Trump’s Transition Team Is His Newest Cognitive Test

Before you look at this list of names, class, we’re going to review the Tenets Of Trumpism — as they would gaslight you into believing they exist. First of all, meritocracy is everything, right? And DEI hires are not allowed in Trump world — unless of course you’re talking about Don Junior, Eric and Ivanka. In that case, Trump world invented DEI hires. So it will amuse you to the the group of people who will head up a Trump transition and implement Project 2025. Or not implement Project 2025 and therein lies confusion. Only the best people, who earned this job, that’s what you’re asked to believe. Even Steve Bannon is wincing in his cell in disbelief, or laughing, I venture to say.

Family doesn't squeal to the coppers, see? pic.twitter.com/LEsDaKUoNo

— Ron Dorland 🇺🇸 (@DorlandRon) August 16, 2024

J.D., Junior and Eric are absolutely there by merit, yes of course. Between the three of them they’ve served two years in one elected government office. And yes, I’m going to bring up the movie Idiocracy again. I rescreened it a couple of weeks ago and while it was hilarious satire when I first saw it, in this day and age it’s almost scary to watch. It’s too close to the truth. The first Trump administration had characters which are not too far outside the pale of Idiocracy. And to be honest, you could do a remake of Idiocracy today and put in Vance, Eric, and Junior and stay completely true to the original tone of the movie. Eric, Junior and J.D. fit into Idiocracy seamlessly. Seriously.

And Linda McMahon is a “retired wrestling performer” and wife of WWE’s Vince McMahon. She was head of the Small Business Administration in Trump’s first term. Howard Lutnick is a Bitcoin maven and no I don’t know what he might try to do with the American dollar if Trump returns to power. All I do know is that if we get this Trojan horse going back to the White House we’re in a bad way. This is Trump’s latest cognitive test right here: wrestler, billionaire, Uday, Usay and Weirdo.

Junior is already braying about how he’s going to use his administrative power. “I want to block the liars,” he said at the GOP national convention. “I want to block the guys that are, you know, pretending they’re with you… I just want to be a block. That’s it,” according to the Daily Beast. Chauncey Gardner just wanted to watch and Junior just wants to block? And how will he block? I am afraid to ask. And even though Trump is starting early this time with a transition team, it’s still a dysfunctional mess. New York Times:

The statement did not name an executive director for the transition team.

Mr. Trump had delayed the transition operation process because he was superstitious and dismissed any discussion of transition planning as a distraction from winning the election, according to people who have broached the matter with him but who insisted on anonymity to discuss it. Efforts to engage him on the subject are often rejected with a glib refrain: “We have to win first.”

He only begrudgingly agreed to this late formation of a team, the people said.

“It is late in the day to be initiating transition preparation,” said Max Stier, the chief executive of the Partnership for Public Service, a nonpartisan group that runs the main organization focused on effective presidential transitions.

“The modern norms are to begin transitions in the spring of the election year, so we are now four months behind schedule,” Mr. Stier said. “The consequences are significant, because the requirements of transition are huge. You’re taking over the largest, most complex and important organization in our country, probably our planet, and probably in history.”

Mr. Trump’s transition to running the federal government in 2017 was a disaster, regarded as the most dysfunctional transition in modern history. He had announced his 2016 transition team that May, with Chris Christie, then the governor of New Jersey, leading it alongside Jeff Sessions, a senator of Alabama at the time. They did a substantial amount of work, but Mr. Trump thought it was a waste of time. His son-in-law Jared Kushner loathed Mr. Christie, who had prosecuted Mr. Kushner’s father.

After Mr. Trump won the election, his team discarded the Christie team’s work and started from scratch. Mr. Kushner and two other Trump advisers took over, with input from Mr. Trump’s children and his first chief of staff, Reince Priebus. They were severely delayed in staffing the federal government, and many policy priorities were not enacted as a result of their late start and dysfunction.

Now here’s the only subject of note with respect to this Bizarro World transition team: Supposedly McMahon and Lutnick are not connected with Project 2025.

It was also striking that neither Ms. McMahon nor Mr. Lutnick has been associated with Project 2025, an effort by a consortium of conservative organizations to develop personnel and policy transition planning for the next Republican president. While Mr. Trump has close ties to leaders of that effort, he has recently tried to distance himself from it as Democrats have seized on some of its more radical proposals.

This has me baffled. At first blush it would appear that Trump is knifing Project 2025. That would be a blessing if it were the case. And this entire transition team business is hopefully a rhetorical exercise only, that we’re discussing for laughs and will never come to fruition. But this is the only part of the story worth following up on. Trump publicly denies Project 2025, all the while his paw prints are all over it.

And that is the most logical explanation here. McMahon and Lutnick may be the *beards* people who appear to not be connected with Project 2025 when in actual fact, they fully intend to implement it on day one and the American public won’t find out about that until it’s too late. If I had to money one way or the other, today, that’s how I would bet it.

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