America's Talking - Trump Taps Matt Gaetz as Attorney General, Tulsi Gabbard as Intelligence Official

Episode Date: November 15, 2024

President-Elect Donald Trump named two more high-profile figures to his administration Wednesday afternoon, the latest in a flurry of presidential picks. Trump tapped U.S. Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., to serve as attorney general and former Democratic Congresswoman and Lt. Col. Tulsi Gabbard to serve as director of National Intelligence. “For over two decades, Tulsi has fought for our Country and the Freedoms of all Americans,” Trump said in a statement. “As a former Candidate for the Democrat Presidential Nomination, she has broad support in both Parties – She is now a proud Republican! I know Tulsi will bring the fearless spirit that has defined her illustrious career to our Intelligence Community, championing our Constitutional Rights, and securing Peace through Strength.” Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Greetings, everyone, and welcome to America in Focus powered by the Center Square. I'm Dan McAulb, Chief Content Officer of Franklin News Foundation, publisher of the Center Square Newswire Service. We are recording this on Friday, November 15th. President-elect Donald Trump has been busy this week, filling out his cabinet, U.S. Senator Marco Rubio of Florida for Secretary of State, Representative Matt Gates of Florida as Attorney General, former Hawaii U.S. rep Tulsi Gabbard, excuse me, as Director of National Intelligence,

South Dakota Governor Christy Knoem as Secretary of Homeland Security, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as Health and Human Services Secretary. I could go on, but first let's bring in Casey Harper, Washington, D.C. Bureau Chief for the Center Square. Casey, all of Trump's cabinet picks need to be confirmed by the U.S. Senate, which will be controlled by Republicans with a 53 to 47 majority. Let's start with what you think some of the highlights or low lights of these selections are or any that I didn't mention. Dan, the Avengers are assembling. You know, that's what it feels like here with this very unusual, very talented, very famous team.

Now, of course, to Democrats, this is more like Thanos is Trump and he is ready to destroy the world. I guess depending on what side of the eye you're on, you'll look at it differently. but Trump is doing kind of what everyone thought he would do last time and what a lot of Trump supporters wanted him to do last time. Last time they wanted Trump to come into office and shake things up, bring in a lot of new ideas, a lot of new faces, change the status quo, take the positions of power from, you know, the swamp as he often referred to it and give it, give the power to the people to different, you know, to different voices. And last time, he mostly kind of went with establishment picks and Trump himself admitted. that the people he put in charge maybe were his undoing. And so this time around, he is doing the complete opposite. He's putting a lot of controversial picks.

I think, you know, so let's say, highs and lows. I mean, I'm really, one high in all this stand is I really love to see the bipartisan nature of this. I think it's good for the country to have a couple of Democrats in here. Historically, that is how it's been. You know, in recent history, it's not that way. But I think it's really good for Trump. I think it's really good for the America First Movement to have some Democrats, some independents brought into leadership to create this coalition, to make it, you know,

create this vision that America is unified. I think, you know, people say Trump can be divisive and maybe is, but he has Democrats in his cabinet. So I think that's a high for him. That's a win for him. That's a win for the Republican Party. It's a win for the country to have bipartisan leadership in the administration. Another, let's say, I don't want to say, I don't want to say.

anything's alone necessarily because that's sort of my opinion. But I think this Matt Gates for DOJ is going to be a home run or a strikeout. And I mean, Gates has a pretty questionable history. He's been, he's had an ethics investigation. Now, some think he was targeted wrongly for kind of political persecution. Others think he's guilty to sin and it's about to be exposed. And I think time will tell. The answer on that one is we'll see. We'll see if Matt Gates is able to just clean up the Justice Department and prosecute some Democrats and establishment insiders that Trump supporters have wanted prosecuted for a long time, or maybe he'll be totally exposed and some leaks will come out and he'll have to resign and it'll be a disaster. We'll see. Yeah, Gates, the House Ethics Committee

investigating him for alleged sexual misconduct, they were set to release, and I referred to him as Representative Matt Gates at the top. He resigned his seat short. after Trump nominated him as Attorney General, so he's no longer a representative there. Some have said it's because the House Ethics Committee was about to release a report on him. Now that he's not a representative on that ethics investigation, now that he's not a representative, there are calls for them to still release that report. We'll see if that happens. You mentioned Democrats.

Tulsi Gabbard, former Democrat turned independent. Robert F. Kennedy wanted to run for president as a Democrat. The Democratic Party blocked him out of that process, so he decided to run as an independent. Those are two of the Democrats you mentioned who have been appointed by Trump. Two names I didn't mention Casey, and it has to do with the new department. The Department of Government Efficiency, Trump named Vivek Ramaswamy and Elon Musk to head that agency. That, I think, is an interesting thing. maybe something that has been needed for years or decades. What do you think of that? This is one of those picks. I mean, if anything is for the base, this is for the base. They love Ramoswami. They love Musk, of course.

And they love the idea of government efficiency. I mean, for whatever reason, everybody generally acknowledges that the government is highly inefficient, has corruption in it. The taxpayer, or that the wasting of taxpayer dollars is rampant. But I think people have, you know, we've talked about the stand. I think people have given up on the idea that it could actually be cleaned up. Because for so many years, Republicans ran that they, on cleaning it up, and they really had mixed results. They really didn't. They did some, but it wasn't permanent.

And now the debt is out of control, you know, around $35 trillion. And Republicans have mostly stopped talking about it. The Democrats never, you know, back in the 90s they did, Bill Clinton, you know, talked about government efficiency. But since then, it hasn't really been a big part of their platform. And now Republicans don't run on, you know, efficient spending or government efficiency or cutting the deficit hardly anymore. So I think Americans had given up on it. And so to see this out of nowhere, which is kind of interesting because Trump himself

did run up the deficits and that, you know, when he was in office. But I think this is another bipartisan wind, Dan, because I think a lot of independence and Democrats also agreed that the government is inefficient. Polling shows that. And so there's kind of two. ways, Dan, and I want to hear what you think about this, but I think there's really two ways that they can cut government efficiency, this big picture. And one is going to be a lot more successful than the other. And we have a list that we just put up a list of the Soonersquare.com of some examples

of kinds of government ways. But there's the little examples that are really entertaining and just absolutely ridiculous. They get a lot of headlines. Like, you know, giving money to study hamsters fighting on steroids. You know, No, I did not make that up. Or, you know, giving, I have one on the website. It's something like $426,000 for to encourage Latino men to exercise or $200,000 spent by the Department of Defense on Starbucks espresso machines. So these get the headlines, but these are kind of small amounts of money. They are signs of rampant waste and abuse, but they're small amounts of money.

And I think they're going to target those and that'll be good press coverage. for them. But then Dan, the second part is their entire departments of the government, they could just be lopped off. I mean, it could be totally cleaned out. And Ramoswamy in interviews has talked about just cleaning out entire departments. RFK has talked about cleaning out entire departments at the FDA. You know, Elon Musk famously fired about 80% of his staff when he bought Twitter. And, you know, last I checked, the site is still running just fine. So the question is, is it going to be these kind of fun spot check reduction? and grant programs that are high profile,

or are they going to be able to successfully, you know, clean up billions of dollars of spending by ending entire, you know, wings of the government? It will be interesting to follow how all of these nominees shake out. Casey, thank you for joining us today. Listeners can keep up with all of the developments when it comes to Trump's stamp cabinet at thecenter square.com.