My email inbox over the weekend was flooded with stories about the appointments of Pete Hegseth to Secretary of Defense and Matt Gaetz to Attorney General. Most of them were what might be called nuts and bolts pieces about the process. One of the biggest was a story reporting that Senator Mitch McConnell told someone at a D.C. party that the Senate won’t be forced into recess so that newly-installed President Donald Trump could push through his nominees as recess appointments. Apparently, Senator McConnell found it necessary to make this statement because several of Trump’s nominees, including Hegseth and Gaetz, are so execrable they face what is referred to as “stiff opposition” to confirmation by the GOP-controlled Senate. Some pundits even went so far as to opine that McConnell was drawing a line in the sand to protect the prerogatives of the legislative body to which he has devoted much of his adult life.
Do you know what I noticed about the flood of stories about Trump’s Cabinet picks in my inbox? How none of them talked about what kind of small, weak man it takes to sexually assault a woman or pay for sex with an underage girl. Let’s step back for a moment and get into what we are talking about here. We just went through a presidential election in which the winning candidate, Donald Trump, is a man who has been credibly accused of sexual assault by no fewer than 25 women. That man received the votes of some 76 million of his fellow Americans. He took a few days off to celebrate – numerous photos of a big post-election party at Mar-a-Lago hit the internet during the past week or so – and then he got down to business appointing candidates for 12 Cabinet positions in 12 days. Two of those appointments went to men who face the same kind of charges of sexual crimes that Donald Trump has been accused of.
