These freakish and unqualified cabinet picks, from RFK Jr. to Matt Gaetz to Tulsi Gabbard, show that Trump is clowning you.
Former Republican presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Donald Trump shake hands during a campaign rally at Desert Diamond Arena on August 23, 2024, in Glendale, Arizona.(Rebecca Noble / Getty Images)
Within just a few hours of President Joe Biden’s welcoming President-elect Donald Trump to a cozy two-hour Oval Office meeting (which honestly made me queasy), Trump made any right-thinking American queasy, too. He quickly nominated former Democrat-turned-quisling Tulsi Gabbard his director of national intelligence, accused pedophile Matt Gaetz as attorney general, and womanizing, serial liar, dead-baby-bear-defiling, worm-in-his-head anti-vaxxer Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as head of Health and Human Services.
That was just after he nominated Christian nationalist Mike Huckabee as ambassador to Israel.
What to do? Well, if Republicans decide to hold on to their power to confirm the president’s nominees—new Senate majority leader John Thune said he was open to Trump’s demand to make recess appointments—I hope they will not confirm any of them. Obviously, if you’re a Democrat, you make sure every Democrat votes against confirming them.
But before the confirmation dramas begin: Vice President Kamala Harris and second gentleman Doug Emhoff, former president Barack Obama and Michelle Obama, Bill and Hillary Clinton—and honestly, every Democratic member of Congress–must follow the lead of the late Representative John Lewis, who skipped Trump’s first inauguration, and decline their invitation to the inauguration on January 20.
“It will be the first one that I miss since I’ve been in Congress,” Lewis said in January 2017. “You cannot be at home with something that you feel that is wrong, is not right.” Lewis died in July 2020, before he could attend Joe Biden’s inauguration. But I know he’s fine with that. And if he were here now, I know what he would do. This is an ultimately inauthentic government, hateful of knowledge and science. And people. All but the people they see in their boardrooms.
Please don’t legitimize this, Madame Vice President.
I’ve written about RFK Jr. multiple times in our pages. He helped me to my most humiliating professional experience: publishing, at Salon, his virtually fact-free indictment of childhood vaccines for their role in causing autism. Read about it here.
He basically falsified transcripts to make it seem that medical investigators had found a connection between childhood vaccines and autism (he denies falsifying, but follow the links). He fooled me, and Jann Wenner, at Rolling Stone, our copublishers, too; it was the biggest embarrassment of my career. But far worse than the embarrassment is that he could fool anybody, and at HHS, can weaponize this misinformation on a whole new level.
It would waste precious moments of my life to detail his depredation. Let’s just say: He has no qualifications to be HHS secretary—in fact, he has negative qualifications.
Oh, hey, the same is true of Matt Gaetz running the Department of Justice, and Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence.
First, Gaetz: In case you missed it, he’s been investigated multiple times relating to child sex trafficking allegations, including by the House of Representatives (and there’s a bipartisan clamor for that report). He’s never been charged, let alone convicted, I must add. But one of his best friends was, both, and his testimony was anything but disculpatory for Gaetz. Gaetz wants to abolish the DOJ and the FBI.
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Where do we start with Tulsi Gabbard, the freak-show former Democrat whom the BBC recently described as an ally of Russia’s Vladimir Putin and Syria’s Bashar al-Assad? Right there. That’s where we’ll stop. She’s been a poison to our democracy, in my opinion, though she has her fans.
I think it’s going to get harder for establishment Democrats to uphold the performative pageantry we demand every four years. Biden did it Wednesday, but nobody else has to do it this January 20. Every appointment, and many things that come out of Trump’s mouth, require Democrats to stand up. We can’t merely ask it of Congress; we must ask it of the Obamas and Clintons and Bushes, and of course Harris and Emhoff.
I heard talking heads on cable all day suggest that Biden will be there. He will not. The president greets his or her successor (I will say “her” until I die) at the White House, then takes Marine One to his ultimate destination. So it’s funny to watch these very young people—I love young people—suggest that Biden’s Wednesday sit-down foretells a big look on the big stairs. Joe won’t be there, but Kamala could. Same with the whole gang.
They best not. Now’s the time to demand that they stop with business as usual and turn their backs on the sorry spectacle.
Joan WalshTwitterJoan Walsh, a national affairs correspondent for The Nation, is a coproducer of The Sit-In: Harry Belafonte Hosts The Tonight Show and the author of What’s the Matter With White People? Finding Our Way in the Next America. Her new book (with Nick Hanauer and Donald Cohen) is Corporate Bullsh*t: Exposing the Lies and Half-Truths That Protect Profit, Power and Wealth In America.