Coop Scoop: Don't Confuse the Trees for The Forest

Autocracy is the forest that grew this bizarre cabinet

September 18, 2024

By Marc Cooper

The Big Four cabinet appointments—or five if you include the CEO of a fracking company and a climate denier just named as Secretary of Energy—are certainly the worst, most dangerous, and provocative picks that Trump could dig up.

But don’t be confused. In the end, they are distracting "shiny objects" (glaringly blinding!), but I would rather describe them more accurately as the trees.

A budding autocracy is the forest where they dwell and that’s what we really need to focus on. A veritable presidential dictatorship is already in the making and assembling itself before Trump is even seated.

Yes, as I and many others have written, that picking the worst possible candidates for some of the most important jobs is Trump’s way of daring and eventually humiliating the Senate, where MAGA holds a three-seat majority. Trump’s deliberate naming of the five worst candidates imaginable is his Mafia boss way of daring the Senate, any Republican in the Senate, to challenge him. You wanna take on The Don, pal?

In private, according to multiple reports, there are 30 MAGA Senators who don’t want Matt Gaetz as Attorney General. That is, in private. In public, not one of them has yet said a flat no, though Lisa Murkowski came pretty close.

You only need four out of 53 to kill any of these buffoons in confirmation. And if we should hold anybody in contempt, it’s the Republicans who could easily stop the train but are too spineless and craven to act. With some that have nothing to lose, they are impervious to political threats from The Don. Both women Senators, Murkowski and Susan Collins, have little to risk. , Among the others, Sen. Bill Cassidy, an MD, who has occasionally said a few cross words about Trump, could easily be a fourth vote. He will also chair the committee that has oversight over RFK if he becomes HHS Chief.

Don’t choke on this, but neither does Mitch McConnell have anything to lose. He is retiring in two years and we know he personally despises The Don. He was quoted on Sunday by The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer saying: “There will be be no recess appointments.” Maybe, the Trump gambit went a bridge too far because Mitch still has a handful or more of allies who he can bring along with him, if he sticks to his words.

This could be prelude to someone more trusted by Trump, like John Cornyn, who could meet privately with Trump and tell him he hasn’t got the votes and should withdraw at least one or two of his picks to save everyone embarrassment. But Trump wants to embarrass them. He wants them to choke on and swallow the slop he is feeding them, just in case they forgot who the real boss is. And recall what Mitt Romney told his biographer on the record: that there were plenty of Republicans who wanted to impeach Trump but backed down in public because they were afraid their wives and children would be targeted by him. Roll over, John Gotti.

Trump can also use an obscure but legal rule to force both the Senate and the House into recess and just go ahead and seat these gargoyles, avoiding that clumsy old notion of "advise and consent."

I think Trump actually wants his picks to be seated, as their lack of qualifications—and sanity—make them precise instruments to carry out his stated goal of “dismantling the deep state.” He is deliberately attempting to turn the Beltway swamp into a bottomless cesspool. The more damage his appointees can inflict on the “deep state,” the better. And none of these cabinet secretaries are going to be anything more than figureheads and tools, carrying out the whims and desires of the White House. Whether it’s Matt Gaetz or the Man in the Moon, Trump will order a wrecking ball and a guillotine to use against the DOJ. None of these nominees would have any real agency if seated. The orders come down from The Man.

It's possible, if unlikely, that any of the appointees will be stopped. But if one is—and I doubt there is enough collective courage to stop any more than one—it would be a very minor, temporary loss for Trump…if at all. Unless, Mitch is being serious in which case the confirmation of the cabinet could takes months — televised and oozing dirt.

We all know there is literally a sea of lower-profile, less reviled, but just as dangerous MAGAs around to replace all of them, allowing Trump to end up with just a different demolition crew—because demolition is the real goal, not just seating this handful of jamokes. In the end, after weeks of guessing the fate of the cabinet picks, it will make no difference. One way or another, Trump will cause the surrender of the Senate (there’s a long history of dictators keeping around a Potemkin Senate as set decorations).

Underlining that point, I expect that within the first 60 days, the new Senate will use 51 votes to take down the filibuster, as Trump cannot get 60 votes on anything he proposes. I don’t think there are seven Democrats ready to pass anything he wants.

Let’s try, however, to ponder what the next stages will be in The Don’s consolidation of total power. He still has to achieve a final unconditional surrender of the House, where, again, he is only going to have a slim majority. There are some real head cases in there (even with Matt Gaetz leaving) who could create small to medium-sized problems for the president. I don’t think Trump wants some yahoo from Kansas introducing a bill to ban birth control (though MAGA and Trump seem ready to abolish birthright citizenship). But that’s where Elon Musk and his $400 billion come into play. House reps serve only two years, and it wouldn’t take much more than a phone call to shut up any troublemaker to Don’s right or left, letting them know that if they don’t fall 100% in line, oh, I don’t know, $50 million or $75 million are immediately available to back a primary candidate and push them out into the street.

We can consider the House to be virtually another rubber stamp. That’s as much already in the bag.

The final institutional target standing, of course, is the Supreme Court. Its MAGA majority almost always sides with Trump. But "almost" isn’t nearly as good as "always." Trump knows that his monkeying around with the confirmation process will be legally challenged, and he probably can’t wait to stare down John Roberts and the rest of the justices. Just so they also get the message that the separation of powers is now obsolete.

There is a precedent for the Supremes overruling some recess appointments—they did it to Obama. One scenario I would not rule out is Trump deliberately crossing some legal line, forcing the court to rule against him, and then Trump simply ignoring the court ruling—since SCOTUS has no enforcement power. That would be a major and chilling victory.

A constitutional crisis of historic proportions would ensue with unknown consequences, but this is the sort of chaos that autocrats and dictators thrive on. Ultimate power is secured when the bothersome judiciary is smothered. Do you think that impossible? Did you think, two months ago, that Matt Gaetz could be Attorney General?

Am I painting a very dark picture? Yes. Am I saying there is no hope that he will fumble, stumble, and see his coalition fall apart? Absolutely not.

It should be crystal clear by now that Trump, who is now below 50% of the popular vote, won the election on the economy. Mostly on high prices.

Within weeks of his inauguration, his autocracy will be consolidated, but there remains the nagging issue of popularity.

A lot of people who voted for Trump are well aware of his psychotic nature and have no use for him, other than investing some mythical power in him to improve the economy.

And it is mythical. The president has no power to either lower prices (not even gasoline) or raise wages, which a reactionary MAGA Congress would never do. Trump’s problem is that he is psychotic, and his main interest in winning was to stay out of jail, rain down retribution on his enemies, and accumulate as much wealth as possible for himself, his horrid family and his oligarch Quislings. He’s pretty good at seeing political opportunities but he sucks at strategy.

No doubt he will give his richest pals a huge tax break, and maybe a small, rather meaningless one to regular ol’ Americans who are instead expecting gold dust to start falling from the skies. And tariffs? There will be a few, full of carve-outs for the ultra-rich pals getting richer from sweat labor in China.

Yet, Trump is burning the candle at both ends. He’s promised a better economy that he cannot possibly produce, while his BFF and virtual co-president, Elon Musk, is talking openly about inflicting “pain” on the population to reform—i.e., cut government spending. Musk is talking about slicing out a third of the U.S. budget, which, if enacted, would come directly out of the pockets of the bottom half of the population, shrinking the social safety net down to the size of a Brazilian thong bathing suit. Musk only has advisory powers, but both houses of Congress are brimming with others who cannot wait to strangle state spending (even though the tax cuts for the oligarchs will create a deficit a couple yards deeper than the Pacific Trench).

Probably the least educated among MAGA voters will rejoice in his mass deportations (that will not be mass, just as his wall doesn’t cover more than a few miles). They will get their rocks off if he court-martials the retired generals he has threatened. They will cheer his beheading of the DOJ, and only God knows how many will applaud RFK for firing all those elite experts, acting like a ditch-digger performing open-heart surgery. But this 50% or so of his hardcore MAGA voters are not enough to sustain him or his movement in power. Nor are they enough to win the midterms. They will get the message that he has done nothing for them and he could not care less about their welfare.

The other half of his voters who despise him personally absolutely did not vote for him to watch him bring the UFC to the Justice Department. They are not going to countenance armed troops pulling immigrants and their families out of their homes. They didn’t sign up to watch kangaroo courts martial honest retired and elderly military officers. And they are not big fans of the swirling chaos he will bring every night into their living rooms. Soon, they will realize that crime in America has not been erased. And they will realize they have been conned again by a master of the flim-flam.

Hitler, by example, came to power on the heels of the real Depression that hit Germany hard. His popularity initially soared because of his nationalist rants against the onerous Versailles Treaty that had economically smashed Germany and provoked widespread resentment. Once in power, he created millions of jobs as he cranked up the military production industries. He built the freeway system —the Autobahn still in use today—and made cars affordable (Volkswagen—the people’s car. Something you can reflect on next time you’re in a Bug or a Jetta). And he frenetically tried to restore the dignity of a defeated and humiliated nation.

This is the dead opposite of the economy and society Trump is inheriting. What economic miracle is he going to perform to make an economy with 4% unemployment and a growing job market better? And how does he keep his “smash the state” pals and his own rhetoric in any way consistent with family economies?

The inequalities of the economy are structural, no matter who is in the White House. The poor and the hard-pressed by high prices are going to be exactly where they are, or worse, four years from now—and probably sooner. The chasm between Jeff Bezos and Jeff Everyman will only widen.

My guess, and it’s only a guess, is that his numbers will be upside down months before the midterms. If they’re not, and by some magical reason he maintains or grows his popularity, then we really are looking at a lawless and much more powerful dictatorship, rather than a shoddy autocracy built on a twisted Trump cult of personality, an incoherent leader who will be 82 if he lives to complete his term.

The conclusion: Trump’s autocracy has already begun 60 days before his inauguration. And, yet, Trump’s coalition is extremely vulnerable, with endless opportunities to pry open its cracks and break it apart. When he starts to lose his support and we start to see MAGA defections at the popular level, who will be there to catch them?

The Democrats? Not THIS Democratic Party. Its branding alone has become toxic. I have had little to no participation in Democratic electoral politics. But I am ready to say this election was not won by Donald Trump, nor was it won by disinformation or Fox News.

This election was lost by the Democratic Party starting more than 30 years ago, when Bill Clinton signed NAFTA and the party broke its alliance with the working class. And let’s be accurate: in 2024 America, the working class includes people of all colors who are college grads making $23 an hour spending 8 hrs a day in a cubicle and struggling to pay rent, let alone buy a house.

Kamala Harris and the Democrats should have been able to beat a fringe loon like Trump with a flyswatter if the party had not sold its soul to corporate interests decades ago. But it was too little too late.

In most democratic countries, political parties that suffer the sort of loss that occurred a few weeks ago would be watching their top leadership resign. Just who, tell me, in the Democratic Party has accepted any responsibility whatsoever for its ass-kicking and for opening the doors to autocracy? Somebody? Anybody?

Wouldn’t it be great if we had a massive, functional opposition party? (And please don’t bore me talking about the cult of the Greens. A party that gets 1 or 2% of the vote with a narrow ideology is a hobby, not a strategy.)

Do we really need or want the gerontocracy of Pelosi, Schumer, Biden, Jim Clyburn, and a dozen other fossils to lead the fight against possible American fascism? God help us. And make no mistake, their hearts and souls are every bit as in love with retaining power as is any MAGA bootlicker even in a political minority.

There’s an entire layer of much younger, much more popular, much more in-touch Democrats who should be in leadership but who are blocked by their elders. Some of them, unfortunately, have already made themselves subservient to special interests as they see that as the only route to promotion in the party.

It’s not a simple issue of the party moving left which is the mantra that progressives have been incessantly and ineffectively chanting for 25 years. Frankly, some of those “progressive” programs have further alienated millions who should be supporting them. Identity politics has failed miserably and eats at the core of the party.

It’s about the party not moving left or right but rather moving down—moving closer to and immersing itself in the people. It’s about being active in communities every day of the week rather than just a few months every 2 or 4 years. Some 43 states were mostly pushed to the side, as all the firepower was concentrated on the seven swing states, which they lost anyway. It’s primarily about meeting people where they are at, instead of preaching to them. For a decade now, Democrats have been dreaming about taking Texas. Good luck, because that’s never going to happen if Democratic outreach continues centering race and gender instead of class. Ask a Texan about their pronouns and they are liable to say “Colt/45.”

Even this hollowed-out, rudderless Democratic Party can win back the House in two years simply because there is no alternative to Trump. But that is not a viable long-term strategy.

As always, it’s up to us. The citizens. The people. Neither party by itself is going to save us. We have a year or so to build a true, small-d democratic, multi-racial opposition movement, ready to absorb the disaffected MAGAs and motivate some of that 1/3 of eligible non-voters to join up and oppose the autocracy that will be struggling to remain popular. And we need to make clear that we are done with a unimaginative out of touch party that seems to be headquartered in some secret sanitarium unless or until it proves its fighting strength. ++

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