Episode 16: Fasten Your Seatbelt

As Bette Davis said, it's going to be a bumpy night. Claire and political journalist Michael A. Cohen discuss how the Trump administration is staffing up, the weirdest picks, and what the Dems do next

Former Florida Representative Matt Gaetz, accused sex trafficker and President-elect Donald J. Trump’s Attorney General-designate. Image credit: Consolidated News Photos/Shutterstock

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Neil J. Young is out this week, doing super-secret stuff on behalf of media elites and the Deep State. So, our special guest is Michael A. Cohen, a Senior Fellow at the Fletcher School’s Center for Strategic Studies, and a Brooklyn-based freelance journalist. The author of several volumes of political history, Cohen is also the author of the Truth and Consequences Substack, which has been an essential resource to me and will continue to be as we navigate the coming four years. Try a month for only:

You’ll love it as much as I do.

Michael and I began with this morning’s breaking media news. The parody news site, The Onion, has purchased Alex Jones’s Infowars and all of its assets. The bankruptcy sale had the blessing of the Sandy Hook families, and plans a January re-launch as a parody of itself. You can read the parody announcement of the acquisition here.

The Future Guy (also a parody of a President) is off to a banger of a start staffing up his administration. Two unsurprising picks are:

• Former campaign chief Susie Wiles as Chief of Staff. Wheels at the top of hte campaign who ran the candidate are often picked to run the president too; the only unusual thing is that a) Wiles would usually prefer to be heard, not seen; and b) she is the first woman ever named to the post.

• Completely Evil Stephen Miller will be Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy, which means he will run mass deportation from the White House.

Melania Trump will not be returning to the White House (no such luck, Barron: hide the bong!) and will be working remotely from New York, Florida, and wherever her husband is not.

The transition team has announced numerous other cabinet appointments, all of which must be confirmed by the new Republican-majority Senate. Hawkish Marco Rubio will be Secretary of State and Kristi Noem Secretary of Homeland Security. Note to the Bidens: take any puppies and goats on the premises back to Delaware—we hear that Noem is installing a gravel pit in the Rose Garden.

Here are the head-scratchers: Fox News host Pete Hegseth (Secretary of Defense); former Florida Representative Matt Gaetz (Attorney General); and former Democratic Representative from Hawai’i Tulsi Gabbard (Director of National Intelligence.) None have ever run an organization larger than an office staff. In addition, Hegseth allegedly has Nazi tattoos; Gaetz resigned from Congress ahead of a report detailing the outcome of a sex trafficking investigation; and Tulsi Gabbard is either a Russian asset or an idiot (“Aloha, Comrade!” Jonathan Van Last quipped at The Bulwark.)

Then there’s this “Department of Government Efficiency” thing Trump is planning. Working part-time, Elon Musk, and reportedly, Vivek Ramaswamy will be assigned to do—what? This reminds me of “The Defiant Ones,” a 1958 film where Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier are two escaped prisoners: they are shackled together and must cooperate in order to survive. Michael and I suspect that DOGE will end less well than the movie did.

In other news:

• Republicans have won the House and now have control of all three branches of government: but that doesn’t mean there is no curb on the most extreme policies.

• John Thune of South Dakota was elected Majority Leader, and will be in charge of so much confirming. Michael and I discuss what we know about him, and the future of the filibuster.

• We also discuss Michael’s first post this week, “The Case for Democrats Doing Nothing,” in which he argues that the Democrats succumbed to a global anti-incumbency bias, and that by 2026, will be rebounding.

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