Notes on the Way

Flawless failure, horrific hat trick, leadership v. management, blame game, TDS

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Kamala Harris was a great candidate who ran a flawless campaign. That’s the cry rising from the progressive fever swamp in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s reelection. And the subtext is not hard to discern: But a majority of the American people were too stupid to see it. Now I could cite abundant evidence that the Harris campaign was a train wreck and the candidate herself a dud. It’s not necessary, however, to do all that homework. Harris lost the election, and it wasn’t that close. She failed to carry a single swing state. And the guy she lost to was laden with baggage that ought to have dragged him under. Great candidates and flawless campaigns don’t produce results like that.

President-Elect Trump pulled off something of a hat trick this week: In rapid succession he made three staffing decisions that are nothing short of horrific. All that needs to be said about his selection of Matt Gaetz as Attorney General is that the guy’s a rat in human form. Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s pick for Director of National Intelligence, is a natcon apologist for V. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, among other outrages against common decency and common sense. But worse than either of them is Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., nominated for Secretary of Health and Human Services. Kennedy is neither a physician not a scientist, but he is a crack-brained anti-vaxxer with blood on his hands. I’ll have more to say about the three of them over the next couple of weeks—none of it complimentary.

Trump’s selection of Pete Hegseth for Secretary of Defense is in a different category: surprising and controversial, but maybe a good idea. The knock on Hegseth is that he lacks experience as a manager. My response to that is that Major Hegseth was an Army infantry officer who led a rifle platoon in combat. Anyhow, the DoD already has a sufficiency of managers, if not an excess of them, and I’m sure that the majority are competent enough. What’s lacking in the world’s biggest office building is leadership—the kind of leadership necessary to reestablish the broken link between the Pentagon and the forces in the field. As a retired soldier and the father of an Army veteran of Afghanistan, I take a personal interest in this issue, and if Pete Hegseth gets his shot at the job, I’ll be watching with interest to see how it goes.

Victory has a thousand fathers; defeat is an orphan. In the aftermath of Kamala Harris’s humiliating loss to Donald Trump, that truism has once more been validated. Team Harris and Team Biden are at daggers drawn, each blaming the other for the debacle. The Harris people are blaming Biden for clinging to power instead of withdrawing gracefully; the Biden people are bitter over the Harris/Pelosi putsch that knocked him off the top of the ticket. Senator Bernie Sanders, Bolshevik of Vermont, has denounced Harris & Co. for kicking the working class to the curb in favor of progressive culture war obsessions. He thinks that the Dems need more socialist realism. And the “anti-Zionist” wing of the Democratic Party base insists that Harris lost because she wasn’t antisemitic enough. Okay, comrades…

Trump Derangement Syndrome is really a thing. It must be, when so many people are blowing up their lives over the reelection of the Prince of the Golden Escalator. Case in point: Laura Helmuth, the (suddenly) former editor-in-chief of Scientific American. Helmuth was so distraught, in fact, that on the evening of Election Day she took to Bluesky, a social media site, to express her angst: “Solidarity to everybody whose meanest, dumbest, most bigoted high-school classmates are celebrating early results because f**k them to the moon and back,” she wailed, and added, “I apologize to younger voters that my Gen X is full of f**king fascists.” From this I deduce that Helmuth’s memories of high school are dark and somber. These and other posts in the same vein were soon deleted. And now, after four and a half years at the helm of Scientific American, she finds herself unemployed! Doubtless a coincidence…