Donald Trump’s Cabinet of Revenge

It was a mega-MAGA morning on Capitol Hill. In a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, Kash Patel, Donald Trump’s nominee to head the F.B.I., faced hostile questioning from Democrats about his past as a QAnon-adjacent promoter of conspiracy theories and his extensive public vows to exact revenge on Trump’s “deep-state” enemies. In another hearing room, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Trump’s nominee to head the Department of Health and Human Services, sparred with skeptical senators from both parties who worried about his record of undermining public confidence in vaccines. And, testifying before the Senate Intelligence Committee, Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s nominee to serve as the director of National Intelligence, did little to help her nomination—perhaps the most politically uncertain of them all—when she was confronted about her controversial views on everything from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to Edward Snowden. At the hearing’s start, she preëmptively dismissed the criticism as “lies and smears,” though hours of sharp queries from senators suggested that for Gabbard, as for Patel and Kennedy, the best evidence against her confirmation had come from her own voluble past.

That this Trump trifecta faced simultaneous confirmation hearings appeared to be a masterstroke in outrage management by the Senate’s Republican scheduling gods: Who could possibly keep track of the overwhelming number of controversies, concerning revelations, and just plain weirdness to come out of the hearings? But, after I watched all three sessions, thanks to the magic of C-SPAN and the Internet, it seemed clear that these three appointments have more in common than just their concurrent hearings: they have perfectly met the qualification that Trump cares most about—a proven record of tearing down the credibility of the institutions that he has chosen them to lead.

Let’s stipulate that many of Trump’s other nominees are flawed or ill-suited to high office—thin résumés and sizable Fox News contracts might well be the distinguishing characteristic for many in his new Cabinet. But Thursday’s trio stands out for the sheer destructive Trumpiness of their time in public life. Patel once promised that, if he became F.B.I. director, he’d shut down the Bureau’s headquarters and reopen it the next day “as a museum of the ‘deep state.’ ” Kennedy’s long career as a scourge of the scientific establishment includes comparing the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, one of the agencies he would oversee as H.H.S. chief, to “fascism” and its childhood-vaccination program to “Nazi death camps.” Gabbard, as a left-wing congresswoman turned right-wing Trump acolyte, has often questioned foundational conclusions of the American intelligence community. These are not problems as far as the President is concerned—they’re selling points.

This came through, perhaps unintentionally, in an early moment during Patel’s hearing, when Chuck Grassley, the Senate Judiciary chairman, complained at length about the F.B.I.’s participation in “a political scheme to take down Trump.” Then Grassley went on to address the nominee directly: “They have yet to learn a lesson, and I hope you’ll teach that lesson.” Patel, in other words, is there to wreak payback for Trump. So are the others. These are Cabinet appointments as a form of revenge.

There was a certain slow-motion-car-crash appeal in watching the contortions of Republican senators like Grassley as they strained to justify or explain away these embarrassing nominations. The most gimmicky approach was that of Thom Tillis, the North Carolina Republican charged with introducing Patel. In an effort to veer away from the many shocking statements Patel has made during television appearances, podcast interviews, and in his own writings, he prepared a handout: “Kash Bingo,” with phrases, such as “enemies list” and “deep state,” that he expected Democrats to harp on in their questions. I’m surprised he didn’t follow Patel’s example and turn the whole thing into a children’s cartoon book. (See “The Plot Against the King,” Patel’s 2022 recounting of the injustices done to Trump, in which he stars as Kash the Distinguished Discoverer.)

The senators’ squirming was nothing, though, compared with that of the nominees themselves. The most politically costly squirm might have come in Kennedy’s hearing before the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, when Senator Bill Cassidy, of Louisiana, questioned him. Cassidy, the committee’s chairman and a medical doctor himself, is a key vote in determining whether Kennedy’s nomination succeeds or fails. He opened by acknowledging it was “no secret” that he had “reservations” about Kennedy, then voiced his concern that Kennedy would undermine vaccines in the role of America’s top health official. “Will you reassure mothers unequivocally . . . that the measles and hepatitis B vaccines do not cause autism?” Cassidy asked. Kennedy started in on a rambling answer about data, but Cassidy cut him off: It was a yes-or-no question. Still, Kennedy would not offer an answer. Up next, Senator Bernie Sanders found himself in an unfamiliar role as a wingman to the conservative Louisianan. “Vaccines do not cause autism,” Sanders said. “Do you agree with that?” Again, Kennedy would not answer. Had he just failed the Cassidy test? Later, Cassidy suggested that might well have been the case. “Your past of undermining confidence in vaccines with unfounded or misleading arguments concerns me,” he said. “Can I trust that that is now in the past?”

Each of the three nominees tried a similar evasion technique when presented with problematic aspects of their own past. Sometimes, they lapsed into pure brazenness, as when Dick Durbin, the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, asked Patel if he was familiar with Stew Peters, a prominent right-wing conspiracy theorist. “Not off the top of my head,” Patel said. Durbin responded dryly, “You’ve made eight separate appearances on his podcasts.” When Amy Klobuchar, the Minnesota Democrat, asked Patel about his so-called enemies list—sixty members of the “Executive Branch Deep State,” many of them Republicans who disagreed with him or who tried to block him from obtaining more powerful positions in Trump’s first Administration, which were listed as an appendix in his 2023 book, “Government Gangsters”—Patel insisted, “It is not an enemies list. It is a total mischaracterization. It is a glossary.”

Not all of the attacks, incidentally, came from Democrats. In the Intelligence Committee, senators from both parties pushed Gabbard to say whether she believed Snowden’s leaks about the National Security Agency’s surveillance programs made him a “traitor.” She declined to answer when James Lankford, a Republican of Oklahoma, asked her. He asked again. “I’m focussed on the future,” Gabbard replied. Then Michael Bennet, a Colorado Democrat, asked her the same question—four different times. “That is not a hard question to answer when the stakes are this high!” he said at one point, but she again refused to answer. By the time Todd Young, a Republican from Indiana and a key vote on her nomination, asked whether Snowden had harmed American national security, he was the fourth senator to push her on the issue. “It’s notable you didn’t say yes,” Young told Gabbard. “It would befit you and be helpful to the way you are perceived to the members of the Intelligence Committee if you would at least acknowledge that the greatest whistle-blower in American history, so-called, harmed national security.”

As if the three hearings didn’t provide enough distractions, President Trump walked into the White House briefing room late on Thursday morning for a press conference on the previous night’s tragic plane crash over the Potomac, the first deadly accident involving a commercial airliner near Washington D.C. since 2009. He read prepared remarks calling the country “one family” in the face of tragedy. Then he looked up and discarded the platitudinous talking points to bash his Democratic predecessors, air-traffic controllers themselves, and an amorphous “diversity push,” baselessly suggesting that all were somehow responsible for the crash. He said that Pete Buttigieg, the Biden Administration’s transportation secretary, had run the agency “right into the ground with his diversity,” and insisted that both Barack Obama and Joe Biden had rejected his proposed standards to insure that only those air-traffic controllers of the “highest intellect” could be hired. “Their policy was horrible, and their politics was even worse,” he said.

These were hardly the consoling words needed by a grieving nation. But, in the end, Trump’s performance was, perhaps, the day’s most revealing, with little of the obfuscation that came from his nominees on Capitol Hill. Trump said loud and clear what those surrounding him often try to hide on his behalf: He does not care about facts. He does not care about leading the country. He will seek political advantage in anything, even the death of sixty-seven people in a horrific accident in the second week of his Presidency.

It was hard to turn back to the confirmation hearings after listening to him. The MAGA-palooza in the Senate, after all, was but a reflection of Trump himself—these are his nominees, his choices, the fights that he has chosen to pick. He overshadowed any of the crazy or outrageous or disturbing things they had to say with his own words. Gabbard, Kennedy, and Patel are not the crisis in America set off by his reëlection, they are the consequences of it. Trump is the crisis—is, was, and will continue to be. Want to know how the next four years are going to go? Rewatch, if you can stand it, that press conference. This is it. ♦