Like the week following the playing of the Super Bowl, the political junkies of both sides of the 2024 U.S. Presidential Election have been emotionally cycling through the “thrill of victory or the agony of defeat”. The winners have been congratulating themselves on how their team won. Two weeks after the election, those on the losing side are working their way through the first two of five phases of loss – denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance, blaming others and pointing fingers at former colleagues.
The junkies of the winning side are already into the political equivalent of the football draft season. They are enjoying the excitement of the announcements of those who will be going through the approval process before becoming Cabinet members for the new Administration. Still, in the angry phase, the loser junkies are pre-judging the candidates before their credentials have been presented and approved by Senate confirmation.
The voters have chosen Donald Trump as the replacement quarterback for Joe Biden/Kamala Harris. How do the new supporting team members look for a new political season?
The outgoing Democratic team was dislodged for their mutual failures as judged by the voters in the 2024 election. The losing cabinet members should be used as the basis against which the new candidates are judged. Do the incoming Cabinet candidates appear likely to perform better or worse in their new positions than their predecessors?
Sports pundits follow a losing season reporting on the failures of current team members and the priorities the team needs for the coming season. Based on this sports analogy, the following outgoing cabinet members are listed in order of their contribution to the failure of the Democrats in the 2024 presidential election. The top four current Cabinet secretaries and Trump’s draft picks follow.
Merrick Garland, Attorney General – By a large margin among Biden’s Cabinet members, Garland contributed the most to the loss of the White House by the Democrats in 2024. Following his defeat by Joe Biden in the 2020 election, President Donald Trump was politically dead following the January 6th Capital demonstration – “insurrection” – and the claims of election fraud he failed to prove.
Not content to let sleeping dogs die, Garland hatched out the scheme to charge the former president criminally for mishandling classified documents and send him to jail. After appointing a highly partisan special prosecutor in Jack Smith to prosecute Trump, he was almost immediately forced to appoint a second prosecutor to investigate President Biden for similar offenses. The uneven handling of the two cases resuscitated Trump’s political fortunes from the ashes of his prior defeat.
Not satisfied with his work, Garland then offered one of his chief prosecutors to work with New York District Attorney Alvin Bragg to help prosecute a highly dubious New York/Federal case against Trump.
Aside from his vendetta against Trump, and possibly because his appointment to the Supreme Court had been waylaid by Trump’s election in 2016, Garland set his Justice Department and the FBI against non-violent January 6th demonstrators, parents at local school board meetings, Catholics, and supposed white supremacist terrorists.
Nominated Replacement, Matt Gaetz – Few on either side are singing Gaetz’s praises, however, he would have to work overtime and on weekends to do as much damage to Trump’s success as Garland did to the Democrats in 2024. That, however, is no need for Trump supporters to be complacent, for Garland shows how much a badly spoiled apple in the barrel can contaminate the others. Senate confirmation will need to sort this out.
Janet Yellen, Secretary of the Treasury – By forgetting that “It’s the economy, Stupid”, the Harris/Biden Administration was doomed to lose the 2024 election. By her own admissions, Yellen missed seeing the coming of the 2007-08 financial collapse when she was Chairman of the Federal Reserve and then again when as Biden’s Treasury Secretary she called the massive 2021/24 inflation “transitory”.
Biden would have been better served by Lawrence Summers in that role who called the pending inflation very early. He served in various roles in the Clinton Administration which prolonged the Reagan prosperity and provided the nation’s first and last balanced budget in our lifetimes.
Nominated Replacement – Yet to be named. The Musk/Ramaswamy team is a unique approach to eliminating waste and corruption in the Federal government.
Alejandro Mayorkas, Secretary of Homeland Security – After Garland, Mayorkas and Yellen share equal responsibility for their contributions which led to the Democratic 2024 election defeat. Mayorkas mishandled the Border Crisis so badly and articulated what was happening so poorly that it, along with inflation, became the two major campaign issues. Cabinet Secretaries do not necessarily make Administration policies, but how they articulate those policies and carry them out can trigger a president’s success or failure.
Nominated Replacement, Kristi Noem – Raised on a ranch and very articulate, this attractive current Governor of South Dakota should be a major upgrade over Mayorkas for the Trump Administration as President Trump changes the nation’s immigration policies. She will be relied upon to explain them to Congressional committees and to the voting public.
Lloyd Austin, Secretary of Defense – Austin was an obvious affirmative action appointment who brought no communication, military, or strategic thinking skills with him into this office. He was a major Biden advisor on the Afghan pullout fiasco, a participant in the “As long as it takes” stalemate policy in Ukraine, and involved in the “Cease Fire” slow walking of arms for Israel. Plus, he went AWOL for two weeks from his job, a Court Marshall offense if he still had been in the active military – not to mention his inability to meet military recruitment objectives and his downgrading of physical standards for all U.S. military personnel.
Nominated Replacement, Pete Hegseth – This is a replacement for an old, slow-witted general with a bright, young major. An established military axiom is to go out and talk to the Field Grade Officers and Top Sergeants to find out what is happening.
With our closely divided U.S. voters scattered across the continent in two political parties, American elections are not foreordained. Bad decisions, bad policies, bad selection for a vice president and members of the Cabinet, and unforeseen events may determine who wins and who loses. Those working their way through the five stages of loss should review objectively what went wrong in each of these areas and come up with a better Plan B for 2028.
As Dandy Don Meredith on Monday Night Football used to quip, “If wishes and buts were candy and nuts, we would all have a Merry Christmas”.
TW3
November 21, 2024
John Whitmore Jenkins
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