47. Trump’s Cabinet Fiasco

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0:59Hello and welcome to The Rest is Politics US with me, Katty Kay, otherwise known as the slacker who takes one week of holiday after six months. Oh my God. That's how you're sorting? I was going to pay you a huge compliment, said that you were missed on this podcast. Thank you. And I've gone through Katty Kay withdrawal where I haven't said the word Katty Kay in about two weeks. I know that's a problem. It's a problem. What do you want to talk about? You tell me. What are we talking about? Oh, my God. Wow. Where to start? There is so much news. We're going to unpack a couple of the big stories of the week.

1:32What's happening to Pete Hegseth, the nominee to be Secretary of Defense, and why that looks increasingly in jeopardy. You and I both have got some reporting on that. Joe Biden's decision to pardon his son, Hunter Biden, who was facing two federal cases and possibly up to 25 years in prison. We'll do more on all of the turbulence in the inner circle. Some of the nominees, Kash Patel, who the news broke last Friday, but you and I haven't had a chance to talk about that on the podcast, who's slated to become the FBI director, vowed to overhaul the FBI leaderships, also has said that he's going to target members of the media.

2:13I have spoken to one of the lawyers for people who worked in government under President Biden, who are taking serious precautions about what they might do if there is going to be retribution and this extraordinary moment that we're in that we're even talking about this. And then after the break, we're going to talk about how Donald Trump is kind of already acting like he's back in the Oval Office. I mean, where is Joe Biden? The question of the week, what has happened to President Joe Biden. He's in Africa, actually. He may want to stay there, the way his numbers are tanking, not just amongst Republicans, but amongst Democrats as well.

2:49And quick look at how world leaders are sort of scrambling to adjust to the reality of a Trump presidency again. So, should we start with Pete Hegseth, who's been up on Capitol Hill this week. He was meant to go down to Mar-a-Lago on Thursday, but canceled that trip down to see Donald Trump because he is going to try one last ditch effort. When we're recording this, by the way, Thursday morning, so it's possible that by the time you guys listen to this on Friday, he will already be out of the running. I think you and I both agree that his chances of getting nominated are pretty slim. I've just been texting with a Republican lawmaker this morning who said that he thinks his chances are 50-50.

3:26The fact that they're already talking about possible replacements for Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense, I don't think is a great sign. And we can talk about one of those people who I think is interesting. But what's happened there? I have two real questions. And you and I were texting earlier this week, Antonin, you raised the question, which I think is so interesting, and that I've been kind of trying to get to the bottom of, why has Trump nominated people like Matt Gaetz and Pete Hegseth, who have serious kind of personal issues, are not qualified for the jobs? You could put Tulsi Gabbard in that bracket of people not qualified with the experience necessary of running big organizations when there are lots of people who are very loyal to Donald Trump who believe in the MAGA agenda who are qualified.

4:14So kind of what's going on with that? Why is he doing? What's the psychology there of Donald Trump? And what do you think Pete Hegseth's chances are at this point? Well, I mean, there's a lot there. So I think he has no chance. And I think they've already jockeyed themselves into position to make sure that he doesn't have a chance. I think he's a relentless guy, which is admirable. And so he's going to make one more attempt. But I think there's a group of Republicans that are going to sink him. Democrats won't vote for him, of course. And there's three or four Republicans that won't vote for him.

4:47And then, as you know, what ends up happening is, if I know, Kat, you and four other Republicans are not going to vote for him, even though I don't want to vote for him, what I'll do is say, I'll vote for him. And this way, you know, you look like you're being more loyal to the president because you know you've got your other teammates are going to sink Pete Hexeth. But, you know, Trump is in Mar-a-Lago saying a couple of things because obviously I'm still talking to people in his camp. And the first thing he's saying is, my God, his mother took him out. Okay. My God. Okay. And so he's, he's mumbling to himself.

5:20Can you believe the mom took him out? Right. And you know, Trump, so you know, he's saying it. Although his mom Penelope has now been on Fox News saying she loves her son and she apologized to him and he's a reformed character. So I love the fact that his mom has been brought into this process, which adds to the kind of absurdity of the whole thing. So if you really love politics, okay, go find that YouTube clip. The poor woman, it was in a hostage crisis situation. The poor woman was sitting there sweating. She's trying to do a service to the country, but now she's back in there saying, oh no, I was just kidding.

5:56He's not a lascivious drunk and he's not a maniac. But I'm going to say three things about him and then something broad. Okay. Number one, he was buried by Jane Mayer. And I think you know Jane. Very good reporter from the New Yorker magazine and does a lot of this investigative reporting. And it's actually, I know Jane very well. I've known her for years. She's been on the money every time. You can kind of bank her reporting. Yeah. And so it's a well-documented story. And just as number two is John Tower. For those that don't remember who John Tower is, he was a senator from Texas. George Herbert Walker Bush in 1989 wanted him to be the secretary of defense.

6:37He was a drunk. He was an alcoholic. He made a pledge, the same pledge that Pete Exeth is making right now. If I'm at the top of the Pentagon, I won't drink. That wasn't enough. His chances were sunk. And I believe Pete's chances are sunk. And it's worth pointing out that Donald Trump, of course, doesn't drink, right? So for him, alcohol is an issue. And he has a brother who is an alcoholic. He doesn't have alcohol on Air Force One, for example. He's banned alcohol on Air Force One. So I think the drunkenness thing is a problem for him, more than the allegations of sexual abuse. And I'll leave that there.

7:11Yeah. I actually think the number one thing was the mom because I know Trump's personality. I know you're laughing, but I could just see Trump saying, oh, Jesus Christ. The mom's going after him. So that was it right there. Okay. So that's why the Mar-a-Lago trip got canceled. But the last thing, and I think this is the most important thing. And again, I like Pete. I work with Pete of Fox News. Any more than I should be operating on somebody's brain, Caddy Kay, he should not be. the defense secretary. He's never run anything. He doesn't have procurement capabilities. He doesn't have an ability to manage an organization.

7:49You're giving him the largest sub-organization in the American government, the Pentagon. It's just an absurd thing. And so hopefully people will say that. But you said something else that I want to address, which is why is he putting up these people that are not qualified? And there's an answer to that. He is Captain Ayab and he caught the whale. He caught the great white whale. The great white whale is his base and it's MAGA and he wants to chum that whale. And so what he's doing is he's taking chum, Pete Hagseth, Matt Gates, he's taking Tulsi Gabbard and he's throwing chum in the water to feed the whale.

8:25And by the way, if the whale eats the chum, that's great. If the whale doesn't eat the chum, that is also no problem for Donald Trump. He is not out on the airwaves. He's not out on Truth Social defending this person. I'll take you back to the Kavanaugh situation when Ryan Kavanaugh was up for the confirmation in the Senate for the Supreme Court. Trump was working on it. Trump was using then Twitter, not Truth Social. He hasn't done that for any of these people. I don't expect him to do that for any of these people. And this is really him saying, hey, I'm going to throw some chum in the water for my base.

9:02And if these guys get approved by the Senate, great. If they don't get approved by the Senate. I'm moving on as he did with Matt Gaetz. And by the way, I just want to give you this one piece because I got this from a senator, which I think is very interesting. They are tightening the noose. They see him as a lame duck president. They see him as having one more consequential election. That's 2026. After that, no mas for Donald Trump. One senator said to me, hey, in five years, I'll be running for reelection. Donald Trump will be in the rearview mirror. Okay. And so I don't care about Donald Trump the way he thinks I should care about.

9:40I think that's interesting. It's always good to have the reporting on that. I texted with this member of Congress this morning, a Republican, who was the one that said that he thought he had a 50-50 chance of getting in. And one of the names, I mean, this is always when you know in Washington when things are going badly, when the possible other names are already being mentioned. And we're hearing that Ron DeSantis could be a possible pick, Joni Ernst, who is the senator from Iowa, Republican senator from Iowa, who is herself a combat veteran, who met with Pete Hegseth on Wednesday and came out of it and kept saying was being asked by the reporters.

10:15One of the things that people perhaps don't understand about Washington is the great thing about Washington and Capitol Hill is that any reporter can just go up there. Any member of the public can go up there. You can get into any Senate building. You can get into any house building. And you can just walk down the corridors with a microphone. And if there is a member of Congress or a senator, you can stick a microphone in their faces and they can't get away from you. So you've got all of these reporters surrounding Joni Ernst, the senator from Iowa, and asking her, you know, how did the meeting go with Pete Hegseth?

10:47Because she is seen as critical in this voting process because she is a former member of the armed services herself. And she's saying that it was thorough and frank. Well, thorough and frank is code for this was a bad meeting that did not go well for Pete Hegseth. I didn't think he was great. That's all she would say. Thorough and frank, thorough and frank, thorough and frank. But she would also ask, look, could you be the possible Secretary of Defense if Pete Hegseth doesn't make it? And this member of Congress texted me and said, look, she has to play this very carefully because she can't be seen as the person that kills his nomination.

11:22So she can't say anything about that. She would be a very good Secretary of Defense. She actually has the qualifications. You could trust Joni Ernst with the nuclear codes. I think she is a nominee who would actually get bipartisan support. You'd get some Democrats voting for her, which in this particular Washington moment would be pretty remarkable. So once you start naming the other names, I think the chances of Hegseth making this is very slim. I think it's worth pointing out the competency stuff. There's been so much focus on the drinking, on the womanizing, on some of the things he said about women.

11:54But there's something else that I read that he said on Fox and Friends in June of 2020, and it was during the Black Lives Matter protests. And he was talking about the protests. And he said, the question is, do you send in the troops? Do you say, hey, this isn't going to happen anymore? or do you let Seattle sort of implode on itself? And then he compared it to kind of, you know, looking after a wayward child and how you would discipline them. And he said, it's the idea of you caught your kid with cigarettes underage. Do you take them away right away or do you force them to smoke every cigarette in front of you in the entire pack to learn the lesson of what's not going to work?

12:32And I think that kind of video, what he's saying there about the idea of using American troops on American people, which I know that a lot of people in the military have real concerns about. And I have heard from contacts in the Pentagon that you have soldiers saying, we're not going to do this. If we are sent out into the American streets because of legitimate protests, we're not going to start firing on them. We feel very uncomfortable with that. But just the slightly glib comparison of how you discipline your children compared to the enormity of what that would mean for America of sending troops out on the streets, which hasn't been done since the 1960s, I think is another reason why people have concerns about Pete Hegseth.

13:14And it's that competency element of this. And would this even serve the Trump agenda particularly well? Could he get the job done? So Hegseth, we agree, looking like he is in the rear view mirror. What are you hearing about Kash Patel? We haven't had a chance to talk about Kash Patel since the news broke. Kash Patel, who Trump would like to run the FBI, who has said very clearly that he has a campaign of retribution, not just against the media, but against other people who worked in the administration, who he feels betrayed Donald Trump by working on the January the 6th investigations, for example, working on the impeachment investigations, the Russia investigations.

13:56What do you think of Cash as a possible FBI director? Well, I mean, he would be an unmitigated nightmare. Yeah, just tell it how you feel. Yeah, I mean, and I've said this publicly, and so I'm probably going to be arrested by him. What were you, number 48 on the list or something? I think you're just bumping yourself up to number 10. Yeah, I was 48 on his list. You just want to get higher up the list, don't you? I do, and I feel upset that I've done so much work on this that I'm not higher on the list. I feel like I'm not getting enough attention about this, but I don't understand, Katia. Who is the person?

14:31Is it Susie Wiles? Does Susie Wiles not have much influence? I mean, this is what I'm starting to think is where is Susie Wiles? Who's the person, Gaddy, that says, you know, Mr. President, you won the election. You don't have to put up bozos, miscreants, drunkards and incompetence in these positions. Moreover, Cash Patel is not going to serve your interests. He's going to be a ridiculous distraction to you and to your presidency. And so why are we doing this? Why can't we go with somebody tensible? Christopher Ray's done a great job. You put him in the role yourself. Nobody's bothering you from the FBI.

15:08What are you doing this for? Why are you listening to the Steve Bannon podcast? And why are you, which you know is absolutely absurd, accepting the Kash Patel proposition that he should go after and arrest people on his enemies list who are just exercising their First Amendment right to talk and to be critical or not critical of various things that go on in the American system? them. So who is it, Katty? Who's there saying to him, it's in your best interest not to do this? Why are you doing this? Look, I think, I mean, this gets back to that question of why he's nominating these people and what it tells us about his state of mind and what he plans to do.

15:47And, you know, first don't underestimate the degree to which Donald Trump likes the way people look on television and thinks that if they're good on television, that's what he wants. It's how he judges people. It's how he, you know, that's effectively your resume and Pete Hegseth fixed that model. Kash Patel, he thinks is fiery and defensive of him on television and on podcasts. He likes that about him. I think there's a degree to which he's flexing. He feels he's won this massive mandate. And we should point out at this point, the mandate is looking less big at this point than it looked the week after the election.

16:21The Republicans are facing the prospect of a one seat majority in the House of Representatives. That is tiny. It's not a massive victory in the history of massive victories in America. I think he's challenging the Republican establishment and what is left of the establishment Republican Party in the Senate. He wants to see if they're going to defy them. He's kind of challenging them not to defy him. The charitable version is that he actually believes these are the best people to shake up the American system that he thinks is corrupt and bloated and inefficient. And he actually believes that Tulsi Gabbard can do that with the intelligence community, that Pete Hegseth could do that with the Department of Defense, and Kash Patel could do that with the FBI.

17:08There are people in the MAGA movement who would like to get rid of the FBI completely and see the FBI as being complicit in the impeachment investigations against him. And the FBI has become, to the extent that some FBI members have had to have security of their own, that the FBI has become a kind of tool of the Democrats, which is sort of ironic when you think of the history of the FBI and many of the FBI agents I've come across who are probably card carrying Republican voters. But the FBI has become a target of them. I mean, those are my thoughts on why he wants to do this. And I think you're right, he'll kind of move on very quickly.

17:42You know, there are people who worked in the establishment who were career appointees, right? One of the vice president, former Vice President Mike Pence's National Security Advisors, Olivia Troy, who is probably even higher on the list than you are. She has gone on television. She has spoken out against Kash Patel. She has said publicly that Kash Patel would lie about intelligence in a way that endangered intelligence operatives abroad, that he would make things up about US intelligence operations that put members of the intelligence community at risk. He has actually, Kash Patel actually on Wednesday launched a lawsuit against her for defamation for saying that.

18:22I suspect that might make his job harder. It looks a little hotheaded. I don't know that members of the Republican Party in the Senate who work in intelligence are going to particularly like that. I think they have real reservations about Kash Patel becoming the next head of the FBI. That's the question of the moment. The question of the moment is why he's doing this, why he is putting people in place who probably won't get confirmed and are not actually the most competent people for the job. You just think that he has the drumbeat. I'm embarrassed to admit this to you, but I do listen to it. Do you listen to Steve Bannon's podcast, The War Room?

19:00Do you listen to it? I have listened to it. I don't make it regular listening, but I probably should do. I have to listen to it because I did work with this son of a bitch and I did work on the transition team with him in 2016. I did work on the campaign with him. And I think he's the craziest, most malevolent, most evil person that I have interacted with in my lifetime. And I told Alex to this, that the reason why I believe in God is I think that God made Bannon so ugly to protect the civilization from Steve Bannon. He's got the skin products by Blotch and the contemporary hobo look and this, that, and other thing.

19:40But he's a very smart, very charismatic guy, very well read. And he's decided that he wants to wall off America physically and literally and metaphorically from the rest of the world. And I would just say this to you when I listen to the podcast, I say that is how Donald Trump thinks. Now, he can't articulate it the way Steve can. Donald Trump is not a literate guy. He's a very smart guy. He's got great political instincts. He's a very hard worker, but he's not a well-read guy. Okay. He may have had mind cough on his bed stand, but he probably didn't read it. Just thought it was funny to have it there because he's a little bit of a nut.

20:21There was a joke on the campaign in 2016 that Trump has written more books than he's actually read because of course he had a great ghostwriter writing these books for him. But I'm making the point that Bannon is in Trump's ear And Bannon is pushing this agenda. Bannon is pushing. The deep state is evil. Everyone that works in the American government is evil. They're either slackers or evil. And it's a big bloated system that needs to be destroyed by the Donald Trumps and the Kash Patels that now have an opportunity to try to destroy it. Even though, by the way, the American government, the civil service number of people employed in the American government is barely any bigger today than it was under Ronald Reagan, even though the American population is bigger.

21:05So some of this is myth making about the civil service. Yeah, exactly. But it's also, we have to blame somebody. You're unhappy with your life. I've got to blame somebody. I've got to scapegoat somebody. So I will just say this to you, that I believe that the president is going to get shot down on a couple of these ridiculous nominations. And I believe that he's not going to care. I think Trump is in a different spot today in 2024 than he was in 2016. I think he's looked at this and said, I've won. I'm not going to jail. My buddies that have feathered my nest, I'm going to put them in spots. Charlie Kushner, I mean, he set up a prostitute to go after his sisters.

21:51Jared Kushner's father who went to prison for doing this. Yeah, went to prison. Chris Christie prosecuted him. Such a great cast of characters. So sort of wholesome. Yeah. Trump pardoned him. Now he's going to be the ambassador to France. Okay. God bless. Maybe the French will like that. I'm just saying to you that Trump is a weird dude. The American people want Trump to be the president. The Democrats, unfortunately, they didn't give the American people a lot of choices. Again, I'm not criticizing Vice President Harris. I'm just saying he gave her 107 days. I did think that she could pull her off in 107 days because of the craziness around Trump, but obviously she couldn't.

22:29He's got four years here, but he's not going to be able to do any of the things that they're suggesting. We can talk about Doge if you want. We'll do an episode on that because I'm increasingly thinking that he's not going to get much of this done. Not going to get much of it done, but he's not going to care. He is going to go play golf. He's going to wear the 47 hat and he's going to run around with the Secret Service. He's going to hang out with Putin, and he's going to go talk to different people. He's going to Notre Dame this weekend to see the opening of the Notre Dame Cathedral. And I'm just letting you know that these people are not getting in.

23:04The Republicans are going to surprise people. They're shape-shifting on Trump right now, and they're looking at 28 and 32, and there will be no Donald Trump. Unless you tell me that Donald Trump's going to be successful in changing the Constitution and getting himself another term at age 82, which I don't think he's going to be successful with doing that, Katty. So for me, I'm watching this. I'm saying, wow, Trump won. He's not going to get done what he wants. And is he or is he not going to care? And the answer is he's not going to care. I did have a very interesting conversation this week with the lawyer who is representing and advising some of the people who are on that hit list, who worked in the administration, who worked on the national security side.

23:46And he's actually advising some of them to be out of the country on inauguration day in case Donald Trump issues executive orders, trying to round them up or trying to prosecute them in some sort of way. Now, the chances of that happening, and the lawyer himself said actually, given the stumbles that Donald Trump is making with these nominees, makes him think that actually this is the less formidable operation that we all thought it was going to be. There's a lot of reporting saying he's much more organized, he's much more efficient, Susie Wiles has got this down. And actually, you look at Matt Gaetz, and you look at Pete Hegseth fiascos, and you kind of think, well, actually, no, maybe this is the chaos it always was with Trump.

24:24But it was interesting. I mean, I just think it's worth reiterating that we are in a moment in American history, where a lawyer is advising people who worked in the civil service who worked for Vice President Mike Pence to be out of the country on inauguration day in case the retribution takes place and these people are put under arrest. Now, I don't know that that's going to happen. This lawyer himself says, maybe I'm being overcautious. But the very fact that we live in a country at a moment where people are being told, you may not be safe, you have to leave the country is in itself extraordinary.