River News: Our View

Watching the U.S. House of Representatives elect a speaker was an interesting exercise, primarily because it offered glimpses into the emerging coalition politics of the right as we head into Trump 2.0.

Speaker Mike Johnson was elected on the first ballot, but there was some drama. With such a slim majority, Johnson could only afford one GOP defection, and U.S. Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky had already announced that he a was a firm “no.” Then two more GOP representatives announced during first-round voting that they were jumping ship, too. 

Well, that certainly caused a stir, as swamp rats of all persuasions scurried around this way and that, looking for someplace filthy and nasty to hide until the smoke cleared. Others sprung into action. Like Rep. Nancy Mace, who called Donald Trump, who was playing golf, to tell him the three Republicans weren’t playing nice. Trump got on the phone with the miscreants, probably threatened to put them on the front lines when we invade Greenland, and, sure enough, two of the three changed their votes and saved Johnson’s keister.

Massie held firm. Though he is an avid Trump supporter, the GOP representative has never been afraid to buck Trump when it comes to his principles. In this case, Massie correctly called Johnson a weak leader who constantly sells out the MAGA agenda, and, as a result, constantly needs Democratic votes to pass things.

Among other things, Johnson last year opposed legislation requiring a probable-cause warrant to surveil American citizens ensnared peripherally in foreign surveillance. Johnson also supported sending Ukraine $61 billion more in aid this past year, and he supported a stop-gap federal funding bill that awarded Democrats barrels of pork. 

With friends like those, conservatives don’t need enemies, so Massie was right on the narrow point. But there is a larger point to consider, and that is ultimately passing the MAGA agenda and staying unified as a party long enough to do it.

In this case, Trump endorsed Johnson. Trump is not necessarily Johnson’s biggest supporter, but the president-elect believed that a fractious internal party fight was no way to kick off the start of his second administration. The way forward, Trump implored to representatives on the fence, was Johnson.

Many Republicans, both inside and outside of Congress, sounded the same theme. Former House speaker Newt Gingrich called opposition to Johnson a “stunningly stupid, suicidal strategy which only weakens the Republican Party, weakens President Trump, makes it harder to fix America, and these guys need psychologists.”

Conservatives such as Kentucky Rep. Jim Comer agreed and urged Trump to call wavering Republicans and get them to fall in line. Comer was blunt about the implications of the internal rebellion: “It’s going to delay the start of his first 100 days in office, which is the most important time frame of his whole presidency. That’s when you get the most done, historically. So, I strongly encourage President Trump to get on the phone and try to get everyone united so we can work together as a team and make America great again.”

While we agree with Massie on the specific issues, as well as about Johnson’s ability to manage the House, Comer makes a good point, and there’s an even deeper thread behind it that most Republicans and conservatives would do well to remember.

And that is: Unlike 2016 and 2020, President Trump’s popularity has soared. His approval rating topped 50 percent for the first time ever; he went from 63-million votes in 2016 to 74-million votes in 2020, to 77-million votes last year, and, on election night, it became clear that he was outpacing congressional Republicans — in other words, they were riding his coattails, not the other way around.

The Republican trifecta, inasmuch as Republicans were responsible for it, owes to Donald Trump. It was once said that Trump was the only Republican the Democrats could beat; but, in the end, it’s far more likely that Trump was the only Republican who could beat Kamala Harris, or any other Democrat, save incognizant Joe Biden. Switch out Trump for anybody else, especially Nikki Haley, and the Trump base and the low-propensity male voter stays home.

All of which is to say, the Republicans have a unique opportunity to rebuild America, to dismantle the deep state, to restore the values of personal liberty and free speech, to unleash prosperity and secure the peace, all of which Donald Trump has made possible, and all of which can only be possible with Trump.

So we’ll go for now with what Trump says he needs to achieve those goals. In the House, that was Johnson as speaker.

That brings us to the other side of the Capitol and the U.S. Senate, where Trump’s nominees for various cabinet positions will be tested in confirmation hearings. 

And for that we say, the same thing goes: Trump deserves to have the nominees he has selected. These are the people he believes can achieve the MAGA goals he has laid out to America, and for which America has voted.

A number of those nominees are controversial: Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., to head the Department of Health and Human Services; Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence; Pete Hegseth over at defense; Kash Patel to lead the FBI, among them.

They are controversial for a reason: They are disrupters of the narrative; they are radical in their intent. They are Trumpian in their politics and manners. They have all, in one way or another, gone to war with the deep state, and now they have a chance to achieve what everyone thought was an impossibility. They have a chance to run the government.

Throughout his campaign, Donald Trump told America exactly what he was going to do. He featured Kennedy and Gabbard and others front and center at rallies. He bluntly promised to dismantle the deep state. In speech after speech, he pledged to blow apart the bureaucracies that have corrupted our political system and injured and shackled our everyday lives. He promised to bring to an end the long hegemony of the military-industrial complex, and — like John F. Kennedy before him wanted to do — to scatter the FBI and the CIA into a million pieces, the only way to rebuild it.

Trump hid none of it, and America elected him, and with a decisive popular vote victory.

And now senators should listen to that verdict. Installing people like Kennedy and Gabbard and Hegseth and Patel and others at those agencies is the only way to make America great again. And yet we hear murmurs of opposition from Republicans inside the Senate, most of it cloaked in secrecy. We hear about the Senate’s constitutional duty to advise and consent to the president’s picks.

But all of us know the game that is afoot. The Senate is empowered to consent and it should do so in cases of ethical breach or criminality — when the vetting has failed — but not on the basis of political deterrence. Unless some major offense, such as would be impeachable in other contexts, comes to light, there is only one reason not to support Trump’s picks, and that would be because the senators who would do so oppose the MAGA agenda itself, no matter how they frame it to the public.

Depressingly we have heard Democratic talking points coming from the mouths of some GOP senators — that Gabbard is a threat to national security, in effect a Russian asset; that Kennedy will endanger rather than improve public health. Opposition to Kennedy will be bankrolled by millions and millions of dollars from the healthcare and pharmaceutical lobbies.

Make no mistake, those who voice opposition are not advising and consenting in any moral sense; they will be acting as creatures of the swamp, bowing to the captains of industry and to the overlords of the bureaucracies.

What’s good for the goose is good for the gander. If the House needed to fall in line behind Trump’s pick for speaker, the Senate needs to fall in line behind the president’s cabinet picks.

If the first 100 days are vital, so are these important votes. They could make all the difference in whether Trump succeeds.

The first challenge in draining the swamp is just ahead. Stay tuned.