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Update: Whew - It's Just A Clown Show [1]

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Date: 2024-11-24  

Last week I wrote a diary entitled Trump’s Nominees Are Unconfirmable: That’s The Point that spent some time on the trending list and generated a bunch of discussion, so I thought I ought to offer a brief update in light of recent developments — a happy one, as these things go: Turns out it’s just a clown show after all.



My diary had argued that since several of Trump’s nominees, Matt Gaetz in particular, were so blatantly unqualified and personally problematic as to be self-evidently unconfirmable, and that Trump and his team must have known this prior to selecting them, that their nominations likely represented a kind of power play by Team Fascism. Specifically, that they intended to use these absurd nominations as an early demonstration of their ability to crush dissent in Congress and, if necessary, the Supreme Court, clearing the way to unitary autocratic rule and striking while the iron was hot.



Nope!

Matt Gaetz’s swift and almost comically meek exit, stage left, demonstrates — at least to my mind — that it’s just the same old clown show. I did offer that option in a paragraph towards the end of my diary:

Perhaps all this will turn out to be catastrophizing. … Perhaps it really is just a clown show after all, and Trump is merely offering up circuses to distract the masses while he scoops up the bread.

And much to my qualified relief, that’s how it’s going down. Because there is no number of dimensions you could play Chess in where it would make sense to put Matt Gaetz out there, send your minions out to support him, and then just let him walk away. It broadcasts weakness, disorganization, and stupidity. It demonstrates that Trump really is just an addled geriatric toddler grabbing familiar faces off Fox News and throwing ineffectual tantrums, and the dream team of master strategists he’s assembled are just minions and mediocrities scurrying around doing his bidding.

Don’t get me wrong — clowns can still do plenty of damage, especially when they’re backed by deci- and centi-billionaires. As David French writes today in an excellent NYT column, the enemies of democracy are still very much intent on undermining the balance of power in more or less the way I wrote about and, even more consequentially, through nullifying Congress’s power of the purse:

Donald Trump and his allies have proposed two legal maneuvers that could have profound consequences for the function of the federal government. He has proposed confirming presidential appointments through an abuse of his power to make recess appointments, and his allies have proposed reviving a mostly banned practice called impoundment, under which the president can refuse to spend money appropriated by Congress. These proposals together would gut core constitutional functions of Congress and could make Trump our nation’s most imperial peacetime president.

But it heartens me to be able to say of them, as the Ukrainians often say about their Russian enemy: Thank God they are so stupid.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2024/11/24/2288376/-Update-Whew-It-s-Just-A-Clown-Show?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=more_community&pm_medium=web

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