No Silver Linings

Things are getting very dark, very fast

A book by President-Elect Donald Trump’s nominee for Secretary of Defense

I was close to finished with this post when Donald Trump announced his nomination of anti-vaccine advocate and conspiracy theorist Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. to head the Department of Health and Human Services. That’s why I have nothing to say about the news in what follows. Obviously incorporating a discussion of the RFK nomination would have only deepened the air of foreboding that suffuses everything I say below.

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In the week following Donald Trump’s victory in the 2024 presidential election, the predominant mood among political analysts was surprisingly relaxed and almost upbeat. Yes, Trump prevailed. But he won the popular vote this time. This is what the people chose. And most of them did so for the same reasons electorates around the world have been voting against incumbents—because of lingering anger about the post-pandemic inflation that spiked in 2022, plus, in the US, irritation about chaos on the southern border. With time, those issues will fade, Trump will inevitably do things to inspire a backlash of unpopularity, and that combined with ordinary thermostatic shifts in public opinion against the party in power should give Democrats a lot of momentum going into the 2026 midterms, and possibly also the 2028 presidential race as well.

Nate Silver wrote a compelling, data-heavy version of such a post earlier this week. Call it a silver-lining take. I offered my own mild version of one in my last post, listing various bad things we could expect from the incoming Trump administration, none of them suggesting anything fundamentally diverging from normal politics.

I’m afraid the time for such relatively sanguine responses to our situation is already over.

Trump has moved very quickly with announcing nominees for his incoming administration. Some of them—like Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida for Secretary of State—are reassuring. (In 2023, Rubio co-sponsored a bill barring presidents from exiting NATO without two thirds approval of the Senate or the passage of separate legislation by Congress.) Others, such as Rep. Mike Waltz of Florida to be National Security Adviser and Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York to be UN Ambassador, make me unhappy but fit with the very hawkish cast of the first Trump administration. The man clearly likes surrounding himself with people who default to bellicosity, but the results in terms of actual policy during Trump 1.0 were pretty mixed, with the president usually taking a less aggressive approach than advisers like John “Bomb Iran” Bolton preferred.

But the nominations announced on Tuesday evening and Wednesday afternoon belong in a different category altogether. The choices are truly alarming and, combined with Trump’s statements about intending to bypass the Senate confirmation process by appointing people via recess appointments, augur an administration pushing the presidency from the very start in unprecedentedly authoritarian directions.