A Harsh Reality: from TV to DC
Matt Gaetz is out, but what other reality TV logic will soon govern our lives?
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Incoming-President Donald Trump’s cabinet nominations have landed for many Americans like salt in a fresh, bleeding wound.
Lowlights include TV’s Dr. Oz, who we mostly got to know via Oprah guest appearances, sham diet pills, and COVID-19 treatment misinformation. Oz is set to oversee health insurance for 160 million people through the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
There’s Mike Huckabee, former Arkansas governor, Trinity Broadcasting Network host, and follower and supporter of Bill Gothard. Huckabee was named to become America’s ambassador to Israel. Huckabee, during his own presidential campaigns stated that there was “no such thing as a Palestinian” and opposed a two-state solution (unless land could be found elsewhere, such as from other Arab states).
More from TV land: would-be Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, who at least has previously been elected to public office as a U.S. Representative from Wisconsin, got his start on MTV’s Real World: Boston and is host of The Bottom Line on FOX Business. (It’s wild, but I just figured out Duffy is married to Rachel from the Real World: San Francisco, a formative cautionary tale to never make out with xenophobic, homophobic bad boys named Puck.) Tom Homan, frequent FOX News contributor and former director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement will be “border czar” (which does not require Congressional confirmation). Homan is already picking fights, as he did this week with Boston’s mayor, Michelle Wu, who said local officials would not help with mass deportations.
In an interview on Newsmax, Homan said, “Either she helps us, or she gets the hell out of the way, because we’re going to do it,” then added that Wu (an alum of Harvard College and Harvard Law) is “not very smart.”
Meanwhile, militias along the U.S. Southern border have volunteered to help.
The nominee whose TV empire probably best echoes Donald Trump’s own bravado is Linda McMahon, Trump’s past administrator of the Small Business Administration and former CEO of professional wrestling colossus WWE. McMahon, who spent just a year on the Connecticut State Board of Education (finishing in 2010), is set to become the head of the Department of Education, which Trump has promised to dismantle. Importantly, McMahon has also been named in a WWE child sex abuse case, accused of turning a blind eye to ongoing abuse by a ring announcer.
And after yesterday’s news, it turns out these are the less destabilizing nominees.
The first would have been, in normal politics, embarrassing to the Trump transition team. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., is a vaccine denier and medical conspiracist, who has been nominated to head U.S. Health & Human Services. Yesterday, old radio clips surfaced in which Kennedy compared Trump to Hitler, then later backtracked, saying “Hitler had a plan… Hitler was interested in policy.” At the time, Kennedy compared Trump’s followers to Nazis, but now apologizes, blaming his past perception on “mainstream media.”
It's as if no one is vetting these folks or that our attention spans are expected to be so limited that we’ll lose the details once the next segment of the show begins.
Another figure, Pete Hegseth, is up for Secretary of Defense. Yet another FOX News alum, Hegseth was pulled from National Guard duty when initially called to serve as protection for President Biden’s inauguration. His removal was due to a tattoo associated with extremism. (FOX, for its part, published a defense, normalizing the wrong tattoo.) Hegseth is a member of the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches (CREC), founded by Douglas Wilson and a faith group that leans into Christian nationalism and Christian patriarchy.
Beyond this, last term, Hegseth advocated for Trump to pardon soldiers accused of war crimes and argued waterboarding (an ineffective form of torture) is an effective interrogation technique. Yesterday, police reports from 2017 surfaced, in which a woman accused Hegseth of sexually assaulting her. No charges were filed, though a settlement (with payment from Hegseth to the accuser) was reached.
Of course, also yesterday, former U.S. Rep. Matt Gaetz withdrew his nomination for attorney general. The nomination had been a shock given allegations of sex trafficking and drug use. A U.S. House Committee on Ethics investigation was derailed when Gaetz stepped down from Congress following his nomination.
It was audacious, naming a credibly accused sexual predator as attorney general—but then again, why not, when the same can be said for our incoming president?
Yesterday, Gaetz said his nomination was “unfairly becoming a distraction to the critical work of the Trump/Vance transition.” Quickly, Trump nominated Pam Bondi for the spot. Bondi was one of Trump’s lawyers during Trump’s first impeachment. She was also previously accused of bribery over $25,000 in campaign contributions from Trump when her office was being questioned regarding fraud at Trump University, though the complaint, lacking sufficient evidence, did not move forward.
The list consists of loyalists, those accused of crimes or aiding in crimes, and many who made or built their fame on TV, a fitting qualification for a man who made his pre-presidential comeback cosplaying as a cunning businessperson on The Apprentice.
To some degree, it would be possible to wave off the list as the nightmare cast of Trump’s Real World: Washington, D.C. (if so much of it weren’t likely to actually wind up taking place in Mar-a-Lago). There will be drama! Failure! In-fighting!
As formulaic as this sequel is, there’s another element that does make this season of Trump a little different: much of the veneer of qualification has been dropped.
Many on the left might have loathed the politics of a Jeff Sessions or William Barr or Mike Pence, but those insiders had some line they would not cross. (Even while their idea of service tended to include a reallocation of rights away from certain classes of Americans).
Now we have FOX News, Oz, arguably the worst Kennedy, Elon Musk (an entrepreneur turned sycophant turned would-be government reformer, without requisite understanding of government), and a hope that McMahon, that scion of wrestling reality TV isn’t able to destroy a department that enforces laws that guarantee education for children—or our kids will only grow up having even more trouble deciphering badly scripted nonsense from reality.
I wonder at common threads and see two key dynamics: a craven phoniness and callousness.
These nominees and many inside Trump’s inner orbit have achieved a level of wealth or fame that most Americans never experience. Many have done so by commodifying themselves—reality TV, etc. There’s a certain shape-shifting required, and much as we’ve seen among evangelical leaders elevated by charisma and eventually felled by scandal, “qualification” based on such flimsy blessings also makes one vulnerable.
Truth can take you down.
And until then, knowing you aren’t as “great” as the façade you’ve concocted leaves a person craving more (the biggest crowds, highest viewership, most followers, the ability to get away with treating other human beings as consumable, disposable).
Big egos vulnerable in this way tend to become predatory, or willing to side with bigger predators.
I’ve learned this from closely studying politics and the church, and the insatiable appetite for attention that makes a person answer a casting call for a reality show, or become a TV talking head, or buy a social media platform to warp the echo chamber your direction, has a starved, always-feeding quality.
Ideally, roles of government should be about service and sacrifice.
If you are busy feeding, you won’t be as attentive to legions of fellow citizens who deserve their fair share.
Callousness when met with power leads to lawlessness, and that is what informs the reasonable fear many are experiencing when looking at Donald Trump’s nominations.
We are eyeing an impending government that we can only hope is even more inept than it seems, so that it can’t do all the ill it promises. We can hope they will eat themselves, as congressional Republicans seem to have done this week with Gaetz. Less, perhaps, due to the allegations against Gaetz, but a longer political memory: his ousting former Speaker Kevin McCarthy.
Gaetz alleged victim has become part of a convenient excuse. WWE survivors, a side story. Hegseth’s alleged victim, a headline for a few days.
The feeding frenzy feeds on them again.
Ultimately, we, the “viewer” still get to control how we respond, unless we too forget and get distracted by the next political drama.
This is how we become desensitized to the uglier, actual realities tucked behind the headlines.