#MAGA administration

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Hegseth and the triumph of the Trump ideocracy

Lucian K. Truscott IV

Jan 15, 2025

How do you deal with a nomination like the odious Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense? I’m not going to take the time and space to run through the many reasons he is the wrong person for the job. They are manifest and obvious every time he shows his face or opens his mouth.

That appears to be the point with Donald Trump’s decision to appoint him. It’s as if Trump is waving a red flag at the establishment, or somebody anyway, telling the D.C. old guard and everybody else that they’ve run things long enough, so now we’re going to try something really different: the raw, unfettered, incompetence of norm-busting ugliness. There is simply nothing right about Hegseth, not his lack of experience, not his criminal attitude about women, not the insta-Christian nationalism he has deployed as a kind of parachute to save himself by embracing the worst instincts and lies of the far Right.

Trump is known to be furious with the Pentagon for its recalcitrance at the end of his last term in office. Neither Milley nor Esper would countenance his insane plans to put active duty troops on the street to face down American citizens who, along with providing the troops’ paychecks, were exercising their Constitutional right to protest the killing of George Floyd. What Trump wanted from the military was to use it for his own purposes, and anyone who got in his way he saw as not loyal to him and his agenda of grievance, if it can be called that. Trump’s attitude about the military was a version of what good is an army if you can’t do something with it. Previous presidents – George W. Bush comes to mind – have put this attitude to work starting wars that should never have been for reasons that couldn’t stand even a glance of scrutiny.

With Trump, of course, it was personal. Why waste his soldiers and guns and tanks on some country halfway across the world when he could use them right here in the exercise of a coup-in-place? That’s the way other dictators have done it over the years, and we know how much Trump admires dictators.

So, angry at a military establishment he sees as insubordinate to his sense of self as Supreme Ruler Over All, Trump just decided to take a well-coiffed Fox News yapper and blow the whole thing up and see what happens.

It would be one thing if the only people watching were his MAGA base, who have been eating up Hegseth and his simple-minded posturing like a Family Bucket of KFC. Were you watching yesterday during the hearing when half the room erupted in applause for Hegseth and started shouting “USA! USA!”? It was like a scene from the movie “Idiocracy” when a crowd of morons starts cheering because that’s what they’re supposed to do, MAGAs gone wild with delight because they think they’re being treated to the downfall of everything they think they hate about Washington and the establishment. That the “establishment” is this country’s military, which in another day conservatives embraced as reflexively as this crowd opposes our soldiers who have stood fast for the Constitution, is one of the great ironies of my lifetime.

But it isn’t just the MAGA mob watching that abomination of a hearing. It is the whole world, a world that knows all too well what happens when you throw a stink-bomb like Hegseth into the midst of what can only be called the world order. Because that’s what is happening. Trump isn’t just blowing up the Pentagon. He wants to blow up NATO, he wants to blow up our trade alliances, he wants to blow up everything that came before him put in place by anyone not named “Trump.” Europeans and our other allies around the world know what will come to pass if you throw away 75 years of carefully crafted mutual defense: more countries than Ukraine may begin to fall to fascism and force; people and institutions and whole countries will die.

The satisfaction among the MAGA faithful in the hearing room of the Senate Armed Services Committee was right out in the open. Hegseth is a dreamboat to this strain of American ideocracy. He has the “look,” he has the attitude, he wears the ill-fitting suit of the requisite anti-woke, anti-DEI, anti-woman, anti-rational right-wing male as if he’s a contestant for Mr. America, or these days perhaps a “hero” inside the “cage” at one of these fake mixed martial arts macho battles.

It’s so obvious that the whole thing is fake, it’s hard to believe the MAGA faithful don’t see it too. But they don’t. Apparently, neither do the Republican senators whose charge it is to “advise and consent” so that disasters-in-the-open like Hegseth don’t happen.

But they cower in fear of Trump, because that’s what you do if you’re a Republican today, and they will put their stamp of approval on this manifestly unqualified, incompetent TV-ready hand puppet Trump wants over there across the river at the Pentagon so he can call him up and tell him to do things that no other Secretary of Defense in our history would ever do.

It is obvious there is nothing Democrats can do to stop this trainwreck. Standing athwart the tracks and yelling “NO!” will not work. Trump and the Republicans have the votes, and they are going to have their way with Washington D.C. come hell or high water, and unless I miss my guess, an actual flood of downtown Washington is probably among the disasters that will befall us before Trump’s four years are over.

What is next, you may wonder? Well, we have endured this sort of madness before: Vietnam was a truly horrible misuse of American military might, and that included, in Nixon’s attempts to fight the anti-war movement, huge abuses of civil rights, privacy, and real weaponization of the Department of Justice and FBI against those Nixon considered enemies. The misbegotten war on Iraq and the trip we took through the graveyard of empires that is Afghanistan were almost as bad. Young American men and women lost their lives once again in pursuit of policies that never had a chance of success and so should never have been pursued in the first place.

After the deluge comes the clean-up, I’m afraid. Trump’s abuse of our military with the likes of Hegseth leading the way will cause a huge correction to take place at some point in the future, and we will begin again. As happens in Washington, no one will pay for this madness. Look at Wolfowitz and Feith, the “architects” of the lies that begat the invasion of Iraq. Do you see them paying a price? They have sinecures at the evergreen think tanks that populate the banks of the Potomac. Even Dick Cheney has achieved a nearly inexplicable hero status simply because he opposed Trump and stood up for whatever passed for the “old values” of the Republican Party Trump has turned to ashes. But you need to remember that it was Cheney who oversaw the whole Iraq disaster and in the process went after Joe Wilson for telling the truth when he took the job of investigating Iraq’s so-called WMDs and ended his wife Valerie Plame’s CIA career in the process.

That it has always been difficult to find good guys in Washington does not excuse the fact that Trump is fully in mid-stride in placing actual bad guys everywhere he can in Washington, and he’s giving them the triggers to set off bombs every time he picks up the phone and demands “loyalty” from these fools who would not recognize real allegiance and dedication to duty if it came from one of their own children.

The one glimmer of hope I see is that these people always end up doing to themselves what they think they are doing to others. There is no place from which incompetence can rise. It just stays where it is as the consequences ripple out and do their damage. The MAGA functionaries Trump is planting like deadly nightshades all over Washington can’t save themselves by suddenly learning to do the right thing, because they don’t know what the right thing is. And Trump isn’t going to save them, because everything that happens from here on out will be somebody else’s fault, not his.

Get ready for finger-pointing and blame. There’s going to be a lot of it coming, and oh, how much fun it’s going to be to watch Trump and his MAGA faithful eat their own.

[Lucian Truscott]

[thashining]

Don't fall for it

[elledotexe]

[my-midlife-crisis]

He even tucks the thumb

oh boy

Welcome to the Fourth Reich dickheads. This is what you wanted. This is what you get.

[dontmean2bepoliticalbut]

[ngdrb]

[cyarskj1899]

Never forgive the media

[godisarepublican]

We all are!

[deadpresidents]

"Mr. Trump's election demonstrates how American tolerance for the unacceptable is nearly infinite. There are hundreds of absolutely mind-boggling things I could point to from the past decade...But three election in a row, Mr. Trump has been a viable Presidential candidate and our democracy has few guardrails to protect the country from the clear and present danger he and his political appointees will continue to confer upon us. Clearly, Mr. Trump is successful because of his faults, not despite them, because we do not live in a just world...And now Republicans will control the executive branch, the Senate and the House of Representatives. There will be few checks and balances...

...Mr. Trump's voters are granted a level of care and coddling that defies credulity and that is afforded to no other voting bloc. Many of them believe the most ludicrous things: babies being aborted after birth and children going to school as one gender and returning home surgically altered as another gender even though these things simply do not happen. Time and again, we hear the wild lies these voters believe and we act as if they are sharing the same reality as ours, as if they are making informed decisions about legitimate issues. We act as if they get to dictate the terms of political engagement on a foundation of fevered mendacity.

We must refuse to participate in a mass delusion. We must refuse to accept that the ignorance on display is a congenital condition rather than a choice. All of us should refuse to pretend that any of this is normal and that these voters are just woefully misunderstood and that if only the Democrats addressed their economic anxiety, they might vote differently. While they are numerous, that does not make them right.

These are adults, so let us treat them like adults. Let us acknowledge that they want to believe nonsense and conjecture. They want to believe anything that affirms their worldview. They want to celebrate a leader who allows them to nurture their basest beliefs about others. The biggest challenge of our lifetime will be figuring out how to combat the American willingness to embrace flagrant misinformation and bigotry.

As Mr. Trump assembles his cabinet of loyalists and outlines the alarming policies he means to enact, it's hard not to imagine the worst, not out of paranoia but as a means of preparation. The incoming President has clearly articulated that he may dismantle the Department of Education and appears to be giving the wealthiest man in the world unfettered access to the Oval Office. He plans to begin mass deportations immediately and has announced his pick of a Fox News host as the defense secretary -- the list goes on, each promise more appalling than the last.

We would like to believe that many of the ideas on Mr. Trump's demented wish list won't actually come to fruition and that our democracy can once more withstand the new President and the people with whom he surrounds himself. But that is just desperate, wishful thinking. As of yet, there is nothing that will break the iron grip Mr. Trump has on his base, and Vice President-elect JD Vance is young enough to carry the mantle going forward for political cycles to come.

Absolutely anything is possible, and we must acknowledge this, not out of surrender, but as a means of readying ourselves for the impossible fights ahead."

-- Roxane Gay, "Enough", The New York Times, November 17, 2024.

This is one of the best, most spot-on pieces about where we are and what we must prepare ourselves for in the aftermath of Donald Trump's re-election to the Presidency. These gift links will allow you to bypass the NYT paywall and read the entire article, and I urge you to share these links with as many people as you'd like.

[nando161mando]

We are in a bad way

[athena5898]

“Today, in a joint action with Canada, the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) designated the Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network, or “Samidoun,” a sham charity that serves as an international fundraiser for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) terrorist organization.”

This targeting of the Samidoun Palestinian Political Prisoners Network is a huge escalation in the zionist counterinsurgency and weaponization of terrorist designations against liberation movements. Now is the moment all anti-zionist organizations should be standing by Samidoun in their righteous cause.

Follow Samidoun's work:

x.com/SamidounPP

samidoun.net

t.me/samidounnetwork

[jacksproject2025]

The Department of Government Efficiency [D.O.G.E.] is officially a reality. Elon Musk is now the head of a federal agency. Vivek Ramaswamy is now one of the most powerful men on earth. Damn it feels good to be MAGA.

[thashining]

WATCH: Protesters in Raleigh dropped off letters at the state legislature Monday denouncing a post-election Republican power grab that seizes powers held by offices that Democrats won in November. Senate Bill 382 was supposed to be a hurricane relief bill for western North Carolina, which was hit hard by Hurricane Helene in September. But it mostly contains attacks on the powers held by offices like the governor, attorney general, and superintendent of public instruction — which were all won by Democrats in November’s election. It also takes oversight of elections away from the governor’s office. Demonstrators during the “Moral Monday” protest in Raleigh likened it to a “coup,” saying that it undermines the will of the voters. Gov.-elect Josh Stein has condemned the bill. So has outgoing Gov. Roy Cooper and former Gov. Pat McCrory — a Republican. Cooper vetoed the bill, but Republican lawmakers in the House are expected to consider overriding the governor’s veto Wednesday in Raleigh. Stay tuned to @cardinalandpine for updates.

[elledotexe]

[cyarskaren52]

People actually need to do more of this!

Shame people for voting for a RACIST.

Shame them for voting for a RAPIST.

Shame them for voting for a FELON!

I’m sorry but you don’t get to interact with me like you didn’t just VOTE MY RIGHTS AWAY!

No you’re not welcomed in my home!

[spacenoirdetective]

I don't have a shred of respect for this absolute pile of failure. Biden has never EVER EVER taken responsibility FOR LITERALLY ANYTHING HE HAS EVER DONE IN HIS ENTIRE LIFE THAT HAS RESULTED IN FINANCIAL DEVASTATION, SKYROCKETING CRIME, AN INCIPIENT COMMUNIST REVOLUTION, A TOTALITARIAN GOVERNMENT THAT HAS TRIED TO DESTROY ITS OPPONENTS THROUGH MASS PSYCHOSIS AND BRAINWASHING AND ABSOLUTE SOCIAL MADNESS. If you don't see this ruthless, bitter, sabotaging, incompetent supremely entitled dullard for the asinine fraud and sociopathic compulsive liar he is, you are FUCKING BLIND!! SERIOUSLY, WAKE THE FUCK UP!!!

If a perianal abscess had a face, it would be this motherfucker.

He's also a decrepit, mentally deficient, obviously mentally impaired, dementia addled pustule spawned from Satan's asshole protected by the same elites who want to enslave you that he vows to punish as your false savior figure through nonsensical policies whose only goal is the total control over your body, your speech, your actions and your thoughts.

Fuck. You. You dumb, worthless sack of bat shit with your laughing prostitute of a vice president who is literally just a whore in a pantsuit. Fuck your worthless degenerate drug addled son with his Russian human trafficking ring and endless obscenities against God. Fuck your whole family and their criminal influence peddling, embezzlement, pyramid schemes, money laundering and THE ENDLESS NONSTOP HYPOCRISY. FUCK YOUR COWARDICE AS YOU BOW TO THE MOST INSIDIOUS COLLECTION OF AUTHORITARIANS WHO HAVE CONSPIRED TO DESTROY WESTERN CIVILIZATION AND FUCK YOUR ENDLESS FAKE OUTRAGE AGAINST THE ONE PERSON WHO HAS MANAGED TO STOP YOU FROM YOUR PLANS OF A NEW WORLD ORDER.

And fuck you if you keep supporting these people. They hate you. They hate America. Every fucking thing they have ever said is a constructed lie, a designed control mechanism. They hate freedom and democracy. They hate God. They hate Jesus. They hate everything pure and good. They hate everything but power and money. They want to replace worship of God with state worship. They have zero morals. They deluge you with propaganda and if you support them your head is just stuck so far up your asshole you refuse to see it because your ego won't allow it.

I want to shit on his grave.