The list of people with tainted histories to serve the Trump administration’s key portfolios is increasing by the day. Some of them were accused of rioting during the Capitol Hill protests, some ferrying young girls for sex, and yet another an immigrant harbouring a hateful attitude towards communism. One of them is seen as friends of an enemy country as she is accused of having her thoughts aligned with that of the adversary. Additionally, there is another Trump's pick, who is accused of sexually assaulting a woman, and then paying her money for the settlement.
As people at the helm of affairs say, Trump’s spontaneous decisions to nominate people for various positions in his upcoming government will only ‘endanger fear’. They attribute this phrase to tainted ones and believe their appointment will embolden people to commit more wrongs in areas they were accused of and got off scot-free.
Be it child trafficking or spreading lies, both have a strong bearing on the nation. False information will possibly overwhelm the media landscape with misinformation and will appear as an agreed reality among the communication professionals. When you have glorified lawyers, pampered sexual abusers, celebrated hate mongers, and loyalists of adversaries running the government, there is a great possibility of getting the foundation of a nation like America shaken. Processes are likely to take a back seat and the resultant chaos becomes the new order.
Stephen K. Bannon (Steve Bannon), who was convicted in the Capitol Hill riots case and spent four months in jail, was released well before the recent presidential elections, and campaigned for Trump in his popular podcast ‘War Room’. Bannon is a podcaster, and Time magazine once ran a story mentioning him as the ‘second most powerful man in the world.’ Bannon is a talented podcaster, studied from Harvard, served in the American Navy for a few years, and was accused of spreading misinformation. Brookings Institute in their research documents note that the Bannon Show was blatantly lying to mislead people. Guests in the show would display their skills of presenting facts that never existed. Bannon is not the only one in this race, there are others whose follies have also granted them space in Trump’s cabinet. You need to have intuition, calculation or both to be in Trump's team. While skill is optional, smartness is mandatory.
Leaders run their businesses using what they call 'skilled intuitions and algorithms.' Decisions made based on unskilled intuitions will bring undesired results. Trump installing loyalists as his lieutenants in the government without skills will possibly disrupt the normalcy in the ranks as people like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. who is going to lead the health department when he showed scepticism about vaccines. He has no health experience; instead, he showed contempt for evidence-based medicine when the whole world was running for medical help, during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Decisions made on the basis of reckoning and logic seem failing when we do an evaluation of what Trump has said and done. Marco Rubio is a son of an immigrant from Cuba whose father had to flee the island nation to evade getting persecuted by Cuban revolutionaries. He is a staunch anti-communist politician. Trump’s one of the agendas was to go after immigrants. Although Rubio is no longer an immigrant after all this time in the promised land, it can still ache to bear the tag – an immigrant's child.
Matt Gaetz another pick of Trump for a position of attorney general may sometime need to defend a case of child abuse. He was accused of having sex with a minor girl, which was testified by a woman, eight years ago. In her witness account to the ethics committee, she was quoted as saying, “saw Gaetz having sex with a minor girl” in Florida during a party. The attorney general’s role will be marred forever and people in future may assume this as a qualification.
Another pick of Donald Trump is Pete Hegseth for the defense secretary role. The latter was accused of paying money for shutting a victim of his sexual assault. Hegseth had assaulted a woman sexually in 2017 and the victim was later paid money to remain silent. Pete denied that it was an assault and maintained that it was “consensual sex”.
Tulsi Gabbard, a Hindu woman in Trump’s team, was accused of having strong liking for Vladamir Putin's ideology. Tulsi has been nominated for a key intelligence position and analysts see it as a big advantage for Russia. People shockingly responded when the news spread that she will oversee the intelligence and called it “a Russia plan”.
Billionaire Elon Musk did not grab much of the media attention while Trump made these choices because most of the observers' energies went into scrutinising the picks. Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy will oversee the Department of Government Efficiency(DOGE) which Trump established for the duo. It would be interesting to know how India positions itself in this entire process and whether Trump has any more surprises in store to throw like a bombshell.
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