Searching for the right words to describe Trump’s destructive nominees

Matt Gaetz, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Pete Hegseth, and Tulsi Gabbard are a wrecking crew.

Donald Trump’s cabinet picks for key agencies – Justice, HHS, Defense, and ODNI – are so over-the-top, so patently unfit for duty that reporters are finding it challenging to come up with non-judgmental-sounding words to describe them.

Many reporters have settled on the word “unconventional” -- but that word is wholly insufficient.

I appreciate how difficult it is to find a single word or even short phrase to describe these nominees. But at this point in our history, it’s especially important that journalists avoid euphemisms and call things what they are.

Matt Gaetz, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Pete Hegseth, and Tulsi Gabbard – they are not simply “combative loyalists” or even “firebrands”. They are chaos agents, wildly unqualified, wholly unfit. They are entirely off the scale of previous cabinet appointees. Two of them are full-blown conspiracy theorists. None have management experience. Three of them are sexual predators.

What they are is intentionally norm-shattering picks intended to destabilize the government and pave the way for Donald Trump to seek retribution against his enemies. They are a wrecking crew.

The best shorthand phrase was coined by Yale historian Timothy Snyder, an expert in authoritarianism, in a recent interview on MSNBC.

It’s not just that these people are not qualified enough. It’s not just that they’re totally unqualified. It’s that they are anti-qualified. They are qualified to do the opposite of the thing that they are supposed to do.

That these nominees are anti-qualified is what reporters need to explain every time they are mentioned – even if they don’t use that specific term.

What any shorthand description of these nominees needs to include is something reporters often try to avoid: an explanation of intent. These are not simply egregious and extremist choices, they are specifically intended to stop their agencies from doing what they’re supposed to do and instead bend them to Trump’s will.

And although the ongoing confirmation battles will make great horserace stories, political reporters must not let the day-to-day drama distract from how spectacularly dangerous these nominees are, and how Trump intends to use them to destroy their agencies.

Some of the reporting has been horrible. For instance, in a New York Times article headlined “Trump Takes On the Pillars of the ‘Deep State’,” star reporter Peter Baker grotesquely normalized Trump's outrageous nominations as "taking on" institutions "that most frustrated his political ambition." He euphemized the nominees as "firebrand allies with unconventional résumés". Insufficient!

Washington Post reporter Colby Itkowitz lamely described the nominees as “polarizing figures,” including “Gaetz, an inflammatory Trump loyalist.” Insufficient!

And headlines really matter. A news analysis in the New York Times by Katie Rogers got a flattering headline -- “Gaetz, Gabbard and Hegseth: Trump’s Picks Are a Show of Force” -- when it should have better reflected the conclusion Rogers drew in the text, namely that Trump’s “promise to build a presidential administration fueled by retribution quickly came into view.”

Associated Press coverage of the nominees has been generally poor, as exemplified by this overview by Thomas Beaumont. Gaetz is simply described as “a loyalist”; Gabbard as “another example of Trump prizing loyalty over experience”. Hegseth “lacks senior military and national security experience.” The negative characterizations of Kennedy are attributed to “people who are concerned about his record of spreading unfounded fears about vaccines.” Insufficient!

The most disgustingly normalizing treatment I’ve seen in mainstream media came, unsurprisingly, from NPR, where Will Stone and Allison Aubrey led their piece about Robert F. Kennedy Jr. without the tiniest bit of context about his extreme anti-vaccine views and conspiracy theories. It sounded like a MAGA press release:

With Robert F. Kennedy Jr. now lined up to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, it appears his Make America Healthy Again movement is poised for real power.

Its central mandate: Reverse the chronic disease epidemic, which is the leading cause of death in the U.S., and drives massive health care costs.

MAHA has set its sights on big food and big pharma, arguing that these industries use lobbying power to maximize profits at the expense of the country's health.

By contrast, one of the toughest, least mealy-mouthed news articles came from Baker’s New York Times colleagues Glenn Thrush and Devlin Barrett, who wrote in their lede:

President-elect Donald J. Trump on Wednesday named Representative Matt Gaetz, the firebrand Republican from Florida, as his nominee for attorney general, a provocative move to install a compliant ally at the helm of the Justice Department as he seeks retribution against those who prosecuted him.

And a few days after his egregious normalizing of the nominees, Baker himself used more appropriate language, describing Trump’s “new campaign to shatter the institutions of Washington as no incoming president has in his lifetime.” Baker wrote that Trump “would put in place loyalists intent on blowing up the very departments they would lead.”

Is Baker coming around, or was it an aberration? The jury is still out.

Nevertheless, it’s still a far cry from the full-throated characterizations, of, say, Joan Walsh at The Nation, who wrote about how Trump nominated “former Democrat-turned-quisling Tulsi Gabbard his director of national intelligence, accused pedophile Matt Gaetz as attorney general, and womanizing, serial liar, dead-baby-bear-defiling, whale-head-removing, worm-in-his-head anti-vaxxer Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as head of Health and Human Services.”

Somewhat more diplomatically, Washington Post columnist David Ignatius likened the nominations to “a wrecking ball to destroy the country’s military and intelligence agencies.” Hegseth and Gabbard are “polemicists and ideologues — wreckers, to be blunt, rather than builders.”

And New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg appropriately deemed Trump’s nomination of Gaetz a “clear sign that his second administration will be catastrophically chaotic, vengeful and corrupt.”

As she wrote: “His chief credential is not his mastery of the law but his contempt for it.” And he “seems to have been chosen precisely for his hostility to the values of the organization he’s supposed to lead.”

The New Yorker’s David Remnick didn’t hesitate to delve into Trump’s thinking:

In Gaetz, who faces allegations (which he denies) of illegal drug use and having sex with an underage girl, Trump sees himself, a man wrongly judged, he insists, as liable for sexual abuse. In Kennedy, an anti-vax conspiracy theorist, he sees a vindication of his own suspicion of science and his wildly erratic handling of the Covid crisis. In Hegseth, who defends war criminals and lambastes “woke” generals, he sees vengeance against the military establishmentarians who called him unfit. In Gabbard, who finds the good in foreign dictators, he sees someone who might shape the work of the intelligence agencies to help justify ending U.S. support for Ukraine.

Remnick continued:

In other words, Trump’s nominations—in their reckless endorsement of the dangerously unqualified—look like the most flagrant act of vindictive trolling since the rise of the Internet. But it is a trolling beyond mischief. All these appointees are meant to bolster Trump’s effort to lay waste to the officials and the institutions that he has come to despise or regard as threats to his power or person. These appointees are not intended to be his advisers. They are his shock troops.

The nominations, taken as a whole, are enormously significant and newsworthy for what they say about what is to come. And that is too important a message to be lost in incremental coverage, weak language, and insufficient shorthand.

As Financial Times columnist Edward Luce wrote on Tuesday:

The question of whether Trump consciously wants to destroy the US federal government is irrelevant. You measure a leader by his actions not by his heart. To judge from what Trump has done within a fortnight of winning the presidency, his path is destruction.