Dem
47
GOP
53
And now for some more news that is disturbing, but not at all surprising. Yesterday, The New York Times had a lengthy story, based on insider accounts, about how the Trump v2.0 Department of Justice works. It's... not good.
The general problem with attorneys general, from Donald Trump's standpoint, is that they tend to be a little too... independent. It is certainly true that Jeff Sessions and Bill Barr, while they were AG, were willing to tote a fair bit of water for Trump. However, they each had their limits, such that Sessions did not protect Trump from the Mueller investigation while Barr did not protect Trump from the 1/6 fallout.
It's now clear that Trump (or someone smarter than him, who is telling him how to play his cards) came up with a solution to this problem. To start, the person who currently bears the title of Attorney General, Pam Bondi, is not actually the AG in any meaningful way. Her role is something more along the lines of... organ grinder's monkey. She is told what to do, and what to say, and is primarily expected to appear on right-wing media platforms and blather.
And if Bondi is the monkey, then who is the organ grinder, the one actually playing the tune? That would be Stephen Miller, who is calling the shots from the White House, despite lacking, you know, a law degree. Or Senate confirmation. Yes, he consults with Trump, but Trump has largely left the DoJ in Miller's hands. After all, there is golf to be played.
This is scary on a number of levels. First, and foremost, of course, is that Miller is an out-and-out fascist. And, as is usually the case with fascists, he pairs that with being an out-and-out racist. Now he gets to back that up with, arguably, the most powerful law enforcement apparatus in the world. Which is how you end up with, for example, people being deported for not actually committing any crimes, and then being held without benefit of charges, or without the right of habeas corpus (see above).
Also scary is that Miller is, quite clearly, a Trump whisperer. Most of the people who move into Trump's orbit, and get some measure of power as a result, tend to overdo it and to aggravate and alienate the Dear Leader. Elon Musk appears to be the latest example of this, but there are countless others who ended up on the outside looking in. By contrast, Miller has been performing his snake-charmer act with Trump for close to a decade, and there's never been the faintest whiff of a story of Trump being aggravated with him. Point is, you could pretty well count on Musk to self-destruct, eventually. You can't count on that with Generalissimo Miller.
With the Times reporting in hand, the original AG choice—Matt Gaetz—makes all the sense in the world. Gaetz was not needed to run the DoJ or to help set policy or to do anything other than appear on Fox and Newsmax and OAN and the Joe Rogan podcast and be a bomb thrower. He's good at that. Heck, it may be the only thing he's good at (at least, the only thing that's legal). When he went down in flames, Bondi was a pretty obvious choice to replace him, since she's also an experienced bomb thrower. And when she was tapped, she was told, in no uncertain terms, exactly what the arrangement would be.
To the extent there's anything to be hopeful about here, we suppose it's this: Because Miller is a fanatic, he tends to overreach. And so, even if Trump has no interest in reining him in, and even if Republicans in Congress have no interest in reining him in, the courts will likely do so. Undoubtedly, Miller will say "Let's just ignore the courts," but the early indications suggest that, even for Trump, that is a bridge too far. (Z)