What I'm Reading: US election wash-up edition
November 15 : Five reads that piqued my interest this week
Trump’s shock and awe cabinet picks
It all started so well.
Donald Trump’s return to power was marked by calm and order instead of the chaos that characterised his first term.
He stunned and placated friends and foes as he made two reasonable picks — Mike Waltz as National Security Adviser and Marco Rubio, his one-time rival as Secretary of State.
Then came the jaw-dropping nominees: Fox News commentator Pete Hesgeth for Defence Secretary, Tulsi Gabbard for Director of National Intelligence, anti-vaxxer Robert F. Kennedy Jr for Health and Matt Gaetz for Attorney-General.
The latter cohort represents the ideological heart of MAGA and will test whether the GOP, now in charge of the Senate and the House can keep the President in check.
And they may also test whether lame-duck President Joe Biden was right when he warned that re-electing Trump would be a threat to democracy.
Hesgeth and Gaetz, both supremely unqualified for these jobs by any objective standard, are both expected to purge their departments, triggering concerns that this could be the start of incremental authoritarianism — the kind seen in India and Hungary, where the tools of government are used to pursue, harass and silence critics.
In this spirit, it’s clear what emerges as the most dangerous move of Trump’s early transition: the Gaetz pick.
It is hard to imagine someone more cravenly loyal to Trump than Gaetz. It is hard to imagine anyone who has a more serious vendetta against non-partisan administration of laws, since Gaetz was once the target of a federal investigation.
And it is hard to imagine a more important position than attorney general — one that gives immense power both to eviscerate guardrails and to punish private sector dissenters with spurious criminal investigations (among other tools).
The Defence Department plans aren’t too far behind. Purging the Joint Chiefs based on political loyalty — excuse me, alleged ‘wokeness’ — removes one of the chief barriers to Trump’s alleged desire to invoke the Insurrection Act and deploy soldiers against protestors at home. Hegseth isn’t quite as egregious a Cabinet choice as Gaetz, but it’s hard to imagine someone who has proposed such purges and regularly praises Trump on TV standing in the way of his boss’s plans.
We can go on down the list.
The plan for circumventing the Senate’s advice-and-consent power would be extremely threatening to guardrails if it happened, but it’s unclear how likely it is to happen.
Gabbard as director of national intelligence raises some troubling questions about politicising intelligence, but she’s not as much of a Trump toady as a Gaetz or even a Hegseth.
Kennedy is almost certainly a disaster for public health, but not an obvious threat to democracy narrowly speaking. The office of presidential personnel is small potatoes compared to a cabinet post, but Trump’s decision to put his book publisher in charge of it will facilitate his plans for seeding the entire government with loyalists.
Gabbard on Japanese re-militarisation
To provide an insight into just how exotic Gabbard’s thinking is, she has previously questioned whether a remilitarised Japan is a good idea.
On the 82nd anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour, she said Americans needed to ask themselves whether Japan re-arming was ‘truly a good idea?’
‘We need to be careful that shortsighted, self-serving leaders do not end up bringing us again face-to-face with a remilitarised Japan,’ she said.
The Japan Times covers this angle in a deadpan style.
Gabbard, who is from Samoa, was elected to the House of Representatives from Hawaii. She later became a candidate in the 2020 Democratic presidential primaries. After becoming an independent, she approached Trump and joined the Republican Party this October.
As Gabbard is known for defending Russia over its invasion of Ukraine, some have questioned her qualifications to join the administration.
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence was created following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in the United States to oversee intelligence institutions in the country, including the CIA.
Taking the director post requires approval from the Senate. The approval process is not expected to be easy for Gabbard as she has no experience of working in an intelligence organisation.
Is Trump getting sick of Elon?
This is a dynamic to watch. It’s gone little-noticed but on Thursday Trump made his first formal speech since his election victory and he has started mocking Elon Musk.
Musk has been given a job alongside the other giant fast-talking ego Trump recruited — Vivek Ramaswamy — at a quasi-’Department’ for Government Efficiency named after a cryptocurrency DOGE which started out as a meme (yes, really).
Speaking at Mar-a-Lago, Trump said: ‘Elon, what a job, what a job he does. He’s great, he happens to be a really good guy. You know, he likes this place. I can’t get him out of here.’
It wasn’t the first time Trump had started speaking of Musk’s clinginess. Musk was on Trump’s first call with Ukraine’s President Volodymr Zelensky and has been photographed with Trump at Mar-a-Lago relentlessly over the past few weeks.
‘Elon won’t go home. I can’t get rid of him … Until I don’t like him,’ Trump is also reported to have said.
Trump has a history of pushing out those who think their star burns as brightly as his. Just ask Steve Bannon.
…some Republicans have questioned how long Trump and Musk can happily co-exist, particularly given Trump’s past frustration with those who take up too much of the spotlight.
‘Trump is not going to have another alpha. I think Trump is going to tire of him,’ one source close to the transition told The Hill.
One Republican lobbyist with ties to Trump said there are some in the president-elect’s orbit who think Musk is ‘a little big for his britches.’
Infowars is over but its legacy lives
There’s a delicious irony in the satirical website The Onion bidding to take over Alex Jones’ Infowars website which was forced into sale after the families of children killed in the Sandy Hook massacre sued him for claiming the attack was fake.
But Jones may be having the last laugh. Sure, he lost his case and was forced into bankruptcy but he pioneered a dangerous form of media that thrives and propels far-right movements.
But Josh Owens, who worked for Infowars from 2013 to 2017, said Jones’ legacy lives on in how conspiracy-minded outlets have made big business of undermining any sense of ‘objective truth.’
‘It doesn’t seem to matter what’s real or what’s not real. People are going to believe what they want,’ Owens said. ‘And I think Alex Jones has played a huge role in that.’
For further evidence of that legacy, said Owens, a former Infowars video editor, look no further than the current US political landscape.
Jones ‘has been far more wrong than he’s right, but he’s constructed this narrative and this world where it doesn’t matter,’ he said. ‘You see Trump doing the same thing.’
‘Just a complete erosion of trust and truth,’ he added.
Beyond Infowars, a sizable and thriving world of pro-Trump media that often traffics in conspiracy theories continues with few limitations, especially as major social networks have rolled back some of their moderation policies that once sought to limit the spread of false claims and extreme rhetoric.
And some on the right have even succeeded in building or buying their own platforms — most notably Elon Musk in his purchase of Twitter and in the rise of the video platform Rumble.
Kamala and the Glass Cliff
As discussed in my recent podcast episode with JL Partners pollster
, gender was a huge factor in this vote.As Michael Green from the US Studies Centre told me last week, it is too simplistic to conclude that gender was the reason for Kamala Harris’ loss, as a swathe of Democratic women candidates prevailed in their House and Senate races.
But it remains the case that the American voters have never selected a woman president.
And it also remains the case that the only time women candidates have been fielded they have been against Trump — who channels the ultra-macho man appealing to disenfranchised male voters, whose roles have been upended by female choice, women outperforming them at a tertiary level and the left’s preoccupation with diversity and identity politics.
It is my firm belief that women against Trump cannot win and the Democrats’ best hope was for another white male, a la Joe Biden — the only person to have defeated Trump.
I greatly enjoyed the nuance of this piece, quizzing ten experts about the way gender played a role in this campaign.
Harris didn’t lose the election because she’s a woman, but she was put into the position to lose this election because she was a woman. A 2014 study found that Fortune 500 companies were likely to promote women into CEO positions over white men when those companies were struggling in a phenomenon that has been dubbed ‘the glass cliff.’ Harris was pushed off the glass cliff — repeatedly.
…
Trump again leaned into a macho posture in 2024 as he faced down another female opponent, again asserting an authority that has not yet been usurped: male power.
This time, he emphasised a kind of male pride as he appeared with various fixtures of the bro universe: male-oriented podcasters, wrestlers, mixed martial arts fighters, tech entrepreneurs.
The message was more subtle than 2016’s explicitly misogynist ‘Trump that bitch.’ It was a statement about whose voices the campaign values, whose culture it embraces, and whose preferences it will put first — who will have a seat at the table when America is being re-made, and what the nation will look like post-makeover. It was a statement about who is naturally deserving of power in America.
…
The most discouraging insights from our poll surfaced in response to a blunt question: ‘Do you personally know someone who wouldn’t vote for a woman for president?’ Shockingly, four in 10 women said yes — they know someone, whether a close friend, family member or even a significant other, who would not support a female candidate, regardless of her qualifications.
Perhaps even more troubling, 10 per cent of women overall — and 20 per cent of Republican women — admitted that they personally would not vote for a woman for president.
This internalised bias highlights the deeply rooted cultural and social norms that continue to cast doubt on women’s leadership potential, even among other women.
And that’s my list for this week. Today I spoke to Moncole Radio about the Trump effect on the APEC and G20 summits.
Please do send me anything that’s caught your eye, I enjoy knowing what you’ve been reading.
Some of you have started to offer me copies of your books etc. Please email me at latika@latikambourke.com for a forwarding address for hard copies.