Ever since the news broke that Donald Trump would be president again, we’ve seen an influx of new folks coming to read the Current Affairs News Briefing. It makes sense; the next four years are likely to be terrifying in all kinds of new and unexpected ways, and it’s more important than ever to be informed about what’s going on in the world and what you can do to impact it. To our new readers: welcome aboard! And to our Day Ones, thanks for riding with us this far. Now, on with the news.
CROOKS vs. SICKOS vs. CRANKS vs. RELIGIOUS FANATICS vs. (alleged) SEX PESTS (Or, “What’s going on with the Trump White House?”)
❧ Since our last briefing, we’ve gotten a boatload of new Trump staff picks and… oh boy, it’s gotten so much worse. The previous batch, while certainly full of war hawks and hard-right ideologues, were fairly standard swamp creatures that would fill any Republican administration. Since Tuesday, though, Trump has eschewed any pretense of normalcy. His picks have been utterly buck wild:
First off, there’s a new government agency in town—X (formerly Twitter) CEO Elon Musk will be put in charge of his coveted “Department of Government Efficiency” (abbreviated as “D.O.G.E.” after Musk’s favorite cryptocurrency, which is named after an unfunny meme from more than a decade ago). In its first act towards maximum efficiency, this department will have two heads—Musk will share the role with former presidential candidate turned Trump sycophant Vivek Ramaswamy. (More on him in this Current Affairs article by Alex Skopic.)
This newly created “department” is not actually a department in the traditional sense. Rather, it’s a sort of advisory board that will give Trump recommendations for the budget he’ll give to Congress. Musk arbitrarily decided that the number of federal agencies needs to be shrunk down to 99 from more than 400, and that the U.S. needs to eliminate $2 trillion—or a third of the budget—in annual spending on what he considers “waste.” Since this is a Republican administration, presumably very little of that will come out of the Pentagon budget.
It also presumably will not involve cuts to the billions of dollars that Musk’s own companies Tesla and SpaceX receive in subsidies. Musk has made clear that he intends to propose cuts to social safety net programs like Social Security and Medicare. And he has fully acknowledged that this will create “temporary hardship” for many Americans, but said it’s a necessary price because we need to “live within our means.” That’s right—the literal richest man in the world thinks ordinary folks are living too high on the hog, and he’s here to put us in our place.
If there’s any good news, it’s that Musk’s agency doesn’t actually have real power to act on its own. It will be up to Trump and congressional Republicans to act on his vision and explain to voters why their healthcare and retirement are being taken away.
Some of you will die, but that’s a sacrifice I am willing to make.
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.—who has no formal medical training, and has spread virtually every scientific conspiracy theory under the sun—is Trump’s pick to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control, and the National Institutes of Health. Of all of Trump’s picks, Kennedy is potentially the most dangerous yet, as he will oversee the food and medicine that every one of us uses on a daily basis.
If there is a crank medical belief out there, there’s a safe bet Kennedy has promoted it at some point in his lengthy career as a public figure. He is most famous for spouting nonsense about the supposed dangers of vaccines. He convinced millions of people that the COVID-19 shot would kill them and promoted ineffective cures for the illness like Ivermectin. Before that, he helped to spread unfounded fears that MMR vaccines caused Autism. (In fact, his campaign against the Measles vaccine may have directly led to an outbreak in Samoa that killed 83 people). Kennedy has said that there are “no” safe and effective vaccines on the market and has pledged to end mandates for children. He has even said he opposed vaccines that have eradicated deadly diseases like Polio. Trump has said he’d be willing to ban vaccines if RFK suggested it. (Though he doesn’t have the authority to do that unilaterally.)
Kennedy has promoted a campaign to “Make America Healthy Again,” and a few aspects of his crusade seem potentially on the right track. For instance, he is right that a lot of the processed foods that large corporations make available are full of unhealthy ingredients that are not tolerated in other countries. He is also right on the fundamental level that the pharmaceutical industry prioritizes its bottom lines over the health of Americans. But whatever wisdom is there is more than drowned out by the sheer volume of pharmaceutical-grade nonsense he believes: Including that Wi-Fi causes cancer, that Americans need to drink bacteria-riddled raw milk, that HIV doesn’t cause AIDS, that antidepressants cause mass shootings, and that Americans are being poisoned by chemtrails. Trump has given RFK the authority to, in his words, “run wild” with public health. And it will more than likely be a nightmare for everyone.
This was supposed to be a joke!
(Art by Nick Sirotich, from Issue 43 of Current Affairs Magazine, July/Aug. 2023)
Rep. Matt Gaetz has been named as Trump’s pick for Attorney General. If you’re keeping track, this now brings the count of accusedsexualharassers and abusers in this proto-Cabinet up to four. (And that’s not even including Trump himself.) But Gaetz’s case is the most serious, as he is alleged to have trafficked a 17-year-old girl and paid her for sex. The FBI previously investigated Gaetz but declined to charge him. The House Ethics Committee was in the process of investigating Gaetz and says it has a damning report on his conduct, but it was forced to halt the investigation when he stepped down from Congress this week. It’s unclear whether the report will be released, but House Speaker Mike Johnson has come out against it.
As for how Gaetz would act as Attorney General, he has never wavered in his loyalty to Trump, and it’s likely he would be fully on board with Trump’s goal to prosecute critics and political opponents—including those he believes “weaponized” the DOJ against Trump. In response to the Gaetz appointment, Elon Musk tweeted that “The Hammer of Justice is coming,” which is rather alarming.
Tulsi Gabbard, a veteran and former Democratic congresswoman from Hawaii, is Trump’s pick for Director of National Intelligence. The DNI oversees the CIA, which will be led by Trump’s former DNI John Ratcliffe, another hardcore MAGA loyalist. Gabbard has had quite an odd political transformation. In 2020, she was a supporter of Bernie Sanders and strongly criticized Donald Trump’s foreign policy, calling his assassination of top Iranian General Qassem Soleimani an “illegal and unconstitutional act of war.” Before that, she referred to Trump as “Saudi Arabia’s bitch” for his support of the murderous Gulf regime. But she was also not well-liked among Democrats due to her anti-interventionist stances on Syria and Russia (she once said Putin and Zelenskyy “should put geopolitics aside and embrace the spirit of aloha,” which isn't the worst idea), along with her genuinely troublesome past work against LGBTQ rights.
After a longshot bid for the 2020 Democratic nomination, she transformed herself into an unrepentant MAGA cheerleader, taking up virtually every right-wing culture war cause and eventually changing her party to Republican. Whether she had a genuine change of heart or cynically decided to sell out all her old beliefs is hard to know. But it’s brought her from a no-name back-bench Democrat to one of the most powerful people in U.S. foreign policy, so it was certainly the right call for her career.
Tulsi, you used to be kind of cool!
Trump pulled his pick for Defense Secretary straight out of the TV. His name is Pete Hegseth, and he’s the former weekend host for the Fox News show Fox & Friends. Hegseth is pretty similar to the neocons Trump has already appointed, though he is a bit more isolationist toward Ukraine and skeptical about NATO. He has pledged to launch a “frontal assault” on the Pentagon, which sounds great in theory, until you realize he just means he wants to make it less “woke.” He’s also a major advocate for freeing war criminals. While on Fox, one of his causes célèbres was advocating for Trump to pardon Navy SEAL Eddie Gallagher, who was convicted for taking photos with the corpse of a murdered 17-year-old prisoner of war (and accused of multiple other war crimes).
The most frightening thing about Hegseth (aside from the fact that he once said he never washes his hands because he doesn’t think germs are real, and the time he almost killed a drummer with a stray throwing axe) is his Christian fanaticism. He sports multiple tattoos celebrating the Crusades, an infamously violent medieval military campaign meant to ethnically cleanse the Holy Land of its Muslim inhabitants. Like Mike Huckabee, he is also an apocalyptic Christian Zionist who believes that American support of Israel and the destruction of Islamic holy sites is in furtherance of Biblical prophecy that will bring about the end times and the return of Christ. Not a great guy to have in charge of foreign policy, in our opinion.
Hegseth has tattoos of the Jerusalem Cross, carried by armies during the Crusades, and the phrase “Deus Vult,” meaning “God wills it,” which was a battle cry used during the campaign against Muslims. (Photos: Reddit)
And we would be remiss not to mention the ascent of an all-time favorite News Briefing character to lead the Department of the Interior: Former North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum!
You’re probably wondering how Trump intends to ram this clown car through Congress. The Senate needs to confirm many of these appointments, but Trump is hopeful that its Republican leadership will allow him to make “recess appointments,” which would allow him to make them without congressional approval. (Associated Press)
Trump is also suing major news outlets—including the New York Times and CBS—for billions of dollars, claiming they made “false and defamatory statements” about him in an attempt to get Kamala Harris elected. Unless the suit happens to come before a Trump-appointed judge, it’ll be difficult for his lawyers to prove this, as the standard of evidence in U.S. defamation cases is quite high. (The Guardian)
Calling it “the funniest thing that has ever happened,” the CEO of the Onion has announced that his satirical paper is buying Alex Jones’ InfoWars and turning it into a parody website, saying that “we look forward to continuing its storied tradition of scaring the site’s users with lies until they fork over their cold, hard cash. Or Bitcoin. We will also accept Bitcoin.” The bankruptcy sale is currently under review by a judge, and Jones has declared a “HOAX ALERT,” insisting that InfoWars wasn’t actually sold at all, so stay tuned on this one. (Variety)
In a small mercy, it appears that Rick “Slash Medicare” Scott will not become Senate majority leader. Instead, it’ll be his rival Senator John Thune (R-SD), a “by-the-books establishment figure” who’s been compared to Mitch McConnell—and who Trump once tried to organize a primary challenge against. (Time)
AROUND THE WORLD
Back on October 15, the Biden administration set a 30-day deadline for Israel to stop restricting the flow of humanitarian aid into Gaza, warning that it would “reevaluate” and potentially halt weapons shipments if Israel didn’t comply. Well, the deadline has now passed, Israel hasn’t complied… and the Biden administration isn’t going to do anything about it. It’s almost as if the whole thing was a huge fraud! (New Republic)
A suicide bomber set off two explosions outside the Brazilian Supreme Court on Wednesday night. The only person killed was the bomber himself. According to police, the attacker was identified as a former city council candidate and a member of Jair Bolsonaro’s political party. He is believed to have carried out the bombing in response to the Supreme Court’s decision last year to ban Bolsonaro from holding office until 2030 as punishment for his attempt to lead a coup in 2022. (Associated Press)
There’s been another outbreak of toxic smog, something that seems to be happening more and more around the world. This one is in Lahore, Pakistan and the surrounding area, and has affected at least 14 million people, who describe being “stuck in our own poison” as factory emissions are “trapped by cooler temperatures and slow-moving winds.” Sounds like it might be time to have a talk with those factory owners! (Al Jazeera)
He gets around.
After a 15-year legal battle, a U.S. court has ruled that three Iraqi men must be paid damages by the Virginia military contractor, CACI, that tortured them at the Abu Ghraib military prison during the War on Terror. It is the first time that any private military contractor has been held legally responsible for the crimes against humanity committed at Abu Ghraib. “I’ve waited a long time for this day,” Salah Al-Ejaili told Al Jazeera. “This victory isn’t only for the three plaintiffs in this case against a corporation. This victory is a shining light for everyone who has been oppressed and a strong warning to any company or contractor practicing different forms of torture and abuse.”
Niger’s military junta has banned a French aid organization, which was helping people displaced by violence and natural disasters, from operating in the country. Niger is a former colony of France. Since taking power last year, military ruler Abdourahamane Tchiani has sought to banish Western influence—including the U.S. military—and align the nation more with Russia, as well as other Sahel regimes that recently overthrew their Western-friendly leaders. (Washington Post)
In Canada, the Trudeau government is forcing the International Longshore and Warehouse Union to enter binding arbitration with employers at several ports in British Columbia and Montreal, bringing a halt to an ongoing contract dispute in which the bosses had unilaterally shut down the ports. The union has condemned the move, saying it sends “a dangerous message: employers can bypass meaningful negotiations, lock out their workers, and wait for political intervention to secure a more favorable deal.” (Labor Notes)
Not for the first time, Trudeau has a dark stain on him over this.
Haiti’s transitional council—which is currently led by interim president Leslie Voltaire of the social-democratic Fanmi Lavalas party—has fired Prime Minister Garry Conille after just six months on the job, citing a lack of progress on Haiti’s gang violence and humanitarian crisis. It’s disputed whether the council even has the authority to do this, as Haiti’s constitution says only parliament can dismiss a PM, but right now there is no parliament. Conille’s replacement will be Alix Didier Fils-Aimé, a former president of the Chamber of Commerce who owns a dry-cleaning chain, so he’ll likely take a more neoliberal approach to government—not the best news. (Miami Herald)
HIGH PRAISE for THE MYTH OF AMERICAN IDEALISM
A couple of new reviews have come out for Current Affairs editor-in-chief Nathan J. Robinson’s newest book, co-written with Professor Noam Chomsky, and the word is good!
“The record of hypocrisy recounted by Chomsky and Robinson is sobering and convincing. No open-minded reader could absorb this book and continue to believe the pious rationales that U.S. leaders invoke to justify their bare-knuckled actions.” — Foreign Policy
“An incredibly valuable teaching tool for teenagers and young adults as they become politically engaged.” — Los Angeles Review of Books
In a rare piece of charming election news, independent socialist candidate Dr. Cornel West won the village of Kipnuk, Alaska by a landslide, receiving 50 of the 114 votes cast. The population there are largely Yupik-speaking Native Alaskans working for tribal organizations, and apparently they’re quite progressive! (Must Read Alaska)
Can the Kipnuk Model be successful elsewhere? (Image: Wikimedia Commons)
Amazon workers at a warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama are getting a third shot at a unionization vote, after a federal judge ruled that Amazon had illegally interfered in the last election. They should probably hold their vote soon, as the incoming Trump NLRB will almost certainly try to tip things back in the company’s favor. (WVTM Birmingham)
Housing activists from several different organizations joined forces in Michigan this week, forming a “Rent is Too Damn High Coalition” and marching on the state capitol in Lansing. They’re challenging their legislators to “prove you’re not useless” by passing HB 4878, better known as the Fair Chance Access to Housing Act, which would prohibit landlords from considering a person’s criminal record (or lack thereof) when offering them a lease. They also have a “housing homestretch” slate containing other bills to ban discrimination based on income source, secure the right to form a tenant union, ban “steep” rent increases, and make a number of other reforms. For our Michigan readers, you can find more information about the movement at MIrentistoodamnhigh.com. (Michigan Advance)
The makers of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream are suing their parent company, Unilever, over allegations that it censored them “on four occasions” from speaking out against the Israeli bombing spree in Gaza, including preventing the brand from calling for the safe passage of Palestinian refugees to the U.K. Unilever denies the accusation, but it previously tangled with Ben & Jerry’s leadership over whether the ice cream should be licensed for sale in illegal West Bank settlements, so there’s precedent here. (CNN)
Oklahoma State Superintendent Ryan Walters—the same Ryan Walters who ran a scam to get Trump Bibles in every school in the state—issued an order requiring every school to show students an unnerving video in which he bashes the “radical left” and “woke teachers unions” for “attacking” religious liberty. He then encourages them to join him in a prayer for President-elect Trump. The state attorney general’s office said Walters did not have the authority to require students to view the video, and many schools refused to comply with the blatantly unconstitutional order. (Oklahoma Voice)
This man wants to be Secretary of Education soooo bad.
Last week, we informed you about the 43 rhesus macaque monkeys that escaped from a South Carolina research lab. Since then, 35 of the monkeys have been apprehended and returned to the Alpha Genesis lab, leaving eight of them at large. But now, animal rights lawyer Justin Marceau argues that the monkeys may have a legal claim to freedom! (Beaufort County Post-and-Courier)
Rhesus monkeys at the Alpha Genesis facility (Photo: USA Today)
GOAT FACT OF THE WEEK
Goats in Morocco are really good at climbing trees!
When you look for goats, as one does, you probably don’t look directly up. But if you lived in Morocco, that’s the first place you’d have to check. You see, the ruminants who live in that particular part of North Africa have a unique talent: they can climb up argan trees like nobody’s business.
The argan fruit is a key foodstuff for these goats, and it’s a symbiotic relationship. As Liza Lester writes for the Ecological Society of America, the goats chew the fruit, swallow the fleshy outer parts, and then eventually regurgitate the nutlike inner kernel, helping new generations of argan trees to sprout across Morocco. There’s also an economic benefit for local villagers, who can collect the spat-out nuts and make argan oil from them, often in women-led cooperative workplaces.
Writing and research by Stephen Prager and Alex Skopic. Editing and additional material by Nathan J. Robinson and Lily Sánchez. Header graphic by Cali Traina Blume. This news briefing is a product of Current Affairs Magazine. Subscribe to our gorgeous and informative print edition here, and our delightful podcast here.
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