| This is a great article by Frank Bruni of the NYT's about how weird the Trump cabinet are.
The most senior officials in the Trump administration are such a cuckoo crew that it’s easy to miss the kookiness just a tick below.
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Dan Bongino.
And I’ll catch you up, in case — I envy you! — you’ve been rationing your exposure to MAGA madness.
He’s a former police officer, Secret Service agent and host of a popular right-wing podcast who was bafflingly given the job of second in command at the F.B.I., presumably so that the similarly underqualified first in command, Kash Patel, wouldn’t feel overshadowed. Bongino and Patel are a matched set, two peas in a Trump-adoring pod, and it’s impossible to say which is odder.
Or at least it was until last week, when Bongino took the crown with a bizarrely self-pitying and digressive interview — where else? — on Fox News.
He was there, seemingly, as part of a recent media effort by him and Patel to calm agitators on the right who wonder why the dynamic duo haven’t yet unveiled and detailed all the supposed corruption in the F.B.I. that they both railed against back when they were in charge of nothing more than promoting conspiracy theories and whipping up fury.
And Bongino, after fewer than three months as the bureau’s deputy director, was feeling beaten down and trying to buck himself up.
He wanted Fox News viewers to know about his sacrifice: “I gave up everything for this.” He wanted them to appreciate how hard he and Patel work: “If you think we’re there for tea and crumpets — I mean, Kash is there all day. We share — our offices are linked. He turns on the faucet, I hear it.”
The faucet? What does plumbing have to do with F.B.I.-ing? And why did viewers need to know about Patel’s and Bongino’s workout schedules, which Bongino mentioned next? He volunteered that Patel tended to arrive at the office earlier than he did, because Patel “uses the gym” there, while Bongino exercises in his apartment. Glad we finally have clarity on that
And on this: “I stare at these four walls all day in D.C., by myself, divorced from my wife — not divorced, but I mean separated,” Bongino said, before further refining his word choice and explaining that by “separated” he meant “apart,” on account of all that grueling work he must do. “It’s hard,” he said. “We love each other.” So now that’s settled, too.
Next month will be the first anniversary of Tim Walz’s branding of Donald Trump, JD Vance and, by implication, some of their political associates as “weird,” and it’s obvious now that Walz spoke too soon, before Trump won in November and his administration turned weirdness into a credential and an operating principle, before weirdness started afflicting Trump allies who seemed a little less weird in the past, before episodes of Trump-adjacent weirdness proliferated.
Walz spoke in advance of the full flowering and then spectacular wilting of Trump’s bromance with Elon Musk and thus the addition of Musk’s weirdness to the existing smorgasbord. Even before this week’s weirdly mesmerizing exchange of insults between him and Trump, Musk was running some kind of weirdness decathlon, summiting some sort of weirdness Everest (and, given his pharmacological affinities, probably inhaling all the xenon gas he can en route). Add his Nazi-evocative salute and Oval Office attire and demeanor to all of his other eccentricities, and he’s making a persuasive case that extreme weirdness is the emotional analogue of gargantuan yachts: a privilege of the ultrarich.
Senator Joni Ernst, the Iowa Republican, isn’t ultrarich, but she’s acting ultra strangely. “We all are going to die,” Ernst said last week during a town-hall meeting where one of the attendees challenged her on the consequences of proposed new Medicaid cuts. That remark wasn’t just glib and callous; it was flat-out weird. As was her subsequent stab at damage control, which included the counsel that if you want to live forever, you should worship Jesus Christ. So the new MAGA health care plan is almost literally a Hail Mary.
It’s weird that Joe Kasper, the chief of staff to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, reportedly digresses during meetings at the Pentagon to discuss such crucial national security issues as a visit he made to a Washington strip club. It’s weird that Kristi Noem, the secretary of homeland security, dressed as if she were heading out for a vigorous walk in the woods — well, apart from the $50,000 gold Rolex on her wrist — for a photo op in front of caged inmates at an infamous gulag in El Salvador.
I’d say it’s weird that Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the health secretary, frolicked with his grandchildren in a Washington creek thought to be contaminated with fecal matter, but that’s unremarkable in the context of his prior antics. For him to clear his own weirdness bar, he’d have to bottle that creek water and carry it home as a thrifty alternative to Evian.
I joke to cope. But this pageant of peculiarity isn’t a laughing matter. It reflects Trump’s confusion of nonconformity with boldness. It speaks to his love of performance, even if it’s the fruit of a loopy performer. It demonstrates his desire to rattle, no matter how infantile the rattling. Bongino is welcome to melt down. So long as he’s owning the libs while he’s melting.
A Word About Democrats’ WoesIf I’m subjected to one more lamentation, one more rant, about how lost and pitiable and shameful the Democratic Party is, my head is going to explode. Not because the Democratic Party is in good shape — it isn’t. Not because it can make do with only minor adjustments — it can’t. It’s guilty of the arrogance and incompetence of which it’s accused. And the country’s future as a reasonably healthy and prosperous democracy depends on Democrats’ recognition and remedy of that.
But some of the extravagant lashing of the party carries the implicit suggestion that Republicans, by contrast, have their act together. Excuse me? If success at the polls is the only metric for that, then sure, yes, they’re in an enviable spot. But it’s a wretched (and, I have to believe, vulnerable) one. Republican lawmakers who rightly gaped in horror at the events of Jan. 6, 2021, later developed collective amnesia, putting power several light-years above principle. They then indulged or outright applauded Trump’s laughable cabinet picks and his adoration of Musk and his cockamamie tariffs and his abandonment of due process and his swag from Qatar and his sadistic humiliation of President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine and so many other cruelties and outrages that this sentence could go on forever. I struggle to admire Republicans’ political chops. I’m too distracted by their moral rot. |
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