Trump’s Authoritarian Appointments
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Your enemy is well-trained, well-equipped, and battle-hardened. There is not a liberal America and a conservative America. There is the United States of America. Good night and good luck. Hey folks, I'm Rick Wilson. Welcome back to the Lincoln Project Podcast. A couple of things have happened since we were last together, including Donald Trump. Now, we're going to see a lot of things unfold about Donald Trump, but this week we're starting to see the shape of his cabinet. And that, my friends, is the elephant in the room.

Okay. What do you got so far? Let's break it down on a couple of axes. Let's start out with Trump's appointments on the national security side. And by the way, I know y'all want to talk about the election. We're going to talk about the election later. We're going to go through this. We're going to work it through. We're generating through all of our numbers, our data, our reports. I know everybody else is too. There are a million reasons why Trump won, but we're going to find the ones that

That were the central reasons and we're going to work it. We're going to fix it. We're going to help the pro-democracy forces in the future respond appropriately to the things like this media ecosystem that they built and all the lies that the machine feeds their people. But I want to talk about right now these appointments because the consequences to the country are gigantic.

So I'm going to stick with national security today because a lot of the other stuff is, you know, we're going to, there'll be issues there. There'll be craziness there. But these things are existential. First off, one of the most important people in national security apparatus isn't the secretary of defense. It isn't the CIA director, national intelligence director. It's the attorney general. And so who did he appoint as attorney general?

Matt Gaetz. Now look, a lot of you didn't get to know Matt Gaetz until you saw him on Fox talking like a jerk-off, okay? Which he excels at because he happens to be one. Those of us in Florida, however, have seen Matt Gaetz up close for a long time. We know where the bodies are buried, some literal bodies. Matt is a degenerate, a sociopath, a weirdo. He's brilliant, by the way. Don't underestimate that. He is very smart. But Matt has shit in his life.

that would disqualify him from getting a job at a Waffle House. And they'll hire murderers at a Waffle House. And I love Waffle House. Before Donald Trump left office, Matt Gaetz asked for a pardon in the sex trafficking case in which he was being investigated. Matt, his running buddy Joel Greenberg, and a handful of other degenerates were involved in Venmoing underage teenage prostitutes

for sex. Now, I was told in the Republican world that the whole pedophilia thing was the biggest single issue ever and that teenage prostitutes were out completely. But with Matt, apparently, it does not disqualify him from being appointed attorney general. He is under a current investigation in the House of Representatives concerning his sex trafficking and underage prostitute scandal.

Matt is a guy who comes from a very wealthy background, extraordinarily wealthy family, and has always gotten out of trouble. His multiple DUIs back in the day, I think it was at least two, got washed under the carpet because Daddy Gates, as they called him, called the sheriff of Escambia County or wherever they were living at the time and said, make this go away. And they did. His dad was the Senate president in Florida, was an enormously powerful figure in the legislative process in Florida for a long time.

But you got this guy, oh, by the way, this is my favorite one. When Matt was in college, a dead married guy turned up in Matt's dorm room, dead of erotic asphyxiation. I would like to know more, but it's also been one of those things that just disappeared. So Matt's always been a guy who got away with murder. I'm not saying that in connection to the prior statement, but he metaphorically at least got away with murder.

Donald Trump wants him in the office of attorney general for one reason. He wants Matt to execute the revenge plan. He wants Matt to go and investigate the

All the people he thought were involved in the deep state Russia story. So if you're my friend Pete Strzok or you're Lisa Page or Lisa Monaco or Jim Comey or Bob Mueller or anybody else, you're most likely going to be spending the rest of your next four years getting investigated by the FBI and by the Department of Justice because Matt will launch that special prosecutor probe. It will fail.

because it's a lie, just as the whole Huber investigation failed because it was a lie. But Matt will break the Department of Justice's independence as quickly as he can. Even if he only gets a recess appointment because he can't be confirmed, he will break the Department of Justice. He will change it from an independent agency to an agency that the president runs and uses for revenge. Remember, he promised us that he would do that. So appointing Gates, to my mind, was a...

A real tell about the abuse of power we're about to see from Trump. You may not realize it, but every minute of every day, you're enjoying the most important freedom. The freedom that's brought to you by the First Amendment. You can speak your mind, vote how you choose, wear what you want, get your opinions out there for free, even if it's unpopular. You can put a sign on your front lawn that says, vote for Bigfoot, someone you can believe in. You can pray to the God of your choice or don't.

You have the right to be with the people that think like you do. You have the right to tell the government what you think about its policies, whether you love them or hate them. They are freedoms that let you be you, and they're all brought to you by the First Amendment. Learn more at freedomforum.org. The second appointment is more ludicrous and more dangerous. I have worked for a Secretary of Defense. I've worked in the Department of Defense for four and a half years. I was a young guy then, but I was able to see what that job entailed.

and able to see the complexity and the depth of that job. Appointing Pete Hegseth, and by the way, he served honorably in the military. He did two tours, one in Afghanistan, one in Iraq. God bless. No criticism there. God bless. But he's been a Fox News host, and he's run a couple of super PACs. Just so to catch you up, Secretary of Defense is a job that requires you to be a diplomat, an intelligence officer,

A manager of a $900 billion global enterprise that includes the lives of 2.4 million active Reserve and National Guard soldiers, 700,000 contract employees of the DoD around the world and at the Pentagon and other places. It requires you to be able to handle everything.

super complex multivariate problems. It requires you to be able to handle massive amounts of information every day. This is not reading a fucking teleprompter, folks.

Pete Hegseth is an unserious person for one of the most serious and consequential jobs in government. These are not conspiracy theorists motivated just by lies. That's a bunch of nonsense that people want to tell us. These are people that understand first principles. They love freedom and they love free markets. The hole that was on my wall when I got rid of my Harvard degree, thankfully I replaced it with an honorary gunsmithing program degree from the Pennsylvania Gunsmith School. I don't think I've washed my hands for 10 years.

Really, I don't really wash my hands. Someone help me. No, I inoculate myself. It's just not germs are not a real thing. I can't see them. Therefore, they're not real. His agenda that got him the job is he's going to eliminate wokeness in the military. Any general that was involved, general, admiral, whatever that was involved in any of the DEI woke ****.

It's got to go. We should not have women in combat roles. Whatever the combat standards were, say, in, I don't know, 1995, let's just make those the standards. If you think wokeness in the military is the problem versus how do we configure our forces to face China, Iran, Russia, the Houthis, Islamic terrorism.

North Korea. If you think eliminating the use of pronouns is going to make America a better fighting force, you're out of your fucking mind and you're not a serious person. In the words of the philosopher Logan Roy, you are not fucking serious people. Now, going up the danger scale, and so, look, by the way, Hegseth has a screeching fanboy crowd on Twitter right now, which is

hilarious to me that they believe that a guy who was a platoon leader is capable of stepping up to run the largest organization in the world. It's craziness. But the most dangerous one of all, I think, is Tulsi Gabbard. Let's remember who Tulsi Gabbard is. Today's Democratic Party, it's controlled by fanatical ideologues who hate freedom. They despise the Constitution. She is a pro-Russia, pro-Putin shill. When Syria...

with Russian help, was using chemical weapons on its people, Tulsi Gabbard was on the side of Russia and Syria. Tulsi Gabbard has opposed sanctioning Russia for invading Ukraine. She has repeatedly taken the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs line that if we disagree with Putin, it's nuclear war.

Trump has nominated her to be the director of national intelligence. This is the single most dangerous appointment I can conceive of. And I have to tell you, it tells you a lot about who these people are. They have a critical mass of anti-Ukraine, anti-NATO, anti-Europe, anti-American voices coming into the national security apparatus. John Ratliff, CIA director.

He was director of national intelligence the last time, and he was there so that Trump could, quote, push back on the Russia hoax, which is not a hoax and did come from Russia. As a recently departed CIA official told me yesterday, to say that Ratliff isn't worldly is putting it mildly. He is a – he's going to be a bad CIA director. He's not as dangerous as the three prior mentions. Michael Walls, national security advisor, a former Green Beret, a Florida congressman,

No particular dings on Michael Walls for being a Green Beret or being a congressman, but national security advisor is a job that takes enormous sophistication, talent, diligence, education, and a depth of understanding of just what we face in the world. That ain't it. So what has he got? What do you got for this national security pick so far? You've got malice, danger, and marginal competence.

This tells you a lot about what Trump wants in this year to come. He knows a lot of these people can't be confirmed by the Senate. So this is why he's almost certainly going to recess the House and Senate, as the president can do under Article III of the Constitution, name all these people by recess appointment, which they can serve about 200 and I think it's 215, maybe it's 210 days, I'm not sure, somewhere in there, about 200 plus days, and do a smash and grab on the country. And just say, F you, I don't care. I'm going to do it.

I'm going to do it anyway. Some of these guys can get confirmed, and believe you me, even though Mitch McConnell beat Donald Trump on who he wanted as Senate Majority Leader, most of these people will get through the Senate. Gates, I think, is a real problem for the Senate. Even these guys, even these shameless whores to Donald Trump are going to have a problem swallowing the guy who then mowed for sex with teenage hookers. It's going to be a real problem.

But if he doesn't get his way, he'll just recess the legislature and impose this as an immediate fiat by these recess appointments. When we told you Trump would break the Constitution and break the country and break all of the norms and institutions that the generic Washington, D.C. Republicans and the gentry conservative media told you, oh, no, that'll never happen. That'll be fine. You're exaggerating. No, we were right.

It sucks being the Cassandra of Donald Trump. We tell you what he's going to do over and over again. You go, oh, come on, man. That's crazy. He's just kidding. It's just for the show. It's not for the show. He means it. This is what we're facing now. This is the beginning of a series of unconstitutional and illegal and inappropriate and un-American and unpatriotic efforts to reshape this country in Donald Trump's authoritarian mold. That is what he wants.

Donald Trump wants an authoritarian and an oligarchic system, and he's going to get it. And people voted for that. Look, I want to have a quick discursion here about the election. Guys, she lost. He won. It wasn't Elon's satellites. Stop the blue and on shit. I mean, voter fraud is hard and marginal. And by the way, if Democrats could really do voter fraud...

Do you think we'd be sitting here and right now having this fucking discussion? Anyway, to get back on this, you're going to see Donald Trump engage in the things he told his he would do. He will take revenge. He will be the retribution of people. He is going on day one, two or three, most likely to pardon every single one of the January 6 terrorists who are presently in federal prison.

Let that sink in. Hundreds of people who committed a terrorist act on January 6th, attacking the United States Capitol to overthrow the 2020 election are going to be freed. I would not be shocked if he if he if he meant some fucking medal for them at the White House and gives them a welcome home and gives them jobs in the administration. Don't be shocked. Church's original recipe is back. You can never go wrong with original.

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We really fought hard in this election, folks. We left everything on the field at Lincoln. I left everything on the field personally. I took a week off because I needed rest. It wasn't that I was depressed or leaving the fight. I needed to rest. I was exhausted. And I want to tell you, we're not leaving the fight. I'm not leaving the fight. The Lincoln team isn't leaving the fight. Millions and millions of Americans aren't leaving the fight. We lost on the battlefield. We did. We lost on the battlefield. He won the election.

That doesn't mean you get to stop fighting. This country is still worth saving. It's still worth fighting for. It's still worth standing up in front of this thing that he's going to build, this authoritarian monster he wants to build, and swinging the sword until you can't swing it anymore. I would have loved to see Kamala Harris sit down in the Oval Office on January 20th. I would have loved it.

I could have rested finally. I've been in this fight now, y'all, for nine years, almost 10. This country has suffered from this man for nine years, almost 10. But we don't get that option. We don't get that easy storybook ending. Now we have to fight every day, once again, against Trump. What do we have to fight? We have to fight the disinformation ecosystem that this motherfucker built. And that's where we all, myself included, got it wrong.

A lot of the people we persuaded, we discovered post hoc, were not in the Fox bubble. But that bubble of Fox, Newsmax, all this online shit, Elon Musk and Twitter, all of it has built the brains of millions of Americans to be absolutely receptive to nothing else but Trump and Trump propaganda. We've got to fight that system. We've got to fight his appointments.

Tooth and nail, every single person he's going to appoint is going to be like these fucking morons and weirdos that I talked about today. They're going to be dangerous for the country, bad for the country. I mean, Vivek Ramaswamy is already talking right now about eliminating the Department of Veteran Affairs. Great. I guess those suckers and losers are going to learn their lesson now, aren't they, Donald? Yeah.

We've got to fight their appointments. We've got to fight their policies they're going to try to pass. We've got to fight this in legislative bodies up and down the chain. We've got to fight it in the U.S. Senate. We've got to fight it in the House. We've got to fight it in the state legislative bodies. The fight doesn't stop because he won again. The fight gets more intense and more important. The fight gets more proximate to the world that we live in right now. We don't get to just walk away.

We all wanted to rest and to go back to the world as we wanted it and knew it. We don't get to walk away. Finally, we have to fight because there's a two-year window that we're in right now where we have to take the House back and we have to take the Senate back in 2026. Those are not optional formations, okay? Those are not would-be-nice-to-dos. It's going to require that our friends of the Democratic Party fight

and I mean this in the kindest way possible, pull their heads out of their asses on a lot of things. You can't focus group and test your way to victory. You have to fight. You have to go out there and spend the money. You know the committees, the committees, the House and Senate committees ended up with money in the bank at the end? Unexcusable. Harris died broke in the campaign, as we say. They'll be okay. They'll come out net zero, but

You've got to leave it all on the field. The next two years are the hardest of the hard fights. Guys, Trump is still declining, sick, old, senile, crazy, all those things. When Trump dies and they find his bloated corpse behind the desk in the Resolute Square or behind the Resolute desk in the Oval Office with a Chicken McNugget lodged in his throat,

We have to make sure that when J.D. Vance takes that office, he is facing a Democratic House and Senate. We have to be sure that we rebuild the capacity to win at every level. We have to be sure that the fights we pick, the candidates we choose, the work we do in the future is with one major understanding, and that's that if we don't fight him, he will win. The election was a win for him.

It's not the end for America unless we let it be. That, folks, is the elephant in the room. See you next time. The Lincoln Project Podcast is a Lincoln Project production. Executive produced by Whitney Hayes, Finn Howe, and Joseph Warner Chaney. Produced and edited by Whitney Hayes and Jeff Taylor. And good luck.

Hey, everybody, if you would like to get in touch, if you have suggestions for a guest or a show topic or just general questions, our email is podcast at Lincoln Project. That's podcast at Lincoln Project dot US.