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GELFAND’S WORLD - It wouldn't surprise you to hear that Donald Trump's nominations for cabinet positions are getting a lot of negative press. Let's consider just for the moment the kind of person that an ordinary president-elect would choose to be the next Attorney General. The AG is the head of an immense department that is involved in every manner of criminal investigation and prosecution. It has decision making power over bringing prosecutions, offering plea bargains, and importantly, the positioning of resources and budgeting. Ordinarily, the AG appointment would be some person of unimpeachable integrity, a long history of success in the legal field, and possessing a closet without skeletons.
Most of us, I would surmise, consider the Department of Justice to be important and worthy of preserving.
Trump has had his own disagreements with the Department of Justice, up to and including multiple felony indictments. It's not surprising that he would be a bit resentful, but if, as Trump likes to state, it has all been a witch hunt brought on by his political enemies, then wouldn't it make sense for Trump to nominate that upright and capable individual described above? An honest man who would get to the bottom of the evil conspiracy that put Trump in courtrooms both in Washington D.C. and in Florida?
So instead, we got Matt Gaetz as the nomination -- a man whose major accomplishment in the House of Representatives has been to clown around and to nip at the heals of the previous Speaker Kevin McCarthy. And Gaetz has skeletons. Oh does he have skeletons.
The political pundits have interpreted the Gaetz nomination as Trump's dare to the Senate. Josh Marshall over at Talking Points Memo interpreted it as (I'm paraphrasing a bit) the ritual humiliation of the senators, who will have to bend the knee to Trump lest they be politically destroyed.
So what did happen? By now you all know. On Wednesday, Gaetz did some meeting with senators. The news media described it as lobbying the Senate.
And now, as of Thursday morning, Gaetz has withdrawn his nomination to be Attorney General of the United States. Apparently, the senators are not quite so ready to accept vassal status to the new president. And, we might imagine, those skeletons in the Gaetz closet must be really something. The sex trafficking allegation comes to mind. But we may never know for sure, unless that House committee report on his alleged ethical violations comes out.
A Serious Question
The background to this question is the collection of comments about the Trump cabinet nominations so far. Clown Car is the most common. One pundit suggested that Trump is staffing a reality show, and the fact that some of the cabinet nominees had their own television shows (Dr Oz) supports that wry observation. But the central point made by most of the pundits is how incompetent and unprepared the nominees really are. The obligate conclusion was that Trump is staffing his cabinet to destroy as much of the government as feasibly possible. He is doing this by appointing people known for their antipathy against the very departments they are now being offered control over.
By the way, there is an alternative explanation for these appointments, which is that Trump really, truly, does not have a clue about who is capable and who is not, and simply bases his decisions on who he knows socially and who has supported him politically. I'm guessing that the avid Trump supporters (including those who like to comment here) would want to disagree with this interpretation, so we'll just leave it there.
But I do have a question that may or may not be answered in the near future. Is there any government department that Trump respects and wishes to see as successful? Could the Treasury Department be the one, as suggested to me by the publisher of CityWatch? Will Trump reach out to the financial and academic sectors and find a nominee who will withstand careful vetting?
Addendum
The View from the Balcony
On Wednesday night, I attended the LA Opera performance of Gounod's Romeo and Juliet. I last saw this opera in Chicago several decades ago, and do not remember it as anything special. There is always the problem that we all know the story, so it is up to the composer to bring out something extra in the music and the action. We might take note that Puccini did this in Madam Butterfly. We all know that she will die by her own hand at the end, yet opera houses are bursting at the seams with audiences who come to see it. Or we might compare Isolde's final scene in Wagner's Tristan und Isolde, aptly known as the love-death.
By comparison, Romeo and Juliet is a pretty good piece of music and drama, but does not rise to the level of the greatest work. In short, it is a bit dull in several places.
I will give credit to the final scene in this production. Amina Edres as Juliet and Duke Kim as Romeo carried this Gounodian version of the love-death in a musical and convincing way. It didn't hurt that they are both pretty people who managed to look the part of love-struck teenagers drowning in a sea of hateful adults eager to carry on their own grudges.
The sets and costumes (unlike so many other productions in the modern era) were not borrowed or shared from some other opera company, but were the creation of this opera company. All in all, they worked well. There was a sort of jungle gym structure that served for the buildings, and which allowed the young, agile Romeo to climb over and above. The overall look reminded me of some Italian Renaissance art. This may have been intended to convey the idea of Verona, where the Shakespeare play is set.
All in all, this opera was worth experiencing, but did not rise to the level of other recent works including Tannhauser, the Dwarf, or Madame Butterfly, all of which involve unrequited love and its tragic consequences.
(Bob Gelfand writes on science, culture, and politics for CityWatch. He can be reached at [email protected])
