YOU WERE WARNED:

 Heather Cox Richardson: 

 Heather Cox Richardson is a political historian who uses facts and history to put the news in context

There are a number of ways to think about Trump’s appointments. The people he has picked have so little experience in the fields their departments handle that Erin Burnett of CNN suggested that he is simply choosing them from “central casting”—a favorite phrase of his—to look as he imagines such officials should. Indeed, as Zachary B. Wolf of CNN pointed out, while President Joe Biden vowed to make his Cabinet look like America, Trump’s picks look “exactly like Fox News.” Trump has actually tapped a number of television hosts for different positions.

That so many of his appointees have histories of sexual misconduct is also striking, and underlines both that they share his determination to dominate others and that they do not think rules and laws apply to them.

But there is another pattern at work, as well. In a piece he published on November 15 in his “Thinking about…” newsletter, scholar of authoritarianism Timothy Snyder explained that destroying a country requires undermining five key zones: “health, law, administration, defense, and intelligence.” The nominations of Kennedy, Gaetz, Hegseth, and Gabbard, as well as the tapping of billionaires Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to run the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, to destroy the administration of the government, are, according to Snyder, a “decapitation strike.”

“Imagine that you are a foreign leader who wishes to destroy the United States,” Snyder writes. “How could you do so? The easiest way would be to get Americans to do the work themselves, to somehow induce Americans to undo their own health, law, administration, defense, and intelligence. From this perspective,” he explains, “Trump's proposed appointments—Kennedy, Jr.; Gaetz; Musk; Ramaswamy; Hegseth; Gabbard—are perfect instruments. They combine narcissism, incompetence, corruption, sexual incontinence, personal vulnerability, dangerous convictions, and foreign influence as no group before them has done.”

But that destruction of the United States is so far still aspirational. The constant references to Trump’s supposed “mandate” are misleading. He did not win 50% of the vote, meaning that more voters chose someone other than Trump in the 2024 election than voted for him, and even many of his voters appear to have misunderstood his policies.

According to Jonathan Karl of ABC News, Trump’s loyalists have tried to shore up support for his nominees in the Senate by threatening the Republican senators: "If you are on the wrong side of the vote, you’re buying yourself a primary. That is all. And there’s a guy named Elon Musk who is going to finance it.”

That threat is a direct assault on the Constitution, which gives to the Senate the power to advise the president on senior appointments and requires their consent to a president’s choices, and one that also hands the U.S. government over to an international billionaire. Forcing a leader’s political party to get into line behind that leader is the first task of an authoritarian, who needs that unified support in order to attack political opponents.