Free Idea: No Democratic Votes For Loyalty-Tested Republicans
Executive branch appointees work under the president, but on behalf of the public—this should be an easy line for Democrats to draw.
If you forced me to bet, I’d still probably throw in with those who think Pete Hegseth—the weekend Fox News host and alleged rapist—will never become secretary of defense.
But the still-forming Trump administration (it’s really more of a posse than an administration) seems intent on forcing a showdown with Senate Republicans over Hegseth’s nomination, and it’s testing the Democratic approach of letting media scrutiny of Donald Trump’s worst appointees do their dirty work for them.
In a void of opposition, Republican leaders have shrugged off news reports and treated the Hegseth backlash as yet another witch hunt.
“We’re not abandoning this nomination,” said JD Vance, the nominal vice president-elect. “Pete Hegseth is going to get his hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee, not a sham hearing before the American media.”
The window for Democrats to build national politics around Trump’s desire to give big jobs overseeing men with guns to bad people is closing steadily. Democrats don’t have leader figures who will say, for instance, “the Fox News host Trump picked to run the military currently has his mommy begging Republican senators to confirm him, and those senators are too scared to put an end to this charade.”
More generally, Trump’s sloppy cabinet rollout is unfolding in horserace terms—will they or won’t they be confirmed?—in part because Democratic leaders have refused to tie it to concrete stakes.
Trump told NBC over the weekend that mass pardons for violent January 6 insurrectionists are on his day-one agenda, and nobody in the opposition leadership thought to turn that into a test for his attorney general nominee. Are the interests of justice served by pardoning rioters who bludgeoned police officers and tried to overturn an election by force?
In the days since rebels closed in on, then ousted, Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, I have not seen a relevant elected Democrat connect the most obvious dots: If Trump gets his way, the country’s top intelligence chief will be Tulsi Gabbard, an Assad fangirl. What would she have done with those powers if she’d been on the job this past week? Would she have intervened to protect Assad’s regime? Would she have been receptive to it if Vladimir Putin had called in a favor?
We may never have answers to these questions, but we definitely won’t if nobody prominent asks them.
THE LOYAL WE
Better still, Democrats could create a simple test for Trump’s nominees, and insist they all clear it: Who will you work for, Trump, or the citizens of the United States?