Trump’s Cabinet of Curiosities

 

 

 Jeffrey St. Clair >>>

It’s been a hallucinatory week, which I hope explains my momentary lapse of reason in believing that an unshackled and restored Trump might follow through on his vow to drive the neocon contagion from the halls of executive power, if only out of revenge for plotting against him for the last eight years. After all, this was the man who evicted John Bolton. (The right side of my brain reminds me that this was also the man who hired John Bolton and the equally evil Elliot Abrams.)

The early visions were promising. Trump slamming the door firmly in the face of two neocon job applicants, Nikki Haley and Mike Pompeo, the man who plotted the assassination Julian Assange, acted on my political psyche with the chimeric allure of Lemon tekking a dose of Psilocybe cubensis, which are currently popping up in pastures all along the Oregon coasts. But before reaching peak high, the whole exciting illusion began to melt into some Daliesque hellscape populated by a grotesquerie of neocons, Christian nationalist end-timers, and billionaire defense contractors.

First, news broke that Trump had tapped Lil Marco Rubio for Secretary of State, then a mini-Goebbels himself, Stephen Miller, as his deputy Chief of Staff. This was quickly followed by the termagant from Albany, Elise Stefanik, as UN ambassador, resumé-embellisher John Ratcliffe at the CIA, Christian fundamentalist Mike Huckabee as ambassador to Israel, and FoxNews star Pete Hegseth to run the Pentagon. The fantasy had dissolved into another Bad Trip.

Like capitalism itself, neoconservativism seems endlessly adaptable, capable of filling any void, assuming any visage, from Rumsfeld to Hillary Clinton. Trump’s rogues gallery aren’t the apex neocons of the Bush-Obama-Clinton-Biden era. There’s no pretense of intellectualism. These are the grunts. This is neoconservatism run by the gut. The very wise Stephen Walt referred to Trump’s national security peaks as a Team of Lackeys. But in the Man’s own coarse, simplistic language, they’re just Trump’s Chumps, hand-picked for their obsequiousness and blind fealty to their boss. People who follow orders and don’t ask questions. Whether they’re competent enough to implement Trump’s plans remains to be seen.

Trump rolled out his cabinet of curiosities like a carnival barker at a tent show, with the introduction of each new act yielding a louder gasp from the audience… Rubio is the most peculiar case. But then, he is a peculiar man who has fashioned his political career in Florida out of a histrionic hostility toward Cuba while largely concealing the fact that his family fled the island to escape the dictatorial grip of Fulgencio Batista. Some may find it odd that Trump picked Rubio off the trash heap where he’d flung him after Rubio signed on to a Senate report documenting Russia’s courting of the 2016 Trump campaign, particularly its entreaties to Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort. But there’s no loyalty stronger than the rehabilitated man. And Rubio had been put through a process of Trumpian operant conditioning: abuse, humiliation, exile, supplication, return, reward. Rubio has bent the knee, licked the boots (or Ferragamo’s in Trump’s case), and kissed enough ass to be sent forth to excoriate the rest of the world with his juvenile style of bluster and bombast.

Rubio’s hectoring brand of anti-diplomacy will accompanied by the coruscating keening of his backup singer, Elise Stefanik, who impressed Trump with her McCarthyite scolding of Ivy League presidents for their laxity in not violently crushing the campus anti-genocide protests last spring. It’s hard to envision a UN ambassador more ill-equipped for the job than Biden’s Linda Greenfield-Thomas, the hapless enabler of Palestinian genocide, may fill the bill as Trump’s one-note Jeanne Kirkpatrick–one shrill note at that.

Someone said that instead of a cabinet to Make America Great Again, Trump had drafted a team to Make Greater Israel. You’ll scan futilely for any peacenik libertarians or even hardcore isolationists in this gung-ho retinue, all of whom seem eager to greenlight the immediate annexation of the Occupied Palestinian Territories on route to more glorious (and insane) confrontations against Iran, Cuba, Venezuela, China and any stubborn nation that refuses to hand over its lithium to Elon Musk. Not only aren’t there any guardrails in sight, there’s not even a handbrake.