Category: History

Congress has the power to block Trump from taking office, but lawmakers must act now

The Hill – Opinion

Congress has the power to block Trump from taking office, but lawmakers must act now

Evan A. Davis and David M. Schulte – December 26, 2024

The Constitution provides that an oath-breaking insurrectionist is ineligible to be president. This is the plain wording of Section 3 of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution. “No person shall … hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any state, who, having previously taken an oath … to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.” This disability can be removed by a two-thirds vote in each House.

Disqualification is based on insurrection against the Constitution and not the government. The evidence of Donald Trump’s engaging in such insurrection is overwhelming. The matter has been decided in three separate forums, two of which were fully contested with the active participation of Trump’s counsel.

The first fully contested proceeding was Trump’s second impeachment trial. On Jan. 13, 2021, then-President Trump was impeached for “incitement of insurrection.” At the trial in the Senate, seven Republicans joined all Democrats to provide a majority for conviction but failed to reach the two-thirds vote required for removal from office. Inciting insurrection encompasses “engaging in insurrection” against the Constitution “or giving aid and comfort to the enemies thereof,” the grounds for disqualification specified in Section 3.

The second contested proceeding was the Colorado five-day judicial due process hearing where the court “found by clear and convincing evidence that President Trump engaged in insurrection as those terms are used in Section Three.” The Colorado Supreme Court affirmed. On further appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, the court held that states lack power to disqualify candidates for federal office and that federal legislation was required to enforce Section 3. The court did not address the finding that Trump had engaged in insurrection.

Finally, there is the bipartisan inquiry of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th attack on the United States Capitol. More than half of the witnesses whose testimony was displayed at its nine public hearings were Republicans, including members of the Trump administration. The inescapable conclusion of this evidence is that Trump engaged in insurrection against the Constitution. In particular, Trump unlawfully demanded that his vice president, Mike Pence, throw out votes in the Electoral College for political opponent Joe Biden, a power he did not have. While the riot was in progress, Trump used Pence’s rejection of his demand to further enflame the crowd and cause them to chant “Hang Mike Pence!”

Some will argue that the Supreme Court decision in the Colorado case, Trump v. Anderson, precludes Congress from rejecting electoral votes when they convene on Jan. 6, on the basis of 14th Amendment disqualification. This view lacks merit for three reasons.

First the majority’s suggestion that there must be new implementing federal legislation passed pursuant to the enforcement power specified in the 14th Amendment is what lawyers call dicta. Dicta are the musings of an opinion that are not required to decide the case. The holding that Section 3 is not self-executing may be an alternate holding, but thoughts about the kind of implementing statute required are plain dicta. Dicta are not precedential. The four dissenters strenuously objected to this part of the opinion as overreach to decide a question not presented. This overreach is a power grab which Congress is not required to credit.

Second, counting the Electoral College votes is a matter uniquely assigned to Congress by the Constitution. Under well-settled law this fact deprives the Supreme Court of a voice in the matter, because the rejection of the vote on constitutionally specified grounds is a nonreviewable political question.

Third, specific legislation designed for this situation already exists. The Electoral Count Act was first enacted in 1887 and later amended and restated in 2022. That statute provides a detailed mechanism for resolving disputes as to the validity of Electoral College votes.

The act specifies two grounds for objection to an electoral vote: If the electors from a state were not lawfully certified or if the vote of one or more electors was not “regularly given.” A vote for a candidate disqualified by the Constitution is plainly in accordance with the normal use of words “not regularly given.” Disqualification for engaging in insurrection is no different from disqualification based on other constitutional requirements such as age, citizenship from birth and 14 years’ residency in the United States.

To make an objection under the Count Act requires a petition signed by 20 percent of the members of each House. If the objection is sustained by majority vote in each house, the vote is not counted and the number of votes required to be elected is reduced by the number of disqualified votes. If all votes for Trump were not counted, Kamala Harris would be elected president.

The unlikelihood of congressional Republicans doing anything that might elect Harris as president is obvious. But Democrats need to take a stand against Electoral College votes for a person disqualified by the Constitution from holding office unless and until this disability is removed. No less is required by their oath to support and defend the Constitution.

Evan Davis was editor in chief of the Columbia Law Review and David Schulte was editor in chief of the Yale Law Journal. Both clerked for Justice Potter Stewart. Davis is a New York lawyer who served as president of the New York City Bar, and Schulte is a Chicago investment banker.

Americans and their leaders are to blame for returning Trump to the White House

Nashville Tennessean – Opinion

Americans and their leaders are to blame for returning Trump to the White House

April Lieberman – December 26, 2024

From rural Tennessee to Democratic presidential politics, I’ve lived in both worlds − of “us and them.”

Here’s my take on why:

  1. my neighbors don’t trust Democrat
  2. a convicted felon is returning to the White House.

There’s plenty of blame to go around.

Biden himself is among those to blame among Democrats
  • President Joe Biden: for selfishly pursuing the presidency despite cognitive decline, his sundowning obvious back in the 2019 primary debates.
  • Biden supporters and allies: First Lady Dr. Jill Biden and his family for letting him. White House staff, the Democratic National Committee, and party leaders, for enabling this epic disservice to the country. His Cabinet, profiles in cowardice, for not invoking the 25th Amendment and removing him.
  • Attorney General Merrick Garland: for delaying appointing a special counsel, allowing now President-elect Donald Trump to run out the clock. Rep. Jim Clyburn, for delivering Biden South Carolina in the 2020 primaries. Former President Barack Obama, for strong-arming Pete Buttigieg and Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minnesota, out of the race, placing loyalty over country, then again by preemptively supporting Biden’s reelection bid, deterring primary challengers.
  • The Clintons: 2016 Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton and coastal elites, for underestimating Trump in 2015-2016 and neglecting the Blue Wall. Former President Bill Clinton and ‘90s NAFTA Dems for decimating small towns across America, including mine. All of them (not named Bernie Sanders), for decades of ignoring rural and blue-collar voters while taking Black and Latino Americans for granted, instead pushing agendas far left of the American electorate.
  • Miscellaneous: Whichever idiot coined “Bidenomics,” an infuriating attempt to gaslight America.
  • Vice President Kamala Harris: for not distancing herself from Biden or showing us she felt our pain. Her campaign, for inaccessibility and insularity (shades of Hillary Clinton), ignoring those devastating anti-trans ads, and fundamentally misreading what mattered most to voters: It’s still the economy, stupid.

Opinion: Kamala Harris is the best Democrats can do? Looks like they don’t want to beat Trump

MAGA voters and justice system are responsible for returning Trump to the White House
  • MAGA: For placing a racist/rapist/convicted felon over our Constitution.
  • Other Republicans: Most of them, for striking Faustian bargains in normalizing Trump, sacrificing their integrity for power, none more craven than Sen. Lindsey Graham’s betrayal of “Amigo” John McCain on his deathbed to worship at the orange altar. Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell, for not saving us this national nightmare by ordering his minions to remove the Insurrectionist-in-Chief, forever barring him from federal office − Howard Baker he is not.
  • Right-wing Supreme Court justices: For not checking the presidency, instead placing Trump above the law, dismantling our rights and democracy itself.
  • Judge Juan Merchan: For delaying sentencing on 34 felony convictions until after the election, instead of letting Trump campaign from a New York City jail cell.

Opinion: Tennessee Democrats should build upon the movement Gloria Johnson created

Media, dictators, billionaires and Congress bear responsibility too

Opinion: Nashville’s star is fading. The Big Sort is creating a rural and red revolution.

April Lieberman
April Lieberman

April Lieberman is a former appellate attorney with family experience in presidential politics, a Yale Law School graduate who studied philosophy at Vanderbilt, and Democratic politics in the backwoods of West Tennessee.

Dem Plan to Block MAGA Revolution

Daily Beast

Chuck Schumer Reveals Stealth Dem Plan to Block MAGA Revolution

David Gardner – December 26, 2024

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer believes the record number of judicial appointments may keep the Biden administration's legacy intact.
Kent Nishimura / Getty Images

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has revealed the Democratic Party’s secret weapon in fighting a rearguard action against Donald Trump’s MAGA offensive.

The Democrats are holding onto one last hope after a disastrous election in which they lost control of the White House and both chambers of Congress.

For the past four years, President Joe Biden, Schumer, and his colleagues on the Senate Judiciary Committee have been quietly stacking the federal judiciary with liberal-minded judges knowing they could one day provide a crucial bulwark against a resurgent Trump.

Just before Christmas, they achieved their goal of pushing through a record 235 judicial nominations, more confirmations in a single administration than any since the Jimmy Carter White House. That total includes 150 women judges, the most under any president.

With less than a month to go before Trump can begin putting his MAGA policies into action, Biden and Schumer see the batch of new judges as their best, and perhaps their only chance of preserving any kind of legacy from the last four years.

“I don’t know exactly what (Trump will) do. But I can tell you this: The judiciary will be one of our strongest — if not our strongest — barrier against what he does,” Schumer told Politico Playbook in an exclusive interview.

“They’re going to come after everything,” he said of the Trump administration. “They have so many different parts of MAGA: the people who are anti-women’s rights; the people who are anti-environment; the people who are anti-working people rights and union rights; the people who are anti-the consumer. They’re going to use the judiciary in every way they can.”

The Democrats didn’t go the traditional route of picking prosecutors and lawyers from “fancy” firms but chose people from all walks of life – civil rights lawyers, voting rights experts, teachers, mentors, union reps, scholars – to “resemble America,” Schumer boasted.

Schumer said they tried to get “as many judges confirmed as possible because we knew that Trump had loaded the bench up with a lot of MAGA judges and achieving balance was important. And the more the better.”

He told Politico: “In a time when there’s more legislative gridlock and there’s an attempt to use the judiciary to actually legislate, having judges that are not MAGA judges, that are not extreme judges, is more important than it’s ever been.”

Schumer saw the writing on the wall in the last couple of years and he said: “We also saw that the hard right was gearing up to use the bench in case after case to achieve their goals.”

It will be a struggle to control a rampant Republican Congress, fueled by a White House intent on recrimination. But Schumer is hoping his army of judges can hold the fort until (he hopes) the cavalry arrives in the mid-terms two years away.

The use of the Senate’s power to shape the judiciary was aggressively practiced by Schumer’s Republican opposite number Mitch McConnell, who had set a record for confirmations under Trump’s first term. McConnell also created a conservative super-majority on the Supreme Court with a series of power moves. First he blocked the nomination of Merrick Garland, then a federal appeals court judge, by then-President Barack Obama to replace the conservative justice Antonin Scalia who died in March 2016, then when presented with an almost identical vacancy by the death of the liberal Ruth Bader Ginsburg in 2020, rushed the conservative Amy Coney Barrett on to the bench.

Kash Patel, Trump’s FBI pick, would turn the agency into the Federal Bureau of Retribution

The Los Angeles Times

Kash Patel, Trump’s FBI pick, would turn the agency into the Federal Bureau of Retribution

Doyle McManus – December 16, 2024

Kash Patel speaks before Republican presidential nominee former President Donald Trump at a campaign rally at the Findlay Toyota Arena Sunday, Oct. 13, 2024, in Prescott Valley, Ariz. (AP Photo/Ross D. Franklin)
Kash Patel, shown campaigning for Donald Trump this year, has vowed to purge the FBI of anyone who doesn’t fully support Trump and to prosecute those he accuses of conspiring to undermine the president-elect. (Ross D. Franklin / Associated Press)More

Kash Patel, President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee as the next director of the FBI, has big plans.

He has called for the prosecution of a long list of people he accuses of conspiring to undermine Trump, including President Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and outgoing FBI Director Christopher A. Wray.

“These people need to go to prison,” Patel said last year. If he delivers on that threat, he would turn the once-independent FBI into the Federal Bureau of Retribution.

Patel has vowed to purge the federal law enforcement agency of anyone who doesn’t fully support Trump, and says he will transfer all 7,000 employees in the bureau’s Washington headquarters to other cities — apparently including agents who now focus on international terrorism and foreign espionage.

“Go chase down murderers and rapists,” Patel said. “You’re cops. Go be cops.”

On both counts, he is echoing Trump’s long-expressed desire to prosecute his political opponents and bring the FBI to heel.

The president-elect has called on prosecutors to investigate the Biden family, Harris, Clinton, former President Obama, the members of the congressional committee that investigated his attempt to overturn the 2020 election, even the police officers who defended the U.S. Capitol against rioters on Jan. 6, 2021 — “The cops should be charged and the protesters should be freed” — among many others.

Read more: Trump says he’ll jail his opponents. Members of the House Jan. 6 committee are preparing

And he has long harbored a special animus toward the FBI, which he blames for investigating allegations that his 2016 campaign colluded with Russia and for the 2022 search of his home and social club in Florida that turned up more than 100 classified documents he claimed not to have.

Since his election last month, Trump has said — not entirely reassuringly — that he does not intend to order up investigations from the Oval Office.

Read more: Column: Trump hoped his Cabinet picks could escape serious vetting. He was so wrong.

“That’s going to be [attorney general nominee] Pam Bondi’s decision, and to a different extent, Kash Patel,” he said last week.

But he added: “If they think that somebody was dishonest or crooked or a corrupt politician, I think he probably has an obligation to do it.”

Patel may not find that a difficult call. He has already published an enemies list of 60 people he considers “corrupt actors of the highest order.”

The record from Trump’s first term suggests that these threats should be taken seriously.

During his four years in the White House, Trump frequently demanded that the FBI and the Justice Department investigate his adversaries. His aides often pushed back, but eventually bowed to his pressure and opened investigations of Clinton, former Secretary of State John F. Kerry, former national security advisor John Bolton, former FBI Director James B. Comey and other former FBI officials. None was charged with a crime.

Those episodes reflect a sobering fact: It’s easier for the FBI to open an investigation than you may think.

“There’s basically no limit, at least when it comes to opening a preliminary investigation,” said Paul Rosenzweig, a former federal prosecutor.

For a full-scale investigation, which could include search warrants and electronic surveillance (if a judge approves), the standards are tougher.

Read more: Column: Trump’s worst Cabinet picks aren’t just unqualified, they’re part of a bigger power grab

“They have to have an articulable factual basis to believe a federal crime has been committed,” said Michael R. Bromwich, a former Justice Department inspector general. “There’s a lot that can fit within that, but it’s not limitless.”

“If Patel goes to his deputies and says, ‘Let’s open an investigation into Liz Cheney,’ they’re going to ask: ‘What’s the factual predicate?’” he said, referring to the Republican former congresswoman from Wyoming, a vigorous Trump critic. “There will be resistance in the FBI … unless he finds compliant officers who are willing to make something up.”

Prosecution is harder. A criminal indictment requires clear evidence that the person under investigation committed a specific federal crime.

But merely being investigated can have devastating consequences.

“There’s a lot of damage that can be done by an investigation even if there’s no indictment,” Bromwich said. “Investigations are very expensive; a target needs to hire a lawyer. They affect a target’s ability to gain a livelihood. And they are extremely stressful.”

“Lives get ruined,” said Faiza Patel of the Brennan Center for Justice (who is not related to Kash Patel). “People get fired from their jobs.”

An investigation also opens a target’s private life to scrutiny, potentially putting embarrassing information in the hands of the FBI director.

Under J. Edgar Hoover, who ran the FBI for almost half a century until 1972, the bureau assiduously collected private information about politicians and other prominent figures.

The most infamous example was the FBI’s attempt to blackmail civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. by threatening to expose his extramarital affairs.

So if a president wants retribution, opening investigations is a good way to start.

The irony, of course, is that Trump and other Republicans have spent years condemning what they claim has been a “weaponization” of the Justice Department and FBI under Democratic presidents.

Now that they’re about to regain the White House, they appear to have decided that weaponization is now their friend.

But senators in both parties should resist that dangerous trend.

Read more: Column: Tulsi Gabbard as intelligence czar? The Trump Cabinet pick most likely to fail

They should look carefully at Patel’s skimpy qualifications beyond his loyalty to Trump. In 2020, when Trump proposed giving Patel the No. 2 job in the bureau, his attorney general, William Barr, threatened to quit. “The very idea of moving Patel into a role like this showed a shocking detachment from reality,” Barr wrote later.

They should ask Patel if he realizes that transferring all the FBI’s staff out of Washington would disrupt the bureau’s efforts to stop espionage by Russia and China.

And they should ask whether he really intends to turn the bureau into a weapon of partisan retribution against every target of Trump’s boundless ire.

GOP senators might want to ask why so many of the names on Patel’s enemies list are Republicans who disagreed with him during Trump’s first term, including Barr, Bolton and former Defense Secretary Mark Esper.

Then they should think twice about giving Patel power to investigate anyone he chooses. One day they may find themselves in his sights as well.

Donald Trump Probably Isn’t a Russian Agent. But He Wouldn’t Be Behaving Much Differently If He Were.

Slate

Donald Trump Probably Isn’t a Russian Agent. But He Wouldn’t Be Behaving Much Differently If He Were.

Fred Kaplan – December 11, 2024

Donald Trump probably isn’t a Russian agent, but he wouldn’t be behaving much differently right now if he were.

Among the main goals of the Kremlin’s foreign policy are to sow chaos and distrust within Western democracies and to disrupt the alliances that join those countries together, especially the links between the United States and Europe. The idea is that a weaker West makes for a stronger Russia—a connection all the more important as the measures of Russia’s strength on its own (economic, political, and military) are diminishing.

Many have noted Trump’s open antipathy toward alliances and his aversion to any foreign commitments that don’t yield immediate transactional gains.

His actions since he won the election—especially his nominees for high-level positions—reveal his affinity for chaos, his keen desire to sow distrust within the American political system. His aim here is not to strengthen Russia (and other authoritarian countries), though that may be among its consequences. The aim—as he and some of his more ideological cronies have proclaimed for a long time now—is to destroy the “deep state,” to concentrate power in the White House, and to weaken or punish (perhaps even incarcerate) those who try to obstruct his ambitions.

Trump is not stupid. He must know that many of his nominees to be Cabinet secretaries, agency directors, and ambassadors have no apparent qualifications to run vast bureaucracies, parse complex problems, or engage in delicate diplomacy. That’s not the point. He wants them to empty out the bureaucracies or run them into the ground. He wants them to twist the agencies into empty shells or blunt instruments of his vendettas. He wants to insult the diplomatic corps and to show foreign leaders how slight he regards their status.

Some of his nominees are meant to carry out his most perniciously personal and political campaigns. He named Pete Hegseth, a man who has never run an organization of any impressive size, to helm the Defense Department—with its $840 billion budget, 3 million employees, and wide-ranging global responsibilities—because Hegseth’s commentaries on Fox News (where he anchored a weekend show) indicate he’d happily carry out Trump’s intention to fire senior officers who don’t express utter loyalty to Trump.

He named Kash Patel to head the FBI because Patel is not just willing but sweating-ready to go after Trump’s personal and political enemies, including within the FBI itself. Patel has drawn up an enemies list already. (Trump tried to make Matt Gaetz attorney general for the same reason, but Gaetz proved too blatant a henchman for even Trump’s loyalists in the Senate to swallow—as, by the way, some of his other nominees may prove to be too.)

He named Tulsi Gabbard to be director of national intelligence because he wants to blow up the intelligence agencies, many of which he sees as teeming with enemies to himself and the country (which he views as a mere extension of himself, as in l’état, c’est moi).

He named Dr. Mehmet Oz, a heart surgeon turned TV doctor with financial interests galore to run Medicare and Medicaid, because he wants to gut Medicare and Medicaid.* He named Kristi Noem, the governor of South Dakota, to run the Department of Homeland Security—a hodgepodge of 22 once independent departments and agencies with a combined budget of $108 billion (more than 16 times that of South Dakota’s state budget)—because he wants to gut homeland security.

The list could go on.

Trump has said—and may genuinely believe—that he can run the country, the economy, the military, social services, and all the rest, just fine all by himself. (Axios once assembled a list of topics that Trump has said he knows “more about than anybody.” It included money, infrastructure, the economy, trade, ISIS, energy, taxes—just about every topic involving government.)

Many of Trump’s voters think it’s great that he plans to blow up the system. That’s a big reason why many of them voted for him. No doubt, much of the system could use reforms or outright overhaul. But the people Trump wants to put in charge have no idea how to improve the system, nor are they expected to. Many citizens may come to feel buyer’s remorse when they realize just how closely their own lives and interests are intertwined with the functioning of government—something that is often taken for granted, until it doesn’t function. By that time, it may be too late.

And while the direct connection may not be clear, people might also come to take note of new dangers to national security. Foreign governments may no longer share highly sensitive information with an intelligence director who parrots Kremlin propaganda; allies who no longer regard the U.S. as a reliable protector may go their own way or make deals with adversaries; and adversaries may take America’s passivity as a green light to go bold. The Western-led “rules-based order,” which is already in grim shape, will turn to tatters.

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Mr. Trump, Do You Realize How Much the World Has Changed Since You Were President?

Thomas J. Friedman – November 26, 2024

The White House in the distance, with a string of out-of-focus red lights in the foreground.
Credit…Will Matsuda for The New York Times

Donald Trump left the White House nearly four years ago. Given his self-confidence, I suspect he is now thinking: “What could be so different? I’ve got this.”

Well, I just traveled from a reporting trip in Tel Aviv to a conference in the United Arab Emirates to a deep dive with Google’s DeepMind artificial intelligence team in London, and I think the president-elect would be wise to remember a famous aphorism: There are decades when nothing happens, and there are weeks when decades happen.

What I saw and heard exposed me to three giant, shifting tectonic plates that will have profound implications for the new administration.

The most significant geopolitical event

In just the last two months, the Israeli military has inflicted a defeat on Iran that approaches its 1967 Six-Day War defeat of Egypt, Syria and Jordan. Full stop. Let’s review:

Over the past few decades, Iran built a formidable threat network that seemed to put Israel into an octopuslike grip. It became widely accepted that Israel was deterred from striking at Iran’s nuclear facilities because Iran had armed the Hezbollah militia in Lebanon with enough precision rockets to destroy Israel’s ports, airports, high-tech factories, air bases and infrastructure.

Not so fast. It turned out that the Mossad and Israel’s cyber Unit 8200 had been forging what became one of the country’s greatest intelligence successes ever. They planted explosive devices in the pagers and walkie-talkies used by Hezbollah’s military commanders, developed human and technological tracking capabilities to find Hezbollah’s top leaders, painstakingly identified storage facilities in Lebanon and Syria for Hezbollah’s most lethal precision rockets and then systematically took many of them out by air in October.

The result is that Hezbollah looks likely to accept a 60-day cease-fire with Israel in Lebanon negotiated by the U.S. mediator Amos Hochstein. This is a big deal. It means that, even if just for 60 days, Hezbollah and, by extension, Iran have decided to delink themselves from Hamas in Gaza and stop the firing from Lebanon for the first time since Oct. 8, 2023, the day after Hamas invaded Israel. We will see if it lasts, but if it does, it will increase the pressure on Hamas to agree to a cease-fire and hostage release with Israel, more on Israel’s terms.

There is a reason for this. Hezbollah’s mother ship has suffered a real blow. According to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s April strike on Iran eliminated one of four Russian-supplied S-300 surface-to-air missile defense batteries around Tehran, and Israel destroyed the remaining three batteries on Oct. 26. Israel also damaged Iran’s ballistic missile production capabilities and its ability to produce the solid fuel used in long-range ballistic missiles. In addition, according to Axios, Israel’s Oct. 26 strike on Iran, which was a response to an earlier Iranian attack on Israel, also destroyed equipment used to create the explosives that surround uranium in a nuclear device, setting back Iran’s efforts in nuclear weapons research.

A senior Israeli defense official told me that the Oct. 26 attack on Iran “was lethal, precise and a surprise.” And up to now, the Iranians “don’t know technologically how we hit them. So they are at the most vulnerable point they have been in this generation: Hamas is not there for them, Hezbollah is not there for them, their air defenses are not there anymore, their ability to retaliate is sharply diminished, and they are worried about Trump.”

Which means that Tehran is either riper than ever for negotiations to curb its nuclear program or riper than ever for an attack by Israel or the Trump administration — or both — to destroy those nuclear facilities. Either way, Trump will face choices he did not have four years ago.

It is not only a new Iran that Trump will be dealing with but also a new Israel

There were legitimate reasons President Biden denounced the International Criminal Court’s arrest warrants against Netanyahu and his former defense minister Yoav Gallant, accusing them of war crimes in Gaza against a Hamas enemy that deliberately embedded itself among civilians. The same court never issued an arrest warrant for President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, whose army killed hundreds of thousands of his own people. The I.C.C. said Syria is not a member. But neither is Israel. It is also odd that the I.C.C. issued a warrant only for the Hamas leader Mohammed Deif, who is widely believed to be dead, and not for the very much alive Muhammad Sinwar (the younger brother of the late Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar), who is now reportedly running Hamas in Gaza and was a commander in the Oct. 7 attack on Israel.

But while the I.C.C. warrants are questionable, they were also avoidable. The strategy that Netanyahu has imposed on his military is one of the ugliest in Israel’s history: Go into Gaza, destroy as much of Hamas as you can, don’t be too worried about civilian casualties, then leave the remnants of Hamas in charge to loot food convoys and intimidate the local population — then rinse and repeat. Go back in, smash and leave no one better in charge, creating a permanent Somalia on Israel’s border.

Why is he doing this? Because Bibi is being directed by the far-right Jewish supremacists he needs to stay in power and possibly out of prison on charges of corruption. And the stated goal of those Jewish supremacists is to extend Israeli settlements from the West Bank right through Gaza. They oppose any scenario in which the Palestinian Authority is gradually installed in Gaza as part of an Arab peacekeeping force to replace Hamas. They fear the Palestinian Authority might then become a legitimate partner for a two-state solution.

When you fight a war with this many civilian casualties for a year and offer no vision of peace with the other side, you invite the I.C.C.

Attention, President-elect Trump: Netanyahu will tell you that Israel is defending the free world in defeating the dark forces of Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran. There is truth in that. But there is also truth in the fact that he is doing it to defend a Jewish supremacist apartheid vision in the West Bank and Gaza. It’s a dirty business. If you just unquestionably wrap your arms around him, you will get yourself and America dirty, too. You will also ensure that your Jewish grandchildren will one day learn what it is to be Jewish in a world where the Jewish state is a pariah.

Artificial general intelligence is probably coming on Trump’s watch

Polymathic artificial general intelligence, or A.G.I., was still largely in the realm of science fiction when Trump left office four years ago. It is fast becoming nonfiction. And A.S.I. — artificial super intelligence — may be one day as well.

A.G.I. means machines will be endowed with intelligence as good as the smartest human in any field, but because of its capabilities to integrate learning across many fields, it will probably become better than any average doctor, lawyer or computer programmer. A.S.I. is a computer brain that can exceed what any human can do in any field and then, with its polymathic ability, it could produce insights far beyond anything humans could do or even imagine. It might even invent its own language we don’t understand.

How we adapt to A.G.I. was not part of the 2024 presidential campaign. I predict it will be a central theme of the 2028 election. Between now and then, every leader in the world — but particularly the presidents of America and China, the two A.I. superpowers — will be judged by how well they enable their countries to get the best and cushion the worst from the coming A.I. storm.

From what I heard from leading A.I. scientists and Nobel Prize winners at Google DeepMind’s conference on how A.I. is already driving breakthroughs in scientific discovery, A.G.I. is likely to be achieved in the next three to five years.

Two DeepMind scientists just won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their A.I. AlphaFold system, which predicts proteins’ structures and is already being used by scientists to invent drugs and materials all over the world. Now DeepMind is working on GraphCast, an A.I. system that can produce staggeringly precise 10-day weather forecasts in less than a minute, and on Gnome, which has identified some 2.2 million new inorganic crystals that could be useful in manufacturing everything from computer chips to batteries to solar panels.

It’s the tip of an iceberg. It will change or challenge virtually every job. While I was in Tel Aviv, I visited the lab of Mentee Robotics, an Israeli start-up, and was given a demonstration of a humanoid robot, roughly my height, powered by sensors and A.I. with humanlike hand dexterity, a voice and perception that, as its website says, “can be personalized and adjusted to different environments and tasks using natural human interaction.”

President-elect Trump, if you think blue-collar workers without college degrees are facing challenges today, wait until four years from now.

But that’s not Trump’s only challenge. If these A.I. powers fall into the wrong hands or are used by existing powers in the wrong ways, we could be dealing with possibly civilizational extinction events.

Which is why we need to be discussing systems of A.I. control now. And it’s why two DeepMind co-founders, Shane Legg and Demis Hassabis, were signers of a 23-word open letter, issued in May 2023, along with other leaders of the A.I. universe, which declared, “Mitigating the risk of extinction from A.I. should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.”

But this can’t just be left to the companies. We tried that with social networks, and it ended badly.

President-elect Trump, you may think that your second term will be judged by how many tariffs you impose on China. I beg to differ. When it comes to U.S.-China relations, I think your legacy — as well as President Xi Jinping’s — will be determined by how quickly, effectively and collaboratively the United States and China come up with a shared technical and ethical framework embedded in each A.I. system that prevents it from becoming destructive on its own — without human direction — or being useful to bad actors who might want to deploy it for destructive purposes.

History will not look kindly on you, President-elect Trump, if you choose to prioritize the price of toys for American tots over an agreement with China on the behavior of A.I. bots.

Down About the Election? There Is a Speech I Want You to Read.

By Jamelle Bouie, Opinion Columnist – November 23, 2024

Two images of Frederick Douglass in old age, seated, wearing a suit with a bow tie.
Credit…Brady-Handy photograph collection/Library of Congress

Most Americans who know of Frederick Douglass know that he lived to see the destruction of chattel slavery and the liberation of Black Americans from the despotism of human bondage. Less well known is the fact that Douglass would also live long enough to see the slave stand free, stand a brief moment in the sun, and move back again toward slavery, to paraphrase W.E.B. Du Bois in his book “Black Reconstruction.”

Douglass died in 1895 as the counterrevolution to Reconstruction and the agrarian rebellions of the 1880s and 1890s took final shape. In 1890, Mississippi imposed its Jim Crow Constitution. Other states in the South soon followed suit. In 1896, the Supreme Court would affirm “separate but equal” in Plessy v. Ferguson, a landmark ruling that would stand until 1954, when it was overturned by Brown v. Board of Education.

In 1894 at Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church in Washington, D.C., Douglass delivered the last great speech of his career. Titled “The Lessons of the Hour,” it was his attempt to make sense of the rise of Jim Crow and the violent retrenchment of the era. I want to share a little of the speech with you because I think it is worthwhile to read the perspective of someone who continues to fight for his ideals even in the midst of profound reversal and defeat.

Here’s Douglass, moving toward his conclusion.

I have sometimes thought that the American people are too great to be small, too just and magnanimous to oppress the weak, too brave to yield up the right to the strong and too grateful for public services ever to forget them or fail to reward them. I have fondly hoped that this estimate of American character would soon cease to be contradicted or put in doubt. But the favor with which this cowardly proposition of disfranchisement has been received by public men, white and black, by Republicans as well as Democrats, has shaken my faith in the nobility of the nation. I hope and trust all will come out right in the end, but the immediate future looks dark and troubled. I cannot shut my eyes to the ugly facts before me.

He continued:

Strange things have happened of late and are still happening. Some of these tend to dim the luster of the American name and chill the hopes once entertained for the cause of American liberty. He is a wiser man than I am who can tell how low the moral sentiment of this republic may yet fall. When the moral sense of a nation begins to decline and the wheel of progress to roll backward, there is no telling how low the one will fall or where the other may stop.

As much as Douglass intends to stand in the way of those would destroy the victory of an earlier age, he knows that for him, “Time and strength are not equal to the task before me.” And yet:

But could I be heard by this great nation, I would call to mind the sublime and glorious truths with which, at its birth, it saluted a listening world. Its voice then was as the trumpet of an archangel, summoning hoary forms of oppression and time-honored tyranny, to judgment. Crowned heads heard it and shrieked. Toiling millions heard it and clapped their hands for joy. It announced the advent of a nation, based upon human brotherhood and the self-evident truths of liberty and equality. Its mission was the redemption of the world from the bondage of ages.

Douglass concludes:

Apply these sublime and glorious truths to the situation now before you. Put away your race prejudice. Banish the idea that one class must rule over another. Recognize the fact that the rights of the humblest citizen are as worthy of protection as are those of the highest, and your problem will be solved; and, whatever may be in store for it in the future, whether prosperity or adversity, whether it shall have foes without or foes within, whether there shall be peace or war, based upon the eternal principles of truth, justice and humanity and with no class having any cause of complaint or grievance, your Republic will stand and flourish forever.

I hope you find this as useful as I do.

This week’s column was on Donald Trump’s claims to monarchical power and why it is important to contest them.

In our system, the executive branch cannot exercise the full power of the legislature. It cannot act as a monarch would. The sovereign people did not imbue their power into a leviathan. The upshot of this is that any interpretation of the Constitution that grants the president monarchical power is wrong. The structure of the Constitution precludes a royal prerogative, and the ethos of American democracy forbids it. Otherwise, the revolution was for nothing.

I did quite a bit of chatting about the election. You can hear me talk about the results on my podcast with John Ganz as well as with Adam Conover on his podcast and with Adam Shatz on the London Review of Books podcast.

Waleed Shahid for The Nation:

To win, Democrats must inspire the public in a fractured information age, engage meaningfully with the cultural shifts around race, gender, family and migration, make democracy work, despite obstructionists like Manchin and Sinema, and — most critically — deliver tangible results that improve people’s lives. And if the corporate, status quo-loving forces within the party are standing in the way of that mission, they must be moved aside.

Michael Kazin for Dissent:

Perhaps the only positive consequence of the victory of an utterly despicable nominee and his down-ballot faithful is that progressives inside and outside the Democratic Party are groping their way toward a common solution: Revive an aggressive populism of the left.

Anjana Ahuja for The Financial Times:

Researchers across the world will now need courage and resolve in the face of a new Republican war on science, which may lead to the U.S. exiting the Paris climate agreement and the World Health Organization. It is also a moment for scientists to reflect on how they can nurture constructive relationships with politicians and voters who are instinctively hostile.

J. Jacob Calhoun for Time:

The political obstacles facing Democrats are dire, but it is the very existence of these threats that renders political engagement so important in the first place. Those disappointed by this month’s result should strive to emulate America’s first Black voters and allow the immense challenges ahead to instill in them “better encouragement and ambition.”

Rebecca Sanchez for Mother Jones:

What we found was a crisis of democracy underlying that of our political fever. A historical, generational and ongoing inequality and a systemic exclusion — both racial and economic. Scholars like Martin Wolf, author of “The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism,” have said this inequality has been abetted by the neoliberal system, which “poses the most immediate threat to civil society.”

Opinion – Trump promised to be a dictator on Day 1: Here’s why the Insurrection Act blocks him

The Hill – Opinion

Trump promised to be a dictator on Day 1: Here’s why the Insurrection Act blocks him

Julien Berman and Laura Dickinson – November 19, 2024

Could President-elect Donald Trump use the military within the U.S. to suppress protests on college campuses, patrol the southern border, and conduct mass deportations? By invoking the Insurrection Act — a little-known law that grants the president sweeping authority to deploy the military on American soil — he plans to do just that.

The Posse Comitatus Act generally makes it a crime for the military to engage in domestic law enforcement. But the Insurrection Act provides a crucial exception to this rule, giving the president seemingly broad authority to deploy military forces on American soil. Historically, it has been invoked sparingly and responsibly — only 30 times in the 230 years since its inception. Most famously, the act enabled Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson to desegregate schools in the South and protect civil rights marchers to enforce court orders over the objection of state officials.

But in a moment when our democracy hangs by a thread, when the president-elect has openly declared potentially authoritarian ambitions, it could become the legal mechanism for Trump (or any president) to transform our constitutional democracy into a military state.

In 2020, Trump wanted to deploy military forces to quash the Black Lives Matter protests, but was convinced not to by advisers such as Attorney General William Barr and Gen. Mark Milley. In his second term, with Trump pledging to purge independent voices and install loyalists across government, there may be no one left to say no.

The Insurrection Act contains three triggers for military deployment. The first is relatively uncontroversial because it requires a state to explicitly request military assistance to suppress an insurrection. But the other two triggers appear to grant the president virtually unchecked power to deploy troops without state consent — or even against state wishes.

The language in these other two sections of the law is breathtakingly broad. One section seems to allow the president to deploy troops whenever “unlawful obstructions” make it “impractical” to enforce federal law. The other goes further still, purporting to authorize the use of military force to suppress any “domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy” that “opposes or obstructs” federal law enforcement.

Even more alarming, in addition to allowing the deployment of regular troops and federalizing the National Guard, the act permits the president to deputize “private militias.” In theory, Trump could grant federal law enforcement authority to the extremist groups who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 or to militant organizations like the Proud Boys.

Our military is primarily trained for overseas combat, not domestic law enforcement, which requires different rules of engagement and careful protection of constitutional rights. And coordination between federal troops, local police and state officials becomes a logistical nightmare.

But all is not yet lost.

The Biden administration and Congress have roughly two months to reform this dangerous law before Trump returns to office. Experts across the political spectrum have proposed crucial reforms. Congress could explicitly narrow the specific substantive circumstances in which the act can be invoked, eliminate the private militia provisions, or add procedural checks on the use of the act, for example by requiring congressional approval or judicial review.

But even without congressional reform, executive branch lawyers in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel can make it clear that the current language in the Insurrection Act is not as broad as it may seem. Indeed, OLC has long maintained that the act’s sweeping language must be read narrowly in conjunction with other specific constitutional provisions and historical practice. Now, faced with explicit threats to weaponize the act, OLC should forcefully clarify these constitutional constraints, while providing needed guidance to judges should they be required to interpret the scope of the act.

First, OLC should emphasize that Congress enacted much of the act’s broad language immediately after the Civil War pursuant to its authority under the 14th Amendment. Because the 14th Amendment requires state action, the Insurrection Act should too, preventing the president from unilaterally deploying troops unless state authorities are either actively denying federal rights or completely powerless to protect them.

Second, OLC should establish a high bar for military deployment not tied to enforcing specific court orders. Both the Supremacy Clause and Article IV, Section 4 of the Constitution suggest that the president must demonstrate a genuine collapse of state and local authority, and that the statute should only be used as a last resort.

Under this constitutional framework, Trump’s threats to deploy troops against protesters or undocumented immigrants are clearly illegitimate. They involve neither state violations of constitutional rights nor a breakdown of civil authority.

The framers of our Constitution were deeply skeptical of standing armies and military involvement in civilian affairs. They understood that turning troops against citizens was a hallmark of tyranny. It is deeply embedded in our Constitution and tradition that, outside of invasion or rebellion, civilian law enforcement — not soldiers — would maintain domestic order.

Our military exists primarily to protect the nation from foreign threats, not to serve as any president’s personal enforcement army against the American people. Now, as we face four more years of a president who has shown contempt for democratic norms and institutional restraints, we must use every legal tool available to prevent the abuse of this extraordinary power.

Julien Berman is a Harvard undergraduate and op-eds editor of The Harvard Crimson. Laura Dickinson is the Lyle T. Alverson Professor of Law at The George Washington University Law School.

Trump doubles down on provocative Cabinet picks as their fates hang in the balance

CNN

Trump doubles down on provocative Cabinet picks as their fates hang in the balance

Analysis by Stephen Collinson – November 18, 2024

Smerconish: Trump is inviting confrontation with cabinet picks

Donald Trump is refusing to back down over his Cabinet picks in the first clash in an epic battle he will wage against Washington when he takes office next year.

The coming days will show whether Matt Gaetz, Tulsi Gabbard, Pete Hegseth and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. have staying power for confirmation fights in the new Republican Senate over their assignments to safeguard the rule of law, the US intelligence community, the military, and the health and well-being of all Americans.

Each of the most provocative selections is facing criticism that they lack the expertise and experience to run the vast, specialized bureaucracies that would be under their control.

And debate over their prospects is intensifying following fresh revelations and allegations about their pasts, which will set up a test for Trump’s intention to wield what he regards as almost uncheckable power from the Oval Office.

CNN reported this weekend that Hegseth, Trump’s pick for defense secretary, paid a woman who accused him of sexual assault in a settlement agreement that included a confidentiality clause, according to Hegseth’s attorney. The Fox News anchor has denied assaulting the woman, according to the attorney, and was not charged in any criminal case or named as a defendant in any civil lawsuit in connection with the 2017 incident. The initial sexual assault allegation against Hegseth had caught Trump’s team off guard last week, after the president-elect had already picked him.

Intrigue also deepened over a House Ethics Committee investigation into Gaetz, the potential attorney general, after a lawyer who represents two of the witnesses in the probe said Friday that one of his clients saw the Florida Republican, who resigned from Congress last week, having sex with a minor. Gaetz denies any wrongdoing, including ever having sex with a minor or paying for sex. He was not charged after a Department of Justice investigation.

There is also growing scrutiny over Gabbard’s suitability for the job of director of national intelligence because of her positions that sometimes amplified the propaganda of one of the covert community’s top adversaries — Russia.

And some senior medical experts are raising concerns over the qualifications of Kennedy, a vaccine skeptic, to safeguard generations of medical advances as the secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, even though his outspokenness against processed food has found support among many top physicians.

Not all of Trump’s picks are causing uproar. The selection of Florida Sen. Marco Rubio to serve as secretary of state has won praise on both sides of the aisle. But in a conventional administration, controversies raging around at least four key Cabinet picks would be seen as a disaster.

Trump is adamant he’s not going to give in as he seeks people who will fulfill his goals of tearing down the Washington establishment in a second term he pledged to devote to retribution. A source told CNN over the weekend that Trump sees Gaetz as his most important pick. The president-elect wants the former Florida congressman confirmed “100%,” the source said. “He is not going to back off. He’s all in.”

Johnson tells CNN that releasing Gaetz ethics report would open a Pandora’s box’

Trump has called on the Senate to, if necessary, cooperate with him to make recess appointments if the picks cannot be confirmed. Using such a move as a first resort rather than a final one, as has happened in the past, would be a sign that Trump, with a compliant GOP, plans to bypass the constitutional checks and balances of Congress and act with sweeping, unrestrained authority as president.

The outcome of the coming showdown will depend on whether Republican senators are willing to abrogate their own power to vet nominees and will cave under the furious political pressure that is certain to be trained on them by the “Make America Great Again” movement. The issue represents the first political crisis to confront South Dakota Sen. John Thune, who will take over as Republican Senate majority leader next year. And even if senators take a stand over one or two nominees they view as unqualified, it’s unlikely they will deal a defeat to the new president by throwing out all of the most provocative picks, meaning that some of them are almost certain to take jobs atop key government departments.

The storm over Trump’s picks is deepening as the president-elect is working to complete his future governing team with positions such as treasury secretary and US trade representative — who will be critical to carrying out his populist trade and economic policies — still outstanding.

Gaetz — a pyrotechnical politician who made his name with his outspoken support for Trump and a series of political stunts — is attracting the most attention in part because of his decision to quit the House just days before the Ethics Committee was expected to release its report. Without him being a sitting member of Congress, the investigation will end with the report still under wraps, despite some GOP senators requesting to see what is in it.

House Speaker Mike Johnson told CNN’s Jake Tapper on “State of the Union” on Sunday that releasing the report would open a “Pandora’s box” since Gaetz had left Congress, even though such action would not be unprecedented. “The Senate has a role, the advise-and-consent role, under the Constitution, and they will perform it,” the Louisiana Republican said. “They will have a rigorous review and vetting process in the Senate, but they don’t need to rely upon a report, or a draft report, a rough draft report, that was prepared by the Ethics Committee for its very limited purposes.” Johnson also said he had not discussed the matter with Trump.

The president-elect’s son explains the plan

Gaetz and several other Trump picks have caused consternation in some circles given the questions about their qualifications and past behavior.

“I think the whole point with these nominees, several of them, is their un-qualification, is their affirmative disqualification,” Sen.-elect Adam Schiff said on “State of the Union” on Sunday. “That’s Trump’s point, because what he wants to do with these nominees is establish that the Congress of the United States will not stand up to him with anything,” the California Democrat said. “If they will confirm Matt Gaetz, they will do anything he wants.”

Rep. Jim Himes, a Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, warned Sunday that Republican senators should look to their legacies and not to Trump. “These people are manifestly unqualified, and they’re not prepared to run the very complicated organizations they have been asked to run,” the Connecticut Democrat said on CBS’ “Face the Nation.” He added: “A Republican senator who takes a vote to consent to the appointment of Matt Gaetz — a chaos agent, a performative social media, no-respect-for-the-rule-of-law individual — the Republican senator who votes to confirm Matt Gaetz or Robert Kennedy or Tulsi Gabbard will be remembered by history as somebody who completely gave up their responsibility to Donald Trump.”

Trump on the campaign trail made no secret of his plans if he won a second term. Many of his most committed supporters regard the federal government as a liberal deep state that has failed to respond to their needs. Trump, moreover, is still seething over the establishment’s attempts to rein him in during his first White House term. So selecting Cabinet picks who are seen as unqualified to lead their departments may be an attempt to deal a blow against the credibility of government in itself.

The strategy was explained by the president-elect’s son Donald Trump Jr. on “Sunday Morning Futures” on Fox Business. “The reality this time is, we actually know what we’re doing. We actually know who the good guys and the bad guys are. We know who the guys who are fake,” he said. “It’s about surrounding my father with people who are both competent and loyal. They will deliver on his promises. They will deliver on his message. They are not people who think they know better, as unelected bureaucrats.”

Trump Jr. also suggested that the uproar surrounding some of Trump’s picks was exactly why he chose them and that it proves their authenticity. “A lot of them are going to face pushback, for the same reasons. Again, they are going to be actual disrupters. That’s what the American people want.”

It would take a handful of Republican senators to block the most provocative Trump nominees early next year, given that Democrats are likely to vote en masse against them. But several GOP senators made clear Sunday they had no problems with the people Trump has picked to staff the government.

Sen. Markwayne Mullin has a long-standing personal feud with Gaetz and has in the past held his behavior in contempt. But the Oklahoma Republican said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that he would give Gaetz a “fair shot.” He added: “I’ve got a tough situation. … I’ve got to set my personal situation with Matt to the side and look at the facts. If he’s qualified, he’s qualified.”

Missouri Sen. Eric Schmitt said he believed Trump’s nominees would get confirmed. “You have to have people you trust to go into these agencies and have a real reform agenda. And that’s why I think there’s real momentum, real momentum to get these nominations confirmed,” he said on “Sunday Morning Futures.”

On the same show, however, another Trump ally, Alabama Sen. Tommy Tuberville, warned there was “hard work” ahead in the confirmation process but praised Gaetz as a “fighter” who was loyal to the president-elect. “We have got the numbers. Let’s step to the plate, do our job, because we have to get this country back going in the right direction. President Trump only has a short period of time. Four years is not long.”

Across the aisle, Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman looked ahead to those four years and urged Democrats to acknowledge the big picture rather than playing into Trump’s hands over every controversy. He said on “State of the Union” that the picks of Gaetz and some others were “just absolute trolls” that fit Trump’s purposes. “He gets the kind of thing that he wanted, like the freak-out. … If we’re having meltdowns every tweet or every appointment or all those things, I mean, it’s going to be four years.”

Trump’s first Cabinet was rocked by scandal. His second could suffer the same fate.

MSNBC – Maddow Blog

Maddow Blog | Rachel Maddow: Trump’s first Cabinet was rocked by scandal. His second could suffer the same fate.

Rachel Maddow and Allison Detzel – November 12, 2024

This is an adapted excerpt from the Nov. 11 episode of “The Rachel Maddow Show.”

The last time Donald Trump was president, his Interior secretary was embroiled in a corruption scandal and ended up referred to the Department of Justice for a potential criminal investigation. His Transportation secretary was also embroiled in her own corruption scandal and also was referred to the Justice Department for a potential criminal investigation.

Trump’s Labor secretary resigned in scandal, following a ruling from a federal judge that he had broken the law when he signed a plea deal agreement with Jeffrey Epstein in 2008. Trump’s Energy secretary, head of the Environmental Protection Agency and Health and Human Services secretary all also resigned in corruption and ethics scandals.

It used to be if you had one Cabinet official involved in a big ethics and/or corruption scandal that forced them out of the job or led to them being referred for criminal investigations, that would be enough to brand your whole presidency a disgraced and scandal-ridden mistake.

Just consider Warren G. Harding — what’s remembered about his presidency? Maybe that he died in office? Or that he had an affair? No, it’s the Teapot Dome corruption scandal, which resulted in a Cabinet official being criminally charged. A century later, that one scandal involving one Cabinet official is basically all we remember about Harding’s presidency.

The first Trump term had so many Cabinet officials forced out of office in disgrace and referred to the Justice Department for criminal charges that it’s actually hard to remember them all. However, despite an unprecedented number of Cabinet officials being referred for criminal investigations, the supposedly independent DOJ decided to bring charges against precisely none of them.

One of the more memorable ethical disasters along these lines from the first Trump term was a situation involving his secretary of Veterans Affairs, Robert Wilkie. This might be the most memorable scandal because it happened right at the end of his administration, Dec. 10, 2020 — after Trump lost re-election to Joe Biden but before the Jan. 6 attack.

MaddowBlog’s headline at the time, by Steve Benen, read, “Yet another Trump Cabinet secretary caught up in scandal: As Donald Trump’s presidency comes to an ignominious end, it’s apparently not too late for one more Cabinet controversy.”

Wilkie was accused of having discredited a female veteran who said she had been sexually assaulted at a VA facility. The VA inspector general investigated those allegations against him, found evidence that he seemed to have broken the law and referred him to the Justice Department for investigation. (Wilkie has denied questioning the woman’s credibility.)

The Justice Department didn’t charge Wilkie, just like they didn’t charge any of these guys. But more than 20 different veterans groups rose up in outrage against him. Disparate veterans groups with very different takes on the world banded together — everyone from the American Legion to Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America to the Veterans of Foreign Wars – all demanding that Wilkie resign or be fired.

It was just a disaster, and it was a sign that even right up to the very bitter and ultimately violent end of Trump’s first term, things weren’t merely bad. It’s not normal to have a half-dozen members of the Cabinet referred for investigations into potential crimes committed while they were serving in the Cabinet.

Now, as the nation marked Veteran’s Day, a day to honor and celebrate our veterans, we learned Trump has decided to bring Wilkie back, tapping him to lead the transition efforts for the entire Defense Department. At a time when the country is looking to the U.S. military for assurances that they won’t deploy against American civilians the way Trump has threatened, the guy charged with staffing up the Defense Department leadership for the military is same guy who left office last time while his “possible criminal conduct” was under investigation by federal prosecutors.

Wilkie is not the only one who’s been tapped for the second Trump administration in recent days. NBC News has learned Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, who once memorably cast aspersions on the size of Trump’s genitals in a presidential debate, is expected to be the president-elect’s choice for secretary of state.

Trump has also chosen Rep. Mike Waltz of Florida to be his national security adviser. Walz helped in the effort to try to overthrow the government and keep Trump in power after he lost re-election in 2020. Waltz has distinguished himself by claiming that Trump was not responsible for Jan. 6 and that Dulles Airport should be renamed the “Donald J. Trump International Airport.” So clearly, he’s checked all the boxes he needs to be national security adviser.

We learned Tom Homan, the former acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement during Trump’s first term, will be his administration’s “border czar.” Remember when Republicans used to maintain with a straight face that it was a huge scandal and evidence of communism to call anyone the czar of anything?

Well, Homan will now be Trump’s “border czar.” He’s one of the architects of the policy that had the U.S. government deliberately and systematically separating kids from their parents at the border. He’s also spent this interregnum period while Trump has been out of office barnstorming the country bragging about how he’s going to be the man mercilessly coming after immigrants if Trump gets back in power.

Trump has put the other architect of family separation, Stephen Miller, in charge of all policy planning for the transition. A source tells NBC News that Miller will also serve as deputy chief of staff for policy in the second Trump White House.

So anyone telling you that a second Trump administration is going to be at all moderate or normal in terms of what they’re going to do, that person is living on a nice planet that I’d like to visit sometime, but it’s not our planet.

Any expectation that the most extreme things Trump talked about were just talk and that normal people would come into his administration to do normal things, well, that wishful thinking hasn’t survived one week after the election.