Meet the Fascist Ass Kissers

There’s really no better way to describe them.

Images courtesy of ABC News

A criminal mob boss like Trump values loyalty above all else. The ability to shed all principles as you kneel before him is of paramount consideration—if you want a job in the Trump administration. So it’s not hard to see a common theme among those who will soon be surrounding Trump

The cast of characters includes some recognizable villainy: 

Take South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, the heartless dog killer, who he has named as head of Homeland Security. It’s notable that Noem is not welcome on any of the nine Native American tribal lands in her own state after she baselessly accused their leaders of profiting off the drug cartels from across the Southern border.

Trump named Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) as Secretary of State. He must have forgotten about his earlier criticism of Rubio, whom Trump once called an “overrated politician” that he “wouldn’t trust to run one of his smaller companies.”

There’s Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) for U.N. Ambassador. She was once an outspoken Trump critic, blasting him over his comments about Muslims and women and railing against the proposed border wall and his ties to Russia. Now she’s one of his biggest advocates. She’s questioned the sexual assault jury verdict against him and has been busily scrubbing her website of prior criticism of January 6. 

Trump named white nationalist and aptly dubbed “Discount Goebbels” himself, Stephen Miller, as his Deputy Chief of Staff, along with former ICE Director and Project 2025 author Tom Homan as the new Border Czar. Mass deportations and militarized detention centers are coming to a town near you. 

In today’s piece, I’ll discuss three takeaways from these and other announced appointments. First, they signal a far more hawkish, confrontational foreign policy than Trump campaigned on. Second, they portend very badly for vulnerable immigrant communities, where many voters simply did not believe Trump would come for them or their families. And finally, Trump’s quest to surround himself with loyalists means he’s drawing heavily from the U.S. House to fill those roles. And that’s now become a problem for Speaker Johnson.

Neocons dominate foreign policy

Trump spent much of his campaign calling Kamala Harris a warmonger and promising that there would be world peace under his administration. In keeping with this, not long after winning the election, Trump announced that former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley and former CIA Director and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo—two figures aligned with the more hawkish, neocon faction of the GOP—would not be part of the incoming administration.

That pleased the America First non-interventionists. But Trump’s recent appointments, including Stefanik to the U.N., Rubio as Secretary of State, and Rep. Waltz as National Security Advisor, suggest that the incoming administration could be even more aggressive than before and might openly court confrontation with Russia, China and Iran.

And that has set off alarm bells and a bit of an internal battle. Trump’s son, Don Trump, Jr., pledged to “100” percent keep all “neocons and war hawks” from the Trump administration.

Quoting this, Conservative columnist Glenn Greenwald warned that Trump’s last three appointments “are war hawks fully aligned with the worst prongs of bipartisan DC consensus.”

As reported in Responsible Statecraft, Stefanik is a hawk on foreign affairs and always has been. Further,

Stefanik has no background in international relations or diplomacy that would prepare her for representing the United States at the international body, but then the point of sending her is probably to pick fights with other states rather than trying to resolve them.

Stefanik is no doubt a pick favored by Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, after she frequently described the U.N. as anti-semitic and even lobbied for the cutting of funding for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, which provides essential humanitarian assistance to Palestinian civilians in Gaza. On Iran, Stefanik has opposed a nuclear deal and prefers a “maximum pressure campaign”—all great news for Netanyahu.

These views align closely with those of Sen. Rubio, Trump’s pick for Secretary of State. Rubio is a staunch defender of Israel’s right to take direct action in Lebanon and for it to respond militarily and without restraint to Iran. He has even endorsed Trump’s proposal to deport pro-Palestinian protestors in the U.S. who are on student visas. And he has refused to call for a ceasefire in Gaza and blames “100 percent” of civilian deaths there on Hamas, ascribing no blame at all to the Israeli Defense Forces.

The one-two combination of Stefanik and Rubio has green lit Netanyahu to advance some of his most extreme goals, including displacement of the Palestinian population from Northern Gaza and further annexation of land by Israel. Tragically, the humanitarian crisis that would follow will likely be met with complete indifference from the Trump White House.

Trump’s pick for National Security Advisor isn’t a household name, but in his position he could sharply alter the calculus on the ground in Ukraine, at least in the short term. Rep. Mike Waltz of Florida is a former Green Beret who currently serves on House Committees that cover the military, intelligence agencies and foreign affairs. The day before the election, Waltz gave an interview to NPR that made clear he would permit escalation of the war in Ukraine in order to bring it to an end through a diplomatic solution. That includes enforcing “actual” energy sanctions on Russia (though it’s unclear how the U.S. would do this) in order to strangle Russia’s economy and war machine. While that sounds well and fine, it could also push Russia to more extreme measures in the short term. Paired with this, Waltz also favors “taking the handcuffs off the long-range weapons” the U.S. provides Ukraine.

These positions would be a major shift of U.S. policy in Ukraine and would very likely be cheered by the Ukranians, who have been asking for broader permission to strike targets deep inside Russia. It’s unclear, however, how this more muscular approach will square with the MAGA wing’s desire to end U.S. financial and military assistance to Ukraine.

Indeed, on the question of Russia and Ukraine, the incoming Trump administration is sending decidedly mixed messages. Trump’s pro-Russian advisors are signaling that Ukraine should accept huge territorial losses in exchange for a cessation of hostilities, something Ukraine understandably rejects outright. At the same time, and somewhat contradictorily, Trump’s hawkish advisors will soon be counseling him to force Russia to the table by giving greater latitude for Ukraine to inflict damage far inside Russia.

All three of the top incoming foreign policy officials are also hawkish on China and will support harsher sanctions and a more confrontational, rather than respectfully competitive, approach. It’s less clear at this point what these might involve. But here again, the tension between the “America First” MAGA wing and the take-it-to-the-brink neocon hawks is already evident—and so far, the hawks are winning.

Cruelty and fascism at our borders and within immigrant communities

The next trio of appointments—Noem at DHS, Miller as Deputy Chief of Staff, and Homan as Border Czar—is perhaps among the most chilling of combinations imaginable.

Like Elise Stefanik, Gov. Kristi Noem has no background whatsoever in the job for which she was chosen. Best as we can tell, the appointment to head up Homeland Security was a kind of consolation prize after she was passed over for VP spot for bragging in a book about how she shot her family’s young dog, Cricket, in a gravel pit.

The point of telling that story, of course, was for Noem to prove that she had the cruelty to be a MAGA superstar. It backfired at the time because America may be okay with horrific inhumanity toward brown migrants and their kids, but apparently isn’t ready for dog killers. 

But Noem will now be in charge of our nation’s border security, including being ultimately responsible for mass deportations on a scale never before imagined. That’s going to take a certain type of person to achieve, and Trump thinks Noem the dog killer could prove herself useful here.

She’ll be backed up by the new Deputy Chief of Staff, Stephen Miller, who confirmed in the fall of 2023 that the Trump White House will be supercharging denaturalization of immigrants. (Yes, that’s the actual stripping away of U.S. citizenship, sometimes long after it’s been granted.) Miller has been a close advisor, speech writer, and one of Trump’s architects of the cruel child separation policy that the Biden administration is still trying to undo and fix through reuniting families.

And to round things out, we’ll have Tom Homan as the Border Czar. Homan is the unofficial “father” of family separation at the border, having proposed it once back in 2014 (and had it shot down as “heartless and impractical”) only to see it implemented in 2017 under Trump. He’s an author on Project 2025 as a contributor to the section on harsh immigration measures. Homan recently gave an interview on 60 Minutes where he was asked whether he would separate families again at the border. “Families can be deported together,” Homan responded. By this he means to include American-born U.S. citizen children of undocumented migrants.

The officials who will execute on Trump’s campaign promise to mass deport millions of undocumented migrants—creating a police state in affected communities, threatening to sweep in legal residents and citizens, and causing widespread economic disruption and misery—will soon be in place. And they are highly motivated to produce results for Trump, measured by how many lives are upended and how many millions are detained and deported. 

The building of militarized detention centers, the dehumanization of migrants, and the loss of basic civil rights and due process are all paths to fascism on American soil. Local and state governments are searching for ways to oppose and resist these plans, and it’s already clear that big blue urban centers will be ground zero for MAGA’s mass deportation project. Indeed, Homan is already warning blue state governors and law enforcement not to stand in the way of their plans.

“If you’re not gonna help us, get the hell out of the way,” Homan said on the Fox Network. “Because we’re going to do it ... we may have to double the number of agents we send to New York City.”

Stealing from the House Ranks

A final, brief point to make about these appointments: They may be draining away Speaker Johnson’s majority in the next Congress.

If the House race watchers are correct, the GOP may have 220 or 221 House seats in the next session, compared to the Democrats at 215 to 214. That’s already a fairly slim majority, and a defection of three or four members could sink any piece of legislation. We saw that dynamic play out repeatedly over the past two years, resulting in the least productive Congress in recent history.

That’s why analysts like Adam Carlson (and myself) are rather shocked at how many of Trump’s picks for key cabinet or operational positions are being drawn from the ranks of the House Republican Conference. By today’s count, as many as five GOP members could give up their seats if they are nominated and get confirmed by the Senate.

On top of Reps. Waltz and Stefanik, Trump reportedly may tap Rep. Mike Rogers (R-AL) for Secretary of Defense, Rep. Sam Graves (R-MO) for Secretary of Transportation, and Rep. Glenn Thompson (R-PA) for Secretary of Agriculture.

There is even a world in which a 220-215 GOP majority moves this spring to a 215-215 tie.

If all this happens, and while we await special elections, Speaker Johnson might struggle mightily to push any legislation through, assuming he can even re-win the Speakership. Any delay in moving bills along will give Democrats that much more time to rally and lobby against them, particularly if they would strip away healthcare or raise costs on working families or the elderly, and peel off a few GOP swing district members.

House Republicans are already sounding the alarm. “It’s going to be hard to pass anything anyways,” said one, who asked to speak anonymously. A two-seat majority “for us is basically us being in the minority. Especially if the speaker can’t get a hold of his conference.”

They may not even have that two-seat spread by spring.

Trump doesn’t seem to care. For him, it’s not really and never was about policy. That’s something for his people to push for. As long as he has “yes” people around him willing to do anything he asks, he’ll be happy. That is, of course, until he starts to suffer some big legislative defeats, like he saw in his first term when he tried and failed repeatedly to repeal the ACA. Trump hates losing, and he lost bigly then.

That was due to the vote of the late Sen. John McCain, of course. May the ghost of Sen. McCain haunt Trump forever, and may it guard over our Republic in its most dire hour.