Matt Gaetz was a congressman under investigation by the House Ethics Committee for sex trafficking minors who Donald Trump nominated to be Attorney General, the nation’s top law enforcement official. He was best known to his peers for showing off photos from his sex parties on the floor of the House.  

Pete Hegseth is a weekend host on Fox & Friends with white-nationalist tattoos. He is Trump’s nominee to head the Department of Defense, which has an annual budget of more than $800 billion per year.

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., is the world’s most prominent vaccine critic. He also believes COVID-19 was engineered to spare the Chinese and Ashkenazi Jews and harm Blacks and whites. He has been chosen to lead the sprawling Department of Health and Human Services. 

Gaetz, Hegseth and Kennedy were just three of Donald Trump’s early jaw-dropping Cabinet picks. Gaetz’s candidacy flamed out eight days later, when even the normally supine Republican Senate caucus signaled it would never confirm him. In Pam Bondi, a former Florida attorney general who served on Trump’s legal team during his first impeachment trial, Trump found a replacement without Gaetz’s  baggage but who is likely to be equally pliable.  

Meanwhile, the crackpot Cabinet picks keep coming. Linda McMahon, the former CEO of World Wrestling Entertainment will lead the Department of Education. Sean Duffy, another Fox News personality and former aviation-industry lobbyist, will lead the Department of Transportation. Trump’s battle against rising prices apparently won’t apply to beleaguered airline passengers. 

And then there’s Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, and fellow billionaire Vivek Ramaswamy, who will co-chair the non-existent Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). While the DOGE isn’t real, Musk’s power within the Trump administration is. He sits in on most of Trump’s meetings. The task Musk has given himself is to cut $2 trillion per year from an annual federal budget of $6 trillion by mid 2026. His goal: to replicate what he did at Twitter (now known as X)  when he bought the company, immediately firing 75% of the workforce and ultimately destroying much of the company’s value. 

Is there a method to all this Trumpian madness? Musk and RFK Jr. were key supporters of Trump’s campaign, and Trump is sharing the spoils of victory with them, a practice as old as politics. Characters like Hegseth and Duffy who come straight out of the Fox studios are in keeping with Trump’s penchant for hiring underlings who he thinks look good on television.

Beyond that, there’s a deep contempt not only for expertise but for any notion of public service. Many Trump voters were outraged by the price of eggs. Now the arsonists they have empowered are ready to burn it all down, just as they always said they would. 

Breaking the Pentagon & the DOJ

Trump’s picks for the Pentagon and the Department of Justice bear special scrutiny. These were two establishment pillars that thwarted Trump’s desire to rule by fiat during his first term. With Bondi and another Trump personal lawyer Todd Blanche in DOJ top spots, personal loyalty to the president shouldn’t be a problem. The nominee for solicitor general, the number three person at the Justice Department, is D. John Sauer, the lawyer who successfully argued before the Supreme Court earlier this year in Trump’s presidential immunity case that a president has the power to assassinate a political rival if they do it as an “official act.”

In 2020 the top military brass balked at being sent into major cities to suppress protesters under the 1807 Insurrection Act. Hegseth supports setting up “warrior councils” made up of hand-picked retired three- and four-star generals and admirals. They in turn would designate military leaders who should be removed for being too “woke” and replace them with those who are sufficiently “anti-woke” and loyal to Trump. This would make it much easier to turn the military into a domestic-policing arm of the Trump administration. 

For MAGA acolytes, the long march through the institutions will include an all-out attack on colleges and universities, which are seen as bastions of left-wing radicalism. Tools they are preparing to use include turning the college accreditation system on its head as well as spurious charges of anti-semitism. Also being targeted are the nerdy scientists at the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Institutes for Health (a key source of vaccine-related medical research) and anywhere else inhabited by “deep-state” bureaucrats wedded to fact-based evidence. 

For every big-name appointee Trump makes, there will be many more mid-level political appointees who will be recruited to carry out these purges. The second Trump administration will also seek to reverse late-19th-century reforms that created a professional civil service that carries out basic governmental tasks on a non-partisan basis. Before that, under the “spoils system”, most federal government jobs went to loyalists from the winning presidential candidate’s party. It could happen again. 

Trump, the absurd former reality TV star, has proven what Upton Sinclair, author of the dystopian 1936 novel It Can’t Happen Here, argued. If fascism came here, it would have distinctly American characteristics and would not look the same as in Nazi Germany or Mussolini’s Italy. Still, it’s worth thinking about historic parallels.

Comparisons

The sacking of established institutions by ideological zealots, if it comes to pass, brings to mind Mao’s Red Guards at the height of the Cultural Revolution. Trump’s harangues about “the enemies of the people” adds a touch of Stalin.

Leftist writer Carl Davidson notes that Americans are getting a crash course in the cult of personality around Trump that proclaims his infallibility. Drawing on a concept from Nazi Germany, Davidson describes Trump as “the head teacher of the Fuhrerprinzip, the ‘Leader Principle.’”

Trump has never been shy about his admiration for autocrats like China’s Xi Jinping, Russia’s Vladimir Putin or North Korea’s Kim Jong-Un. Trump and the larger conservative movement have also been drawn to Viktor Orban, the Hungarian autocrat who has maintained a semblance of a formal democracy while consolidating power over big business, the media and the judiciary — to the point that it’s become impossible to defeat Orban and his party in an election. 

Or is Trump more of an American Silvio Berlusconni, the Italian media tycoon who, starting in the 1990s, was elected prime minister several times? He dominated Italian politics with his outsized personality but was too dissolute to radically change the country’s established political system.

Another way of looking at Trump, who came of age in New York City 50 years ago, is as someone looking to run the country like a mafia boss for whom corruption is the point and to that end wields absolute power, dispenses favors as he sees fit, brooks no opposition, and will ruthlessly target anyone who crosses him. 

Trump has always been much better at getting attention than actually running anything. So it remains to be seen if his administration can consolidate an authoritarian mafia state. And whether progressive forces in this country can regain the initiative against Trump and his cronies. 

While there is still time. 

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