At a rally in Las Vegas in September, the reggaeton star Nicky Jam came onstage in a Make America Great Again hat and endorsed Donald Trump. We need you. We need you back, right? We need you to be the president, he said. But after a comedian at Trumps rally at Madison Square Garden last month called Puerto Rico a floating island of garbage, the singerwhose father is Puerto Rican and who was raised partly on the islandhad second thoughts.
Never in my life did I think that a month later, a comedian was going to come to criticize my country and speak badly of my country, and therefore, I renounce any support for Donald Trump, Nicky Jam said.
He had no right to be surprised. Trump himself had previously gone after Puerto Ricohe punished its leaders for criticizing him after Hurricane Maria, and sought to swap it for Greenlandbut even if Nicky Jam had missed or forgotten that, he had to know who Trump was.
Nicky Jam was ahead of the curve. Since the election, Trump has moved swiftly to do things hed said hed do, and yet many peopleespecially his own supportersseem stunned and dismayed. This is absurd. Surprise was perhaps merited in late 2016 and early 2017, when Trump was still an unknown quantity. But after four years as president, culminating in an attempt to erase an election he lost, Trump has demonstrated who he is. Somehow, the delusion of Trump la cartetake the lib-owning, take the electoral wins, but pass on all of the unsavory stuffpersists.
In an article about how Trumps transition is shocking the Washington establishment, Peter Baker of The New York Times writes: Nine years after Mr. Trump began upsetting political norms, it may be easy to underestimate just how extraordinary all of this is. Hes right that the aberrant nature of the picks may be overlooked, as I have warned, yet it is also true that the actual unpredictability of them is overestimated.
From the January/February 2024 issue: Trump isnt bluffing
On K Street, Politico reports, health-care-industry lobbyists cant believe that Trump has nominated Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead the Department of Health and Human Services. They were expecting a more conventional pick, even though Trump emphasized Kennedys Make America Healthy Again agenda late in the campaign, and even though Kennedy said that Trump had promised him control of HHS. To be sure, Kennedy is a shocking and disturbing pick, as Benjamin Mazer and my colleague Yasmin Tayag have recently written for The Atlantic, but his nomination should not come as a surpriseespecially for people whose entire business proposition is being highly paid to advise clients on how Washington actually works. (The influence peddlers reportedly hope that senators will block Kennedy. The fact that theyre still waiting for someone else to solve their problems is further evidence of how little theyve learned, years into the Trump era.)
Meanwhile, the New York Post, a key pillar of Rupert Murdochs right-wing media juggernaut, is similarly jittery about the Kennedy choice. Back when Kennedy was a thorn in President Joe Bidens side, threatening to run against him in the Democratic primary, the Posts editorial board was all too happy to elevate him. Now the board condemns his nomination and tells us that it came out of a meeting with him last year thinking hes nuts on a lot of fronts. The columnist Michael Godwin, who beamed on November 9 that Trumps victory offers the promise of progress on so many fronts that it already feels like Morning in America again, was back a week later to complain that its not a close call to say that Kennedy and Matt Gaetz, Trumps pick for attorney general, are unfit for the roles.
The lobbyists and editorialists are in good company, or at least in some sort of company. On Capitol Hill, Republican senators say they are shocked by many of Trumps Cabinet picks. Senator Susan Collins of Maine, who notoriously professed surprise when Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh voted to overturn Roe v. Wade, is shocked at the Gaetz nomination. Gaetzs House Republican colleagues are stunned and disgusted.
Reactions to Pete Hegseths nomination as secretary of defense are less vitriolic, if no less baffled. Wow, Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska told NBC. Im just surprised, because the names that Ive heard for secretary of defense have not included him. Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana was even blunter. Who? he said. I just dont know anything about him.
David A. Graham: The Trump believability gap
If this is true, the senators could perhaps do with some better staff work. Hegseth was a real possibility to lead the Department of Veterans Affairs in the first Trump administration; more to the point, he was a prominent figure on Fox News, which is a dominant force in the Republican Party, from whose ranks Trump has repeatedly drawn appointees.
Staffers at the affected agencies have also expressed shock and horror at the prospect of an Attorney General Gaetz, a Defense Secretary Hegseth, or a Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard.
Ordinary Americans may also be taken aback. As I reported last month, Trump critics were concerned about a believability gap, in which voters opposed some of Trumps big policy ideas, sometimes quite strongly, but just didnt trust that he would really do those things. Although they perhaps deserve more grace than the Republican officials and power brokers who are astonished, they also had ample warning about who Trump is and how hed govern.
Throughout his presidential campaign, Trump vowed to deport undocumented immigrants en masse. Hes appointing officials such as Stephen Miller and Tom Homan who are committed to that, and yesterday morning, Trump confirmed on Truth Social a report that he would declare a national emergency and use the military to conduct mass deportations. And yet, when the roundups start in January, many people are somehow going to be taken by surprise.
