The New Republic today reports that in “an interview with MSNBC’s Ali Velshi, Yale history professor Timothy Snyder insisted that Trump’s nominees to lead the executive branch aren’t just ‘poor choices in the traditional sense,'” which we expected all along, but, furthermore, “Each of them individually is historically bad . . . But taken together, these are not people who are going to be bad at their jobs in some sort of normal sense. Taken together, these appointments suggest an attempt to actually make the American government dysfunctional, to make it fall apart, to pervert it, to have it do things that it’s not supposed to do until it’s not capable of doing anything at all.”
This is the beginning of the final act of achieving the desired end the right-wing has sought for decades: a country driven only by emotion, by belief in a craven ideal of “freedom” without boundaries, and a government only designed to protect those goals. A veritable police state unless we find ways to defend against it. And given the angry core of the country right now, that will be our main task, not so much rebuilding a moribund and gutless Democratic party, but a rebuilding of an American soul. What a task.
What other purpose could Trump have? He is bent on undoing the U.S. one department and bureau at a time.