Inside The Farce Of Swaying Republican Senators On Trump’s Nominees

The “blockbuster” hearings on Donald Trump’s most unavoidably unfit Cabinet nominees feel completely hollow. 

Republicans have no interest in running afoul of Trump (look what happened to Joni Ernst), and Democrats are largely too demoralized and limp to execute a compelling campaign against the nominees.

The crusade against Pete Hegseth petered out into repetitive women in combat gotchas (which he was prepared for) while Republicans complimented him on his musculature. During the hearing last week, everyone seems either elated or resigned that he will likely be confirmed. 

I wondered if Kash Patel, Trump’s nominee for FBI director who comes with a handy (published) enemies list, would put any pressure on this dynamic. Unlike Hegseth, Patel, the son of Indian Gujarati immigrants, is not a MAGA avatar straight out of “central casting.” 

The signs are not encouraging. 

Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL), the soft-spoken chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, told a group of reporters Tuesday evening that he had met with Patel and would be voting against him. When asked what his most compelling argument to Republicans to vote against Patel would be, he said: “read the book,” holding aloft Patel’s “Government Gangsters,” a screed against the deep state. 

“That’s all I could say,” he added. “Anything else they would dismiss as being subjective.” 

When I followed up, asking whether Republican senators had voiced any qualms about Patel, he said they had “at first” but that he hadn’t followed up because he’s being “very careful” in a “delicate period of time.” 

This is the trap Democrats keep falling into. They don’t want to come out against a Trump nominee too aggressively, out of fear of alienating Republican fence-sitters. But in the same breath, they’ll tell you that Republicans aren’t actually open to listening to what they say, as they’re determined to pass Trump’s fealty tests. So Democrats land in a place where they can neither mount an aggressive campaign, perhaps at least incurring some cost to the Republicans senators and the Trump administration, nor have any hope of swaying their GOP colleagues to their side. 

So we end up where we are on Hegseth. Democrats have all but given up, and Republicans can embrace Trump’s darkest choices without even a chance that they’ll be made to feel uncomfortable about it.

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