As we discussed at EAG B, the material change between the 1st term and 2nd term is that there were many “adults in the room” who kept the former president from fulfilling his worst instincts. Whereas now there has been a 4-year effort to cultivate a pipeline of loyalists to staff the government. Ezra’s episode on Trump and his disinhibition is a good piece on the topic.
The nominations for the national security apparatus are the strongest signal that he wants power consolidated and will test GOP Senators out the gate if they will be a check on his power.
I think Ezra’s start to the podcast that Michael linked was apt. If someone two months ago said that Gaetz, Gabbard, and Hegeseth were going to be nominated for DoJ, DNI, DoD, it would have been framed as hyperbolic doomer Liberal talk. However that is the universe we are in.
Have the nominations and the proposal to purge military generals updated your priors at all since EAG B?
I find the Gaetz and Hegeseth picks to be a bit worrying. I struggle to find a reason that the Gabbard is bad at all. In fact, I think she is probably good? She’s a former congresswoman, city councillor, hawaii house rep and member of the national guard, etc. She seems like a good pick who is concerned about the US tendency to intervene in foreign countries.
Now, to be clear, I find the Gaetz and Hegeseth picks to be bad but I thought Trump would do these types of things and I think there is a whole universe of things that Trump could have done and so he did some mildly-moderately bad ones.
So, he did some bad things but it was around expectation and nothing yet in the tails and thus I shouldn’t update in the direction of totalitarianism.
I’m still not finding anything to really be alarmed about other than people I know being alarmed.
So, he did some bad things but it was around expectation and nothing yet in the tails and thus I shouldn’t update in the direction of totalitarianism.
No one speaks of totalitarianism here, but a risk of authoritarian drift.
Over the past two weeks, the President-Elect has indicated he wants to appoint extreme loyalists without substantive qualifications to positions most relevant for democracy working well (or not) (DOJ, DOD, etc.). He is also trying to weaken the power of the Republican Senate Majority, both via the threat of recess appointments plus generally by pushing the Senate to confirm unqualified candidates.
I don’t think anyone knows what will happen, but I think being confident that he is not doing anything in the tails seems overconfident, what he is doing now is exactly what one would be doing if one wanted to move towards more authoritarianism.
The worry that people have with Gabbard is that her sympathies with Russia and Syria would essentially make it hard for her own and allied intelligence services to trust her severely undermining the function she is to serve.
As we discussed at EAG B, the material change between the 1st term and 2nd term is that there were many “adults in the room” who kept the former president from fulfilling his worst instincts. Whereas now there has been a 4-year effort to cultivate a pipeline of loyalists to staff the government. Ezra’s episode on Trump and his disinhibition is a good piece on the topic.
The nominations for the national security apparatus are the strongest signal that he wants power consolidated and will test GOP Senators out the gate if they will be a check on his power.
I think Ezra’s start to the podcast that Michael linked was apt. If someone two months ago said that Gaetz, Gabbard, and Hegeseth were going to be nominated for DoJ, DNI, DoD, it would have been framed as hyperbolic doomer Liberal talk. However that is the universe we are in.
Have the nominations and the proposal to purge military generals updated your priors at all since EAG B?
I find the Gaetz and Hegeseth picks to be a bit worrying. I struggle to find a reason that the Gabbard is bad at all. In fact, I think she is probably good? She’s a former congresswoman, city councillor, hawaii house rep and member of the national guard, etc. She seems like a good pick who is concerned about the US tendency to intervene in foreign countries.
Now, to be clear, I find the Gaetz and Hegeseth picks to be bad but I thought Trump would do these types of things and I think there is a whole universe of things that Trump could have done and so he did some mildly-moderately bad ones.
So, he did some bad things but it was around expectation and nothing yet in the tails and thus I shouldn’t update in the direction of totalitarianism.
I’m still not finding anything to really be alarmed about other than people I know being alarmed.
No one speaks of totalitarianism here, but a risk of authoritarian drift.
Over the past two weeks, the President-Elect has indicated he wants to appoint extreme loyalists without substantive qualifications to positions most relevant for democracy working well (or not) (DOJ, DOD, etc.). He is also trying to weaken the power of the Republican Senate Majority, both via the threat of recess appointments plus generally by pushing the Senate to confirm unqualified candidates.
I don’t think anyone knows what will happen, but I think being confident that he is not doing anything in the tails seems overconfident, what he is doing now is exactly what one would be doing if one wanted to move towards more authoritarianism.
The worry that people have with Gabbard is that her sympathies with Russia and Syria would essentially make it hard for her own and allied intelligence services to trust her severely undermining the function she is to serve.