Less than two weeks into the post-election interregnum and we already know a lot about what lies ahead.

Trump rolled out his Cabinet picks with uncharacteristic speed­—a bad sign that his team has a plan, ready to go—and it was a slate that shocked even inveterate Trump watchers accustomed to the absolute worst from this guy. Gabbard, Gaetz, and RFK Jr are in a dead heat for worst choice, with the others in a twelve-way tie for third. A Russian stooge (at best) to control US intelligence, a troll under criminal investigation for sex crimes by the department he’s been tapped to lead, and a cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs anti-vaxxer and conspiracy theorist with a worm in his brain and a penchant for decapitating whales and hoarding dead bearcubs in charge of public health. What could go wrong?

It’s a group so grotesque that it beggars parody; even Trump’s worst critics did not dare imagine picks this ass-wipingly bad. But this is what you asked for, folks. Did you really think the candidate who mimed a blowjob, portayed his Black female opponent as a low-IQ prostitute, and held a neo-Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden was gonna pick sober, qualified veteran public servants?

Truly this is the kakistocracy. That is not new in Trumpworld, but this bunch makes Betsy DeVos and Rick Perry and Scott Pruitt look like Roman statesmen. Funny how the same people who thought Kamala Harris—former DA of San Francisco, AG of California, US Senator, and Vice President of the United States—was somehow “unqualified” are fine with this crew.

And as a buddy of mine—a longtime federal employee—quipped, what does it say that they have two people heading the Department of Government Efficiency?

In several cases the nominees appear deliberately selected to destroy the departments they will head. (“Trump nominates Godzilla for Secretary of Housing and Urban Development” as the Instagram pundit Middle Age Riot posted.) Yale history professor Timothy Snyder, author of On Tyranny, argues that these choices are exactly that:

Imagine that you are a foreign leader who wishes to destroy the United States. How could you do so?  The easiest way would be to get Americans to do the work themselves, to somehow induce Americans to undo their own health, law, administration, defense, and intelligence.  From this perspective, Trump’s proposed appointments—Kennedy, Jr.; Gaetz; Musk; Ramaswamy; Hegseth; Gabbard—are perfect instruments. 

These proposed appointments look like a decapitation strike: destroying the American government from the top, leaving the body politic to rot, and the rest of us to suffer.

Why Trump wants to help our enemies do that I don’t know. Perhaps a special counsel could look into it.

Gaetz was a shock; I really thought it would be Aileen Cannon for AG, but maybe Donald’s saving her for Clarence Thomas’s seat when he strategically retires and hits the road full time in his RV. Though Gaetz is inarguably the most stomach-turning, for me, as someone with a history in the intelligence community, Gabbard is particularly outrageous, an absolute cartwheel-inspiring strategic victory for Vladimir Putin (much like her boss who appointed her). If this were a movie, the audience would throw popcorn at the screen at the implausibilty of it all. I have to believe that career IC officers—whose stock in trade, after all, is subterfuge—will withhold intel from her…..or better yet, jiu-jitsu the situation by feeding her disinformation that will drift back to Moscow. It’s not called a wilderness of mirrors for nothing. But I look forward to the CIA’s new motto: “Why don’t you play a little solitaire?”

And don’t let’s even start on Bobby K. This week on “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” Larry freaks out when Cheryl’s new husband gets a Cabinet appointment. (And Leon becomes ambassador to the Vatican because his name is an anagram for Elon.)

And Pete Hegseth? Cracker, please. How does this guy join the august tradition of Forrestal, Marshall, McNamara, Schlesinger, Rumsfeld, Richardson, Gates, Cohen, Paneta, Mattis, and Austin? Yes, there are a couple real monsters too (looking at you, Rummy), but even those monsters were at least proper, formidable villains. By contrast, Hegseth, like Trump, is a wildy unqualified clown with a disgusting personal history and poisonous policy views, but also like Trump, an incredibly dangerous one. So we’re giving a white nationalist National Guard major turned Fox News host access to the nuclear codes? As the kids say, that tracks. (I feel bad for those folks who have to shake his hand.) Yes, the four-star service chiefs will treat him like an insect, while staying just shy of open insubordination, but in the end, the chain of command is the chain of command. Just ask the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, US Air Force General Charles Q. Brown, Jr., whom Pete will likely fire just because he’s Black.

It now emerges that Hegseth may be sunk by an allegation of sexual assault—not that that hurt Trump, whom a judge declared had committed rape, or a pattern of credible allegations of that sort against Gaetz. We shall see. Much as I’d love to see him kept out of the Cabinet, the idea that an accusation of sexual assault would do it, and not his sheer lack of qualifications or Wannsee Conference-ready political views, says it all.

At this point, I’m almost more shocked by who’s been snubbed, so far. Giuliani for Secretary of Hair Dye, Cousin-Marrying, and Four Seasons Landscaping? Mike Lindell for head of the Bureau of Pillows, Crucifixes, and Crack? Grenell as US Ambassador to Mordor? How about Sidney Powell? Johnny McEntee? And where is Mad Mike Flynn anyway? Eating Turkish food with Eric Adams somewhere, I presume.

Talk that this rogues’ gallery of Cabinet picks will face trouble getting confirmed is absurd. Does anyone seriously think the supplicant Republican-controlled Senate is going to stand in the way? Donald will get all of them through, via one form of GOP cowardice or another: the Senate will either confirm them without so much as a polite clearing of the throat, or bow to his desire for unconstitutional recess appointments. The only reason Trump would press for the latter is to avoid giving the Democrats a platform for theater. But he may not care.

Clearly, Trump is challenging and testing the GOP leadership (“leadership”) right out of the gate. These are schoolyard bully tactics, which are his stock-in-trade. If any senior Republicans dare push back—and I doubt any will—they will be purged. The rest will have been preemptively emasculated, a humiliation they will meekly accept, setting the tone for all that is to come.

And what is to come promises to be very bad indeed.

MILLER’S CROSSING

I say all this about the Cabinet picks not to dunk just for the sake of dunking, or to comfort myself with a snotty sense of superiority as we careen toward armageddon, but because it’s a grim augury of what’s next.

Two weeks ago I described the presidential election as a test, one that America failed. Another big test is bearing down on us—a pop quiz on the first day of class, and we’re like a bunch of first semester freshmen who didn’t do the reading because we were shotgunning Natty Bo and doing bong hits all night.

Make no mistake: the new Trump administration will immediately launch mass deportations—or an attempt at them—on day one, perhaps even as soon as John Roberts smiles and Trump removes his hand from the Bible, which miraculously has not burst into flame (but it wanted to). Stephen Miller is rock hard just thinking about it.

Remember the so-called Muslim ban? That was Weekend #1 of his first administration. They wanted to make a statement fast and hard and they did, even if it was a disaster that Trump had to back away from, really the only reversal of policy the famously non-apologetic bastard made in his whole first term. They will surely try a similar shock-and-awe maneuver right out of the gate this time, and I don’t believe that the American people are remotely ready for it.

The incoming administration had made it clear that it thinks it has a mandate from the American people to carry out the vile, neo-fascist agenda it promoted on the campaign trail. It would have acted that way even if Kamala had won the popular vote, but the current circumstances, and with the GOP recapturing the Senate and holding onto the House, make it even easier. And sadly, their presumptuousness is not unjustified. After all, Trump didn’t hide what he planned to do: on the contrary, he shouted it from the rooftops. And the American people signed on.

But setting aside the small niche of rabid xenophobes, Trump’s victory at the polls suggests that, broadly speaking, the American people may not have been paying very close attention to what he promised to do in a second term, or at the very least didn’t fully understand it. As Christian Paz writes in Vox, “Support for a policy of mass deportation, while superficially high, rests on….substantial confusion among voters about what it might actually entail.”

Americans might not understand that deportations of all undocumented immigrants would include deportations of DACA recipients and longtime neighbors or friends who have been living normally and are bedrocks of local communities, advocates and researchers say—rather than only recent arrivals, or those few migrants who commit violent crimes.

According to the Pew Research Center, “as many as 40 percent of registered voters who support mass deportations also support a policy that would allow undocumented spouses of US citizens to remain in the country.” That doesn’t square with the draconian ICE raids and mass incarceration of whole families—including children and legal residents of the US—that the Trump campaign has vowed.

And what unholy trinity will oversee this pogrom? Naturally it will be led by famed xenophobic homunculus Stephen Miller, Trump’s cartoonishly evil immigration adviser; former South Dakota governor and dog-killing enthusiast Kristi Noem, who is his nominee to be Secretary of Homeland Security; and border czar Tom Homan, straight from Central Casting, where he could have had a fine career playing redneck sheriffs and sadistic prison wardens.

Experts, current and former government officials, and others interviewed by The Washington Post described Trump’s plans as “alarming, impractical and prone to significant legal and logistical hurdles.”

“You’re talking about officers in tactical gear going into communities, being videotaped in the streets, putting kids in car seats, carrying baby formula. Then what do you do with those families?” said Jason Houser, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s chief of stafffrom January 2022 until March 2023. “Are you going to go into neighborhoods in Philly, New York, Baltimore and start tugging people out of communities? That’s what they want. It puts law enforcement and the communities at risk.”

Reflecting on the ideas Trump and his team discussed during his presidency, Houser said, “Their ideas were psychotic.”

FAST, CREEPS, AND OUT OF CONTROL

Per Houser, some argue that mass deportation on the scale Trump promises is wildly unfeasible, even for a well-oiled administration, which this one ain’t gonna be by any stretch. It’s by no means clear that Trump will have the organization or infrastructure to execute his plans, not to mention senior personnel who won’t tear each other apart with Borgia-like zest. No one even knows how mass deportation would work. (Perhaps the ghost of Adolf Eichmann can be consulted via oujia board.)

But they will certainly try. And while it’s true that the Trump Administration 2.0 will surely be a dumpster fire of dysfunction, immigration policy may be the area where it is most effective. As Hayes Brown writes for MSNBC:

Even as the rest of the administration may bumble about and clash with one another, that might not be the case when it comes to enforcing Trump’s dark immigration plan. Miller, Homan and Noem have the potential to be distressingly effective at working together. The only limit they will likely face is how much the public will allow to be carried out in its name.

But the effectiveness of this scheme is almost beside the point. The plan does not have to work well, or work at all, to inflict the harm and suffering that is its actual goal. “The cruelty is the point” as The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer said about the family separation policy of the first Trump administration, and this will make that look like tea at the Plaza. (On that topic, I strongly recommend Separated, Errol Morris’s powerful new documentary on that subject, based on the book by Jacob Soboroff.)

Are we ready? Will the American people, who voted this rancid meatsack back into office, be shocked by what he does? Will they shrug? Applaud? I dunno. A mix, of course. But the Cabinet picks are a sure sign that the mass deporation plan is very real, and will hit with maximum force and no half measures.

Truthout reports that “with Trump’s return, we can expect not only mass raids of homes, worksites and communities, but the stripping of status from millions of people. With the scale of what has been proposed, some 28 million people could be at risk of family separation in 2025.”

Here’s how the The New York Times frames it:

The constellation of Mr. Trump’s 2025 plans amounts to an assault on immigration on a scale unseen in modern American history. Millions of undocumented immigrants would be barred from the country or uprooted from it years or even decades after settling here.

Such a scale of planned removals would raise logistical, financial and diplomatic challenges and would be vigorously challenged in court. But there is no mistaking the breadth and ambition of the shift Mr. Trump is eyeing.

In a second Trump presidency, the visas of foreign students who participated in anti-Israel or pro-Palestinian protests would be canceled. US consular officials abroad will be directed to expand ideological screening of visa applicants to block people the Trump administration considers to have undesirable attitudes. People who were granted temporary protected status because they are from certain countries deemed unsafe, allowing them to lawfully live and work in the United States, would have that status revoked.

Similarly, numerous people who have been allowed to live in the country temporarily for humanitarian reasons would also lose that status and be kicked out, including tens of thousands of the Afghans who were evacuated amid the 2021 Taliban takeover and allowed to enter the United States. Afghans holding special visas granted to people who helped US forces would be re-vetted to see if they really did.

And they will come first for a place like New York City first: the biggest city in the country, the most liberal (sorry, Berkeley), Trump’s hometown, and one packed both with migrants and diversity in general. Eric Adams—scrambling to avoid criminal convictions himself, and about to face a judge who was once a lawyer for the ACLU fighting the family separation policy—may well play along, with the unspoken quid pro quo of a presidential pardon dangling before him. Will the NYPD do likewise? Will the New York State National Guard? If Kathy Hochul balks, will Trump federalize them? Will their chain of command go along, or do their duty and refuse to obey illegal orders, should they be issued?

And it won’t stop with “illegals” either. Miller want severe limits even on legal immigration, including an end to the 14^th Amendment’s guarantee of birthright citizenship, and even to strip naturalized citizens of their legal status. (Paging Martin Niemöller.) The WaPo reports that to do so, Trump “would sign an executive order on his first day in office to withhold passports, Social Security numbers and other government benefits from children of undocumented immigrants born in the United States.” Such moves would surely wind up in front of the Supreme Court, the same Supreme Court that recently ruled that a US President can pretty much do whatever he wants.* (And I do mean “he.”) I think we all know how that will go.

(*Fine print: Applies only to Republicans.)

Carrying out this plan will require resources far beyond those currently available to ICE, which presents worrying prospects of its own. The Washington Post reports that ICE only has about 6000 deportation officers nationwide, and that it takes about two years to recruit, screen, and train a new deportation. To provide reinforcements, Miller is a fan of enlisting state police, National Guardsmen, and other federal agencies (presumably FBI, ATF, Secret Service, and the Bureau of Prisons, whose officers—in sterile, unmarked uniforms, a la Putin’s “little green men” in Crimea—figured heavily in suppressing the George Floyd protests in 2020). Speaking to the right wing podcaster Charlie Kirk in November 2023, Miller even proposed “sending National Guard troops from Republican-led states into neighboring states governed by Democrats. ‘If you’re going to go into an unfriendly state like Maryland, well, they would just be Virginia doing the arrest in Maryland.’”

That sounds normal.

Trump himself has long been keen on involving the US military in his anti-immigration plans, almost to the point of fetish, including not just National Guard but active duty forces, befitting his view of himself as a despot. “He was obsessed with having the military involved,” a former senior official in the Trump administration told the WaPo, speaking on condition of anonymity. John Bolton reported that Trump “couldn’t care less” about Posse Comitatus, the law forbidding the US military from undertaking domestic operations; no doubt he will find some Reichstag fire-style reason to get around it, which makes allowances for national emergenices. A salivating Stephen Miller has already proposed invoking the Insurrection Act. (Very ironic, of course, for the party of insurrection.)

It hardly bears mentioning the hypocrisy of this xenophobia and cruelty from a nation that ostentatiously prides itself on being built by immgrants (even as it exists on stolen land), and holds up the Statue of Liberty and Emma Lazarus’s poem as part of national iconography.

I think Emma may have gotten wrong exactly who the “wretched refuse” are.

LOOKING DOWN THE BARREL

So what’s next? I don’t dare guess. I know the Onion bought InfoWars, but when Matt Gaetz is AG and Tulsi Gabbard is DNI and RFK Jr. is in charge of public health, satire is dead.

There are reports of Trump voters already having buyers’ remorse as they learn what a tarrif really is, and there will be loads more once the deportations begin, sweeping up folks who never thought for a moment that Trump meant them. The Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party is going to have a field day.

What does it say when prominent Trump critics and opponents, including high-ranking members of the previous administration, are worried about being jailed, court-martialed, or even executed, or short of that, the subject of freelance violence by Trump supporters acting on their own, but egged on and inspired by their Dear Leader? That is the sort of thing that was unimaginable in America, even in our worst moments. And yet here we are.

An overreaction you say? Hysteria? Trump Derangement Syndrome? I hope that proves true, and I’ll take it gladly. But if past is prologue, there is no reason to think that the worst is not very possible when it comes to what Donald Trump will do.

Trump has said he’ll be a “dictator for one day,” and I don’t suspect that day will be in the middle of his term. In fact, he‘s already talking about a third term. (­That was fast, no?) Just a joke, his GOP defenders say! Sheesh, you libtards have no sense of humor! “That was a joke. It was clearly a joke,” said Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.) when asked about it. “I leaned over to somebody beside me, Andy Biggs, and I said, that’ll be the headlines tomorrow, ‘Trump trying to thwart the Constitution,’ which—there’s nothing further from the truth.”

Right, nothing is further from the truth than Donald Trump trying to thwart the Constitution.

But that’s the pattern: a trial balloon disguised as a “joke” for plausible deniability that soon becomes hard fact without so much as a shrug let alone an explanation.

It’s hard to imagine how all this will play out, given the speed at which it’s happening. It’s equally hard to see how that pace can be sustained, or where we’ll be in four years, or that this madness can carry on that long without exploding or imploding. But we are headed down a very dark path.

Recall how fast a certain Austrian-born politician consolidated power after ascending to the chancellorship of his grievance-filled nation via legal means. In less than six months, he had the authority to enact laws without the Reichstag’s consent, all other political parties had been banned, and civil liberites had been suspended under the Verordnung des Reichspräsidenten zum Schutz von Volk und Staat (Reich President’s Emergency Decree for the People and State).

See you in July ’25!

In the second part of this essay, we will get into the weeds of what mass deportation would look like, with ICE raids, mass arrests of whole families, and establishment of a gulag archipelago of privately-conracted concentration camps. When it comes, we will see, in the land of the free and the home of the brave, just how free and brave we really are.

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Photo: Gleeful Trump supporters at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee last July, blithely unaware of how they will look to history. Alex Wong/Getty Images.