Normalizing his debauchery, Trump's cabinet picks are ghosts of Christmas gone...
"God bless us, every one!"
“Darkness is cheap, and Scrooge liked it.”
Happy Holidays and may this season of hope sustain us for what will surely be a new year of challenges. The release of the House Ethics Committee’s report on Matt Gaetz has dropped the first bit of coal in the administration’s Christmas stocking. Gaetz this holiday season is the gift that keeps on giving. The report is a voluminous account of the naughty ways of the former House scourge whose glass house was finally struck by a boulder of his own making. Among the Ethics Committee findings are charges that Gaetz, among other things, hired women, and at least in one case a seventeen-year-old girl, for sex:
In sum, the Committee found substantial evidence of the following:
• From at least 2017 to 2020, Representative Gaetz regularly paid women for engaging in sexual activity with him.
• In 2017, Representative Gaetz engaged in sexual activity with a 17-year-old girl.
• During the period 2017 to 2019, Representative Gaetz used or possessed illegal drugs, including cocaine and ecstasy, on multiple occasions.
• Representative Gaetz accepted gifts, including transportation and lodging in connection with a 2018 trip to the Bahamas, in excess of permissible amounts.
• In 2018, Representative Gaetz arranged for his Chief of Staff to assist a woman with whom he engaged in sexual activity in obtaining a passport, falsely indicating to the U.S. Department of State that she was a constituent.
• Representative Gaetz knowingly and willfully sought to impede and obstruct the Committee’s investigation of his conduct.
• Representative Gaetz has acted in a manner that reflects discreditably upon the House.
Within the committee’s stark finding of serious sexual misconduct, drug abuse, and obstruction, there is a less-than-subtle attempt to mitigate Gaetz’s legal responsibilities as it disingenuously ignores the obvious:
“The Committee did not find sufficient evidence to conclude that Representative Gaetz violated the federal sex trafficking statute. Although Representative Gaetz did cause the transportation of women across state lines for purposes of commercial sex, the Committee did not find evidence that any of those women were under 18 at the time of travel, nor did the Committee find sufficient evidence to conclude that the commercial sex acts were induced by force, fraud, or coercion.” (emphasis mine) (emphasis mine)
Why would Donald Trump even consider nominating Gaetz who is hated on both sides of the aisle? The answer, of course, tells us as much about Trump as it does Gaetz. In fact, of the nominations for cabinet positions forwarded by the criminally cited president-elect, several share remarkably similar problematic issues that trouble Trump. Tulsi Gabbard presents a national security threat, and Pete Hegseth is tarred with sexual harassment charges for paying his victim for silence. His nominee to replace FBI Director Christopher Wray—Kash Patel, an unrepentant 2020 election denier—shares Trump’s fascist tendencies and is a super loyalist pledged to carry out his master’s most retributive orders.
Trump has assembled a clonelike array of mini Trumps who, if confirmed, will normalize his own criminal behaviors. The Senate will be placed in a position of supporting candidates charged with sexual harassment, national security breaches, financial chicanery, and obstructionist behavior which, by proxy, whitewashed each of the charges and convictions Trump has so far faced.
The Ethics Committee’s release of the Gaetz report serves notice that there are lines that some in Congress admit cannot be crossed. The problem is that with each new nominee presented for confirmation, their lines will be blurred and tempered compared to Gaetz and not Trump. As each faces scrutiny their blurred line moves ever so closely to the shadows created by Trump's calculation that there is only so much resolve in the Congress to do what is right.
The bumper sticker for the next four years promises to be for half of us who voted against Trump will be “Don’t blame me, I voted for her,” but it is faint absolution. As the ghost of Christmas yet-to-come observed in Dickens ‘A Christmas Carol’ warns Scrooge:
″‘There are some upon this earth of yours who lay claim to know us, and who do their deeds of passion, pride, ill-will, hatred, envy, bigotry, and selfishness in our name, who are as strange to us and all our kith and kin, as if they had never lived. Remember that, and charge their doings on themselves, not us.‘”
— A Christmas Carol
We are now in the nostalgic season of joy, peace, and forgiveness. Dickens’s Scrooge, after years of wantonness, had to face and repudiate his curmudgeonly past to take a seat at his nephew Fred’s holiday table. There is no place at our table for Scrooge’s modern descendant who shares none of Scrooge’s redemptive turnabout. The Ghosts of Christmas can forgive… but are not so eager to forget.
They do not suffer unrepentant misanthropes, or their humbug, gladly.