Donald Trump is getting bogged down in the muck already

Once Donald Trump was named the winner of the election, he had a clear path for smooth sailing. All he had to do was nominate no-name cronies for key positions, and the complicit Republican Senate would have confirmed them no matter how corrupt they were. Then Trump could have had these cronies do anything they wanted in their new positions.

Instead Trump made the bizarrely stupid move of picking the highest profile and most controversial names he could find for his key positions. Trump picked the few names that could prompt the Republican Senate to actually push back, and sure enough, that’s what happened. Trump’s pick for Attorney General, Matt Gaetz, was rejected immediately. Trump’s other insane picks, like Tulsi Gabbard, RFK Jr, and Fox News personality Pete Hegseth, are also in danger of being rejected.

So you’d think that after Trump humiliatingly got his butt handed to him on his Attorney General nominee by his own party, he’d try being more stealthy about it. For instance, Trump wants to fire current FBI Director Christopher Wray – who was appointed by Trump to begin with in 2017 – and replace Wray with someone more complicit. Again, Trump could probably have picked just about any low profile crony as his nominee to be the new FBI Director, and the Republican Senate would have rolled over. Instead Trump picked… Kash Patel? Are you kidding?

Patel may be Trump’s most laughably, notoriously, and uniquely unqualified nominee to date. It’s the kind of pick that’s prompting some Republican Senators to publicly push back already. Trump could have had just about anyone for his FBI Director. Instead he picked one of the few people who has a good chance of being rejected.

If Trump somehow manages to get Patel confirmed, then we’ll have to say that perhaps there’s some kind of strategy here. But assuming Patel is rejected by the Senate, then this will go down as yet another head scratchingly boneheaded move by Trump and his babysitters.

With each rejected nominee, we’re going to hear hot takes about how Trump is doing this strategically in order to “test the Senate” and so on. But if you’re going to test the Senate’s will, you do it with nominees who are confirmable, not by picking the handful of names on the planet that this Republican Senate won’t rubber stamp. As far as strategy goes, this is just plain stupid. Each failed high profile pick just makes Trump weaker and uses up his political muscle right out of the gate, all while emboldening the Republican Senate to hang onto the power it has. If you force someone to say no to enough of your absurd requests in a row, you’re going to make them more and more comfortable saying no to you in general.

So if this is a “strategy” on Trump’s part, it’s one of the dumbest strategies of all time. Even though he very narrowly won, Trump was given virtually a blank check on election day. Now he’s tearing up that check by playing stupid games with his nominees that’ll bog his presidency down into the muck right out of the gate.

More likely, this is simply a matter of Donald Trump being so deep into dementia, he’s insisting on nominating the handful of people he can remember exist. It’s not a coincidence that the people he’s picking are the same people who were there with him during his final campaign rallies. Trump’s universe, in terms of who and what he can remember exist, is shrinking by the day. If Trump is at a point where his babysitters can’t convince him to nominate anyone other than the twelve or so people who still exist in Trump’s failing memory, then Trump is even further gone than we thought.