Just over a week ago, Donald Trump became the first Republican presidential candidate to win both the Electoral College and the national popular vote since George W Bush in 2004.
And he appears to be repeating one of Bush’s most infamous mistakes.
Bush, who four years earlier had squeaked with the help of the Supreme to win the Electoral College, took his victory over then-Massachusetts Senator John Kerry as a mandate for making sweeping changes to the country’s social safety net.
At a press conference shortly after his 2004 win, he told reporters that the victory engendered “a feeling that the people have spoken and embraced your point of view” and said he would communicate that attitude to the incoming Republican-controlled Congress.
“I earned capital — political capital — in the campaign, and now I intend to spend it,” he said.
What Bush wanted to “spend” on was an audacious plan to gradually replace Social Security with a system of private retirement accounts that would let Americans replace that guaranteed benefit with a bet on the stock market.
It never got off the ground. Democrats, led by then-minority leaders Nancy Pelosi in the House and Harry Reid in the Senate, were ferocious in their pushback. They made a decision early on not to even consider Bush’s plan or engage with GOP efforts to negotiate any sort of compromise legislation, much less offer a Democratic alternative.
More importantly, a critical mass in the Republican Party realized that their leader’s plan was, to put it bluntly, wildly unpopular. Combined with the unified Democratic opposition, the pushback was so great that neither the House nor the Senate ever considered legislation to create Bush’s private retirement accounts.
Twenty years later, Trump appears to be misreading the public’s appetite for remaking the entire government in his image.
On Wednesday, he stunned much of the world by choosing former Hawaii congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, an ex-Democrat with no foreign policy or intelligence experience and a history of spouting Russian propaganda talking points, as his nominee to replace the widely respected Avril Haines as Director of National Intelligence.
He left the American legal establishment similarly flabbergasted by choosing Floridian firebrand Matt Gaetz, who’d to that point been a Republican congressman with a longstanding cloud of scandal around him, as his incoming Attorney General.
Gaetz, a 42-year-old graduate of the well-regarded law school at Virginia’s College of William and Mary, has no experience as a prosecutor or a long record of legal scholarship. But he does have a record in the public arena as a fierce defender of Trump in the face of the multiple congressional and criminal investigations that have dogged the president-elect over the years.
He has also pledged to bring law enforcement “to heel” and keep criminal investigations away from the president-elect and his allies, and by implication target them at Trump’s enemies.
Trump inflamed critics even more on Thursday when he announced that the Department of Health and Human Services — a sprawling organization that regulates food, drugs and funds billions in medical research in addition to operating the Medicare and Medicaid health insurance systems for seniors and poor Americans — would be run by Robert F Kennedy Jr.
Kennedy, the son of assassinated New York senator and former attorney general Robert F Kennedy Sr, was once a well-regarded environmental law specialist until he began peddling discredited theories about a non-existent link between vaccines and autism. He has signaled an intention to fire hundreds of scientific experts currently employed by HHS and upend the approval process required for new medications and medical treatments in favor of refocusing the government’s regulatory efforts on food safety and unverified links between environmental toxins and chronic disease.
The selections of Gabbard, Gaetz and Kennedy have all rankled Democrats who’ve condemned them as unserious and even dangerous.
Trump’s decision to put forth the controversial picks could imperil whatever goodwill he has among the more centrist-minded members of his own party in the Senate, as they will be tasked with approving them for their chosen cabinet posts.
In particular, Gaetz has drawn the most incoming from members of the Senate Republican Conference, where many members are still sore with him for his role in defenestrating then-House Speaker Kevin McCarthy last October. The unprecedented dumping of the House’s top Republican plunged the chamber into chaos for months, with McCarthy attributing Gaetz’s actions to his wanting to deep-six an ethics investigation into his conduct.
The now-former House member (he resigned on Thursday, possibly to prevent the release of a report on that ethics probe) is widely despised among his former colleagues, and multiple GOP senators have suggested that Gaetz will have a tough road ahead of him before he even receives a vote on the Senate floor.
But it could be Kennedy, the anti-vaccine activist and conspiracy theorist, who causes the most headaches for Trump’s political operation.
As a scion of America’s most famous family of Democrats, Kennedy has long hewed his ancestral party’s line on reproductive freedom and LGBT+ rights issues — positions that are at odds with the party he will serve if brought into the new Trump administration.
Matt Bowman, the director of regulatory affairs at the anti-abortion, anti-LGBT+ rights legal group Alliance Defending Freedom, said in a statement that his group “hopes that President-elect Trump will appoint leaders who follow the law and promote the lives and health of those it is tasked to protect.”
“When it comes to HHS, the Biden administration radicalized its bureaucracy to illegally mandate and promote abortion and dangerous gender procedures, so we hope its leaders will restore the rule of law, respect biological reality, and allow states to protect children at any stage of life,” he added.
Though Republicans have been willing to tolerate some heterodoxy on some social issues, Kennedy’s pro-choice history may prove as much a dealbreaker for him among the Senate GOP as Gaetz’s alleged history of sexual misconduct.
While Trump does have a record of successfully bullying Republicans into giving him what he wants, Republican senators may not have the appetite for the negative headlines that will accompany “yes” votes to confirm these latest Trump picks.