Loyalty oaths - Or personnel is policy?
By Todd Gregory and Erik Gregory
web posted November 25, 2024
The disgraced corporate media has put out their coordinated talking point: President-elect Donald Trump is nominating "loyalists" (including, horror of horrors, Democrats or former Democrats like Tulsi Gabbard and RFK, Jr.) for top cabinet positions.
The subtext here is that Trump is to be gelded, and is somehow morally or legally obligated to appoint non-loyalists and people opposed to his agendato key cabinet posts. As if Trump should nominate, say, Democrat election-meddler and "superlawyer" Marc Elias as Attorney General instead of Pam Bondi. Or maybe appoint pin-up girl and former Clinton crone Donna Shalala - or perhaps Jesse Jackson lookalike Lori Lightfoot - as Secretary of Health and Human Services.
Why was it perfectly acceptable for President Barack Obama, the secular messiah of the Democrats, to appoint a loyal "wingman" like Eric Holder as Attorney General? Or loyal "wingwomen" like Loretta Lynch and Susan Rice to high cabinet posts?
Like all Democrats, Obama demanded loyalists in all of his cabinet positions - and not one journalist in all of corporate media insisted that Obama was obliged to appoint an oppositional figure like Bill Barr as Attorney General, or Devin Nunes or Kash Patel as FBI or CIA director. Democracy dies in newsrooms infested by journalists, news anchors, and editors who lie as reflexively as Tourette's sufferers involuntarily twitch and utter profanities.
Funny how the gutter media demanded that America elect Hillary Clinton or Kamala Harris to prove America wasn't sexist and misogynist when the media never demanded that America elect candidates like Sarah Palin or Michelle Bachmann on those grounds.
Amusing too how the discredited media insisted America elect (D) Obama himself to prove America wasn't racist but endlessly sought to vilify and destroy uppity (R) blacks seeking the presidency (Tim Scott, Herman Cain, Ben Carson, Alan Keyes, and others).
Before the November election, the corporate legacy media was joined by newer leftist media (garbage websites like Vox, and The Huffington Post) in debunking, without evidence, widespread and highly credible claims that FEMA was not rendering aid to hurricane-ravaged residents displaying Trump signage or flags in the yards of their homes.
A DuckDuckGo search doesn't show that Vox, for example, issued any corrections after their October "debunking" of the FEMA rumors was itself comprehensibly debunked right after the election.
FEMA's government actions – ideological bigotry and targeting of conservatives, with a strong undercurrent of anti-white racism – was very much of a piece with many other government agencies (FBI, IRS, DOJ, ATF, et al.) targeting innocent conservatives over the years.
At press conferences meant to stage-manage the public relations fallout, FEMA resorted to damage control and FBI-style misinformation on crime statistics, claiming they had to avoid Trump homes because Trump supporters were supposedly a uniquely dangerous and violent cohort of the community in red states like Florida, North Carolina, and Georgia.
This evidence-free "red states are violent" disinformation deliberately omits the fact that blue city crime is what drives crime in otherwise red states (e.g. crime in blue Houston warping crime rates in red Texas; or blue New Orleans warping crime rates in red Louisiana).
Therefore, President Trump has every right to insist that the director of FEMA (or the IRS, or the FBI, or the DOJ) be somebody loyal to the Constitution and the voters who elected Trump to implement specific policies, irrespective of the preferred policies of the permanent progressive bureaucratic state (recall the "interagency consensuses" of Alexander Vindman, the inarticulate Pentagon progtard who spearheaded the first impeachment of Trump).
Personnel is policy, as politicians like to say. And based on political donations made by federal employees, it is estimated that upwards of 95% of federal employees identify as Democrats. It is a stone-cold fact that countless federal employees use their agencies and offices to target law-abiding conservatives on ideological grounds.
The federal government's undeniable hostility and vindictiveness towards half the population underscores the vital importance of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and its proposed sweeping federal fumigation and housecleaning.
Chaste, elderly eyesores like Rosie O'Donnell and author Stephen King, along with other public hideosities like Michael Moore and faux tough guy Robert DeNiro, can swear off sex, take handfuls of Xanax, or scream into the void all they want, but facts are facts.
The biggest reason for Republican voter apathy is that Republican officeholders generally break their word and fail to deliver on their campaign promises. Recall John McCain's famous "thumbs down" on repealing Obamacare, despite his campaign promises to repeal.
McCain likely viewed his action as a noble act of righteous insubordination due to his personal pique with Trump, as if McCain were the HMS Bounty's Fletcher Christian to Trump's Captain Bligh. But the reality is that McCain was being disloyal to his millions of voters, who elected him to repeal Obamacare.
Republican voters were similarly betrayed by George W. Bush's united GOP congress at the beginning of Bush's second term (2004-2006), when "comprehensive immigration reform" (euphemistic code for amnesty) supplanted all other domestic priorities on Bush's and the GOP's agenda.
After Bush broke faith with his base due to his amnesty obsession (after years of promising no amnesty), the 2006 midterms were a calamity for the GOP and the country. The Democrats seized power in congress by huge margins, paving the way for the 2008 election of Barack Obama and his DEI, grievance, and race-based agenda – a nation-destroying program which nevertheless echoes throughout the whole of America's federal government to this day.
Ultimately, Trump has every right – indeed, a moral obligation – to fill his cabinet posts with people who are unambiguously loyal to Trump's agenda, which was the agenda the American people voted for.
The GOP majority House of Representatives and Senate have a similar moral obligation to confirm Trump's nominees. Failure to be loyal to the wishes of the electorate risks a 2026 repeat of 2006, which saw the GOP evicted from congress and put the nation on the disastrous trajectory it is still trying to extricate itself from today. 
The Gregory brothers are previous contributors to ESR.
