Trump’s Nutty Nominations

Let me be clear. While I have never voted for President-elect Trump, I sincerely wish him well as he assumes the Presidency of the United States of America next month.

The nation and the world desperately need America to do well. We need America to do well domestically and, especially, abroad. I will acknowledge Trump’s successes and hope there are no, or very few, statecraft failures while he is at the helm. While I may think Trump has made some nutty nominations to be in his inner circle, they are, nonetheless, his nominations to make.

That said, his judgment, as reflected by his initial selections to cabinet posts and other high positions in the forthcoming Trump Administration, suggests ample cause for concern. How in the world could one even begin to justify Trump’s nutty initial, but since withdrawn, selection of Matt Gaetz to become Attorney General of the United States, or, for that matter, nutty vaccine-denier Robert Kennedy Jr. to become Secretary of Health and Human Services, or Pete Hegseth, who has administered nothing, to become Secretary of Defense, our largest federal agency, or Trump sycophant Kash Patel to head the FBI, or Linda McMahon, who is alleged to have knowingly allowed, if not enabled, the exploitation of children when she and her husband ran World Wrestling Entertainment to lead the Department of Education. What commended any of these top personnel selections to these extraordinarily high offices other than their total loyalty to Donald Trump? That is a question historians will be pondering for many years.

The selection by Trump of Kash Patel to head the FBI has only one redeeming value: his fanatical loyalty to the President-elect. Listen to Patel: “We will go out and find the conspirators,” he told Steve Bannon during an interview; “not just in government but in the media — yes, we’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections.” This is from the man Trump has selected to become the nation’s top criminal investigator, if not the nation’s top inquisitor.

Then there is Trump’s poke-in-the-eye selection of vaccine-denier Robert Kennedy Jr. to lead, of all agencies, the Department of Health and Human Services. Although Kennedy now denies he is a vaccine denier, his long and well-documented anti-vaccine crusade says otherwise. Just last year, he claimed, “There’s no vaccine that is safe and effective,” and told Fox News that he still believes in the long-ago debunked idea that vaccines cause autism. In a podcast two years ago, he urged people to resist Center for Disease Control guidelines on when kids should get vaccines.

“I see somebody on a hiking trail carrying a baby, and I say to him, better not get them vaccinated,” Kennedy bragged. Two years ago, in an anti-vaccine video campaign, Kennedy declared, “If you’re not an anti-vaxxer, you are not paying attention.” The World Health Organization has estimated that global immunization efforts have saved no less than 154 million lives in the last half-decade. A recent study of verified Twitter (now X) accounts found that Kennedy’s account on the website was the top “super-spreader” of vaccine misinformation. Kennedy’s anti-vaccine nonsense was responsible for 13% of all re-shares of misinformation, which was more than three times the second most-retweeted account of misinformation on X. There is mounting evidence that anti-vaccination misinformation is having a profound effect on people’s willingness to have their children vaccinated. Dr. Peter Hotez, co-director of the Texas Children's Hospital Center for Vaccine Development and dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine, says he's worried that COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy has spilled over into hesitancy towards other childhood vaccines. There have been more measles outbreaks this year than last year, and there has been a five-fold increase in whooping cough cases this year compared to the previous year, according to CDC data. Dr. Hotez says this sad statistic indicates that parents are becoming increasingly vaccine-hesitant.

According to the CDC, 277 measles cases were reported in 30 states in 2024—more than four times the number last year—with 16 outbreaks this year compared to four outbreaks in 2023. An estimated 96% of measles cases this year were not fully vaccinated. According to CDC data, whooping cough cases are at the highest levels this year since 2014.

For the fourth year, kindergarten vaccinations dipped in the 2023-2024 school year, failing to meet the 95% threshold needed to prevent a single infection from sparking an outbreak. The last time the nation’s protective threshold was reached was pre-pandemic, during the 2019-2020 school year.

"Now you put someone like Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the nation's most prominent, well-known anti-vaccine activist, at the top of Health and Human Services, and I don't see how these things improve,” Dr. Hotez said. “If anything, they could start to decline even further. So, I worry about further erosion in the number of kids vaccinated in the U.S."

Pete Hegseth’s nomination to head the Department of Defense seems tenuous. Hegseth is a National Guard veteran who has served honorably in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Guántanamo Bay. President-elect Trump should be given wide latitude in selecting his cabinet and inner circle, provided his choices are competent and responsible.

However, Hegseth, who is currently a Fox News commentator, has, according to press reports, had a long-standing drinking problem. While he has reportedly been inebriated on occasion at various events, that does not necessarily make him an alcoholic. Assuming Hegseth likes to tie one on occasionally, that needn’t be disqualifying. If, however, he has a hard-to-control drinking problem, he should be disqualified. There is also a lingering controversy about whether a sexual encounter for which he reportedly paid a financial settlement was or was not consensual. These issues will be resolved during the confirmation process if Trump continues to press forward with the Hegseth nomination. If Hegseth can come through the forthcoming Senate hearings relatively unscathed, which seems a tall order, Trump is entitled to have him in his cabinet.

While many political observers do not consider these nominees impressive, if they remain standing following the Senate’s due diligence, they are the people President-elect Trump has chosen for his inner circle. We must hope they serve him and the nation well.

Then there is the strange appointment of Trump loyalist Tulsi Gabbard as Director of National Intelligence. This is an appointment Trump is apt to regret. Tulsi Gabbard, an apologist for Syrian Strongman Bashar al-Assad, whose regime seems to be collapsing as I write this column, is either chronically misinformed or is, herself, an intentional misinformer, according to the historian Timothy Snyder. Snyder writes that in 2015, Gabbard was selling the line to girls who a Syrian airstrike had severely burned, that they had really been attacked by Syrian rebels and not the Syrian regime in Damascus. That isn’t true, according to Snyder. In 2015, the Syrian rebels could not carry out such an airstrike. Besides, ruthlessly bombing opponents of the Syrian regime has been a major Assad priority during the civil war. Snyder says Gabbard is worse than unfit for the job Trump is giving her. Her public record, he says, is as a disinformer and apologist for mass murder. “There is nothing on the other side of the ledger. There are no positive qualifications,” Snyder insists.

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Recent podcasts have featured my commentary on Liz Cheney’s book, “Oath and Honor,” as well as my commentaries regarding:

U.S. Representative Jim Jordan,

Brian Kemp and Those Republicans of Georgia,

The Trump Indictments,

The Fox Corp Settlement,

The CNN Trump Town Hall,

The Hunter Biden plea deal,

The New American Cult of Personality,

and my interviews with William Bratton, Retired Chief of Police in New York City, Los Angeles, and Boston;

Rikki Klieman, Attorney, Network News Analyst, and best-selling author;

John Thoresen, Executive Director, Barbara Sinatra Children’s Center;

Katherine Gehl, co-author of The Politics Industry and founder of the Institute for Political Innovation;

Jazz artist Ann Hampton Callaway;

Outlander author Diana Gabaldon;

AI Data Scientist Lawrence Kite;

Ryan Clancy, Chief Strategist of No Labels;

Former Senator Barbara Boxer;

Former Senator Joe Lieberman;

and former Maryland Governor Larry Hogan.

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