageous political appointments as opposites.
The top law enforcement job? Give it to a guy investigated for sex trafficking. Running the intelligence community? How about the Assad sympathizer. The Pentagon? Why not award it to a Fox News talking head. White House personnel? Have my vanity book publisher run it. Public health? A perfect fit for the anti-vaccine con artist.
This isn’t to earnestly click my tongue at these picks; he and they have their humor. Rather, the point is that each one has a quality that opposes the stated purpose of their assigned agency. The intention is not to fulfill the obligations of the office, but to make a show of installing someone who, by their nature, is totally incompatible with them.
It’s a strategy of destruction that picks up on a thread deep in the modern right. Last year, I was talking to one Republican operative familiar with some of the fringes of the right. A future Trump administration, this person said, would aim to subvert parts of the government by doing what they’re doing now: appointing people who have a incredibly obvious interest in undermining the agencies that they lead. There’s a kind of dopey nihilism to this, sure, but if you’re interested in reducing your tax bill, it’s helpful to sabotage the recipient.
It’s no accident, then, (vanity is a different question) that Steve Bannon calls himself a Leninist.
“Lenin wanted to destroy the state, and that’s my goal, too,” Bannon told The Daily Beast in 2013. “I want to bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today’s establishment.”
None of this is at odds with or unrelated to the main Trump imperative at play in these hires: personal loyalty. It’s all one thing: undermining independent, quality government serves both the right-wing goal of chipping away at the administrative state and of Trump’s goal in bringing the rest of it to heel.
Or, as Tucker Carlson purportedly said after the 2020 election, “what he’s good at is destroying things. He’s the undisputed world champion of that.”
— Josh Kovensky
Here’s what else TPM has on tap this weekend:
- Kate Riga reports on the status of the Pennsylvania Senate race a week and a half post-Election Day, after an automatic recount was triggered Wednesday.
- Khaya Himmelman provides an update on what election deniers are focused on now that Trump has won a second term in the White House: dismantling the voting and civil rights divisions of the DOJ.
- Emine Yücel checks in on the Republican member of Congress who is now referring to Trump as “daddy.”
— Nicole Lafond
A Week And A Half After Election Day, The Pennsylvania Senate Race Remains In Limbo
Pennsylvania Secretary of the Commonwealth Al Schmidt announced Wednesday that the race between Sen. Bob Casey (D-PA) and Republican David McCormick is close enough to trigger an automatic recount.
At that point, McCormick had a .4 percent lead over Casey, at under 25,000 votes. Schmidt said that the counties reported about 80,000 uncounted provisional and mailed ballots.
McCormick, in the meantime, has been trying to get various ballots that he suspects are friendly to Casey disqualified for technicalities. He did the opposite in 2022, when he was trailing Mehmet Oz and his lawyer implored a state judge to let people vote, “not to play games of ‘gotcha’ with them.”
Both men have been at the Hill this week; Casey, to carry out his Senate duties, and McCormick, to attend new member orientation. (Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) initially declined to invite McCormick until the race was settled, but bent to reported pressure from the right and from Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (I-AZ).)
The Associated Press continues to be an outlet on an island in calling the race for McCormick; no cable news network has yet followed suit.
— Kate Riga
Trump Allies Are Pushing Him To Dismantle DOJ
Former Trump adviser and election conspiracy theorist Cleta Mitchell proclaimed this week that “every lawyer” in the Voting Section of the Department of Justice “needs to be terminated.”
In a post on X this week, she wrote: “Every lawyer in the Voting Section and likely in the Civil Rights Division needs to be terminated. They are not supportive of Pres Trump or MAGA. There has to be a reckoning. These are leftwing activists who have come from and should return to their leftwing organizations.”
Mitchell, a longtime election denier and Trump adviser, is responsible for urging Trump to find nonexistent votes in Georgia that would help him overturn the results of the 2020 election.
David Levine, an election integrity consultant and former elections administrator, noted, in an interview with TPM, that what is so particularly threatening about Mitchell’s tweet, is that as someone familiar with election law and as a former lawmaker, Mitchell is “not just somebody throwing stones from the outside.”
“This is someone who has shown no hesitation to try and push the former president’s agenda, even if it’s potentially running out of the law,” he said. “And even though the former president won the 2024 presidential election fair and square, she’s now in a position to maybe do on the inside what she was only trying to do from the outside.”
The concern, of course, is that if Trump staffs election deniers like Mitchell at the Department of Justice, there are lots of big and concerning questions about what that would mean for the federal support that these agencies are providing.
“We need someone at the helm of the Justice Department who’s not afraid to bring cases when federal voting laws are violated,” he said.
“The career lawyers in the Civil Rights Division at DOJ have sworn oaths to enforce federal civil rights statutes no matter who’s in the White House, holding to account Rs and Ds and officials without partisan labels,” Justin Levitt, an election law scholar and professor at LMU Loyola Law School, Los Angeles, wrote on Bluesky. “And that, apparently, is exactly the problem for Cleta. She wants a goon squad.”
— Khaya Himmelman
Words Of Wisdom
“Daddy’s home. And things are gonna change. And we’re gonna go back to being a strong America.”
That’s Rep. Jeff Van Drew (R-NJ) on Newsmax this week reacting to Donald Trump securing himself a second term in the Oval Office.
You may have noticed we’ve been skipping out on “Words of Wisdom” in recent weeks. That’s mostly because I’ve been at a loss for words recently, in the wake of … recent events. Or more like at a loss for how to find humor in the GOP’s usual shenanigans. But in hopes of reminding myself and everyone else that even amid what feels like a ton of fear and sadness, we can still laugh at a grown man calling another grown man, who is in no way related to him, “daddy.”
— Emine Yücel
Maybe he’ll just stroke out in public and make our lives better.
People who were working two or three jobs to make ends meet during the Biden administration will soon be completely underwater.
The sh_t has gotten real.
“Daddy’s home. And things are gonna change. And we’re gonna go back to being a strong America.” Emine Yucel reads this, "…we can still laugh at a grown man calling another grown man, who is in no way related to him, ‘daddy.’”
But it made me think of the guy – I think it was Hegseth or maybe Tucker Carlson, or maybe each of them at different times – who went on a rant that included the importance of disciplining children (which, of course, parents and teachers on the “radical left” never do), including spanking them, and concluded his harangue, “The scariest words to a child are, ‘Just wait until your father gets home.’”
The man of the house returns from a hard day at work (well, maybe some time out for a sexual tryst – to be expected of a manly man), is greeted at the door by his devoted wife who, of course, has no work outside the home, and hears her report of the misbehavior and disobedience of one of their children (which she could not properly handle because, well, you know, the weaker sex). Daddy sets things right – things are gonna change --, marches to the errant child’s bedroom (where Mom has sent the recalcitrant child) and administers a good old-fashioned whooping. God’s in his heaven and all’s right with the world.
I’m with you on our lives would be better if Trump were to shuffle off this mortal coil, but that is offset by the ascension of president Vance. The low information cultists might disappear, but Trumpism is now GOP policy.