I don’t even want to guess what’s going to happen with Trump cabinet picks. I don’t know if Senate Republicans will hang together to approve them all. I don’t know if Congress will roll over and go into recession for more than ten days so that Trump can choose who he wants without hearings. We’ll see.

I do know that pharmaceutical stocks dropped like a rock after RFK the Lesser was announced as Trump’s choice for Health and Human Services. That shouldn’t have surprised anybody; Trump had already said he’s let the Lesser “go crazy” on health.

Obviously, all of Trump’s choices are people who are intended to both be utterly loyal to Trump and to utterly muck up whatever agency or department they are supposed to be running. It’s Trump’s revenge.

In his first term, Trump obviously was unhappy to find out that Presidents can’t just issue orders about whatever and expect people to follow them. He’s never been constrained like that, you know. The only person who could override him was his father, and Fred Trump Sr. has been gone for about 25 years now.

At some point, someone must have told Trump that the powers of the presidency are listed in Article II of the Constitution. So for a while he was obsessed with Article II, claiming it gave him “rights” to do whatever he wanted. He seemed to think he was the first person to find out about it.

But of course, Article II does nothing of the sort. Article II is very short and gives presidents very little autonomous power. Most presidential functions require the cooperation/advice/consent of Congress. And I suspect all the other presidents before Trump knew that. They’d probably actually spent the three minutes or so required to read Article II. But for Trump, hollowing out the bureaucracies that carry out the functions of government is all about revenge. All those Deep State bureaucrats who wouldn’t obey him will be sorry. And since he doesn’t understand how any of this works and what these bureaucrats do, he doesn’t see the downside.

For months, I’ve been reading that European leaders have been making plans for what they will do when they can no longer count on Pax Americana. Well, that time has come, so I understand they’re preparing to defend Europe without our help. But with the likes of Pete Hegseth at DOD and Tulsi Gabbard as Director of National Intelligence, we’ll be helpless to defend ourselves before long, never mind help Europe.

Earlier today I read a commentary that said our current allies will stop sharing intelligence with us with Gabbard in charge, and they’ll probably stop trusting intelligence from us. I’m sure you regulars understand how inadequate Gabbard is. But for anyone else floating through here, see Tom Nichols at the Atlantic,  Tulsi Gabbard’s Nomination Is a National-Security Risk.  Gabbard is a big fan of Vladimir Putin, btw.

And then there’s the Israel-Gaza thing. Trump won Michigan with a lot of help from the Muslims in Dearborn. The week before the election, Trump visited a halal cafe in Dearborn and promised to bring peace to Gaza. He didn’t mention he would let Bibi Netanyahu destroy it first, but that is emerging as the plan.

Of all the people in the United States, the president-elect has settled on Mike Huckabee as his nominee for ambassador to Israel. Huckabee, a Southern Baptist, has said he does not believe in the West Bank as a concept and that it is Judea and Samaria (the biblical name for the region) and that Palestinians as a people are not real. He has also put on campaign events from the West Bank. After Donald Trump’s announcement, Huckabee was asked whether West Bank annexation was possible during the coming presidential term. “Of course,” he replied. (Huckabee is a Christian Zionist, which is to say he believes that Jews should be in Israel—an area he deems to include the West Bank—so as to trigger the Second Coming, after which Christians can inhabit the land.)

Huckabee is but one part of a larger story: In the week or so since he won reelection, Trump has announced a series of people who either explicitly support West Bank settlement or annexation or bristle at the slightest suggestion of criticism of Israel.

As Galen Jackson, an associate professor of political science at Williams College, put it, “To the extent that Israel plans to hold on to the settlements that it builds in the West Bank, then almost by definition annexation has been proceeding for decades on a gradual basis. The main difference with Trump, in that case, is that he doesn’t even protest Israeli settlement expansion or deem it in violation of international law, whereas all other U.S. administrations have.”

Huckabee isn’t the only nominee that the far right Israelis must be thrilled about. Pete Hegseth and Elise Stefanik (nominated for UN Ambassador) have a long record of being all-in on whatever Netanyahu wants.

And there’s a broad consensus that an AG Matt Gaetz will destroy the Department of Justice and burn down the rule of law. Too bad for all those people who voted for Trump because they were afraid of crime.

And I haven’t yet started on what’s going to happen to the economy. But y’all know all that.

I hate election years, but I expect I will hate next year even worse.