This is an adapted excerpt from the Oct. 29 episode of “The Briefing with Jen Psaki.”
Typically, when people talk about Donald Trump’s retribution campaign, they talk about his pressure to bring criminal charges against people such as Sen. Adam Schiff of California, New York Attorney General Letitia James, former FBI Director James Comey and former special counsel Jack Smith.
Those are definitely glaring examples of Trump’s revenge tour, but the retribution campaign goes far beyond just trying to get current and former public officials thrown in jail.
Trump is deploying federal troops to the streets of Democratic-led cities in what appears to be an attempt to punish voters in places where he got the least support. Just this week, he threatened to send troops into even more cities. On Wednesday, The Wall Street Journal reported the Pentagon is establishing a “quick reaction force” inside the National Guard so that Trump can deploy troops to any city he wants at any time.
Trump has also used the shutdown fight to cancel infrastructure projects in Democratic congressional districts, in order to punish even more people who didn’t vote for him. Last week, he approved disaster aid for three states he won in the last election, while denying disaster aid to three states he lost.
Trump is engaging in a whole-of-government retribution campaign, using every lever of the federal government to target anyone in this country who he thinks is insufficiently loyal to him.
That has been his goal ever since his first term in office, when he tried to do the same thing over and over, only to be stopped by some of the people around him. So Trump knew the only way he could carry out that campaign of retribution in his second term was by making sure that, this time, there was no one around to stand in his way.
As Trump told journalist Jonathan Karl for his new book “Retribution,” the difference between his first and second terms is “I know everybody now, and when I first came I knew nobody. … We had a lot of great people. But I didn’t know people. Had to rely on recommendations. Now I know people, so it’s good.”
There are reasons that there is typically a lengthy vetting process for every person nominated to be in a president’s Cabinet. The first is, of course, to make sure there are no surprises during the confirmation process, but the more important process is determining whether they are up for doing the job.
But Trump ignored both of those criteria in favor of his own preferred test: Who was most likely to be loyal to him? Who would be so indebted to him for nominating them that they would carry out virtually any order he gave? That led to Trump assembling the most incompetent Cabinet of sycophants in modern American history.
Karl’s book offers a new window into how this clown car of people ended up in Trump’s Cabinet. Take, for instance, the president’s appointment of Kristi Noem to be the head of homeland security.
As Karl writes:
Noem had not been on the transition team’s list of possible candidates and had not gone through vetting for the job. When a surprised Trump advisor asked the president-elect why he had decided to nominate Noem to be secretary of Homeland Security, he had a simple answer. “I did it for Corey,” he said. “It’s the only thing Corey asked me for.” The “Corey” in that anecdote is almost certainly Corey Lewandowski, Trump’s loyal first campaign manager, who is now perhaps best known for his close relationship with Noem. The decision to nominate a completely unqualified loyalist like Noem was such a surprise that it even caught another former Trump campaign manager, Steve Bannon, off guard. According to Karl, two days after Trump announced Noem as his pick, an exasperated Bannon told him, “She runs the whole thing? She runs the f—ing Secret Service? It’s all of it. It’s the global war on terror. It’s all that. What are you talking about? She’s never been in law enforcement!” According to Karl, Noem was not the only appointment that caught people in Trump’s orbit by surprise. A cabinet finalist had been sitting in the Mar-a-Lago living room downstairs near a Fox News weekend anchor, whom he assumed was in town to conduct a television interview with Trump. Like the rest of the world, he was stunned to hear later that night that the president-elect would be nominating that Fox News weekend anchor — Pete Hegseth — to serve as secretary of defense. It’s the same story with Trump’s transportation secretary, Sean Duffy. Again, from Karl: Duffy had a colorful biography — in addition to his … experience [as a Fox News host], he had been a reality TV star on MTV’s Real World, served four terms in the House of Representatives, won three lumberjack world championships, and worked as a local prosecutor in Wisconsin and a lobbyist in Washington — but he had no relevant experience for the job. When Trump asked a friend of Duffy’s if he knew anything about transportation, the friend answered, “Of course he does, he has nine kids!” Moving a family that large around, the friend joked, requires at least some transportation expertise. In other words, everyone knew at the time that Trump’s Cabinet picks were not qualified for the jobs they had been given, because they weren’t chosen for their qualifications — they were chosen because they would be loyal foot soldiers in the president’s retribution campaign. Trump didn’t want Cabinet secretaries. He wanted people who would always defer to him. The president knew he could rely on Hegseth to defend sending troops into Democratic-led cities. He knew he could rely on Noem to defend deploying ICE to those same cities and withholding disaster aid from blue states. He knew he could rely on Duffy to defend the cancellation of important infrastructure projects in Democratic congressional districts. He knew he could rely on all of them to go out and defend any myriad of the crazy decisions he planned to make, and now Trump is using that unqualified Cabinet to carry out the campaign of vengeance that has motivated him since day one.
Jen Psaki is the host of "The Briefing with Jen Psaki" airing Tuesdays through Fridays at 9 p.m. EST. She is the former White House press secretary for President Joe Biden.
Allison Detzel is an editor/producer for MS NOW.
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