One Trump Nominee Has Mastered the Art of Pretending It’s All OK

Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. Their almost uncanny toolbox of denial techniques—Hegseth’s “anonymous smears” and Bondi’s “wait, Trump said what now?”—reveals the game here: Treat everything Donald Trump has said about what he plans to do with the Justice Department, the FBI, the military, and the police as the adorable rantings of someone’s crazy uncle, and treat everything reported in the press, ever, as a demonstrable lie. To be eligible to serve in Donald Trump’s Cabinet one needs to have shown fealty to Donald Trump. Which means that during these hearings one needs to mouth platitudes about institutions and theories of justice and independence and liberty and justice for all, and rape crisis centers at the border, without ever disavowing a single word spoken by Donald J. Trump, or acknowledging his activities to set aside the last election, or statements made by his loyalists, or statements made by oneself in order to curry favor. One is simultaneously auditioning for just one person and also saying whatever needs to be said in order to prove that nothing Donald Trump has ever said or done is real, or true, or salient.