TRUMP'S TEAM OF LAPDOGS

   Donald Trump is forming an anti-Lincoln government: instead of a Team of Rivals, it's more a pack of lapdogs.
   He is selecting people whose loyalty is foremost to him, not the country.   John Bolton, Trump's national security adviser in his first term, says he wants more than just loyalty, he wants fealty.
  His choices have more political or Washington experience than four years ago, but almost all are Trump supplicants. None has any real separate standing the way a Nikki Haley would have or, going back, as Hillary Clinton did.
  Trump's latest choices for Defense Secretary, Attorney General and Director of National Security Intelligence have stunned even some Republicans. For Defense he picked Pete Hegseth, a Fox News host.  George C. Marshall, Robert Gates, Leon Panetta, Jim Mattis, Pete Hegseth.
 Does anyone seem out of place ? 
 More shocking was his choice of Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz as Attorney General. Gaetz, who is intensely disliked by many House colleagues on both sides of the aisle, is under investigation by the non-partisan House Ethics Committee on charges that he "engaged in sexual misconduct and/or illicit drug use, shared inappropriate images or videos on the House floor, misused state identification records, converted campaign funds to personal use, and/or accepted a bribe, improper gratuity, or impermissible gift."
  This is the post held by Robert Jackson, Robert Kennedy, Elliot Richardson and Edward Levi.
  Let's not forget former Democratic Congresswoman turned Trump cheerleader, Tulsi Gabbard, tapped to be director of National Intelligence  She is full of fulsome praise for the Russians, a fondness that is reciprocated. 
   Trump's apparent desire is to replicate his June 2017 cabinet meeting when he let the cameras in to watch everyone proclaim how great he was. Only Jim Mattis deflected.
    The marker for a high-powered Cabinet was captured in historian Doris Kearns Goodwin classic, "A Team of Rivals," how Abraham Lincoln surrounded his crisis-challenged new administration with his chief political opponents who all thought they were more qualified than the President. 
   In the 1860 Republican presidential nomination fight, the prohibitive favorite was New York Sen. William Seward, a former Governor with main challengers, Ohio Sen. Salmon Chase, the favorite of the liberals and Missouri Judge Edward Bates, preferred by the Free State conservatives   After Seward took a big lead, the political neophyte Lincoln came back to win on the third ballot.
   Lincoln won the general election and tapped Seward to be Secretary of State, Chase as Treasury Secretary and Bates as Attorney General.  
   It worked as the super secure President, leading the country during the Civil War, tolerated, even encouraged, differing views. It was, Goodwin wrote, his "political genius" that made this work. In fairly short order, most of these strong men came to see Lincoln "as the strongest of them all."
    There have been some efforts to replicate this.  Franklin D. Roosevelt enlisted major Republicans on the eve World War II and Barack Obama brought in his main rival, Hillary Clinton, and retained the Republican-appointed Defense Secretary Robert Gates. 
     Seward was a powerful figure in the cabinet, who would express disagreements with the President, though he came to grow close to Lincoln.
   Let's, by contrast, take one of Trump's non-sleazy choices: Florida Sen. Marco Rubio to be Secretary of State. Rubio did run for President in 2016, where his only memorable moment was when he suggested Trump had a small penis, which Trump vehemently denied. After Chris Christie, another candidate, devastated  Rubio in a New Hampshire debate, he had to drop out. 

   It's telling that Trump referred to him as "little Marco."
   No William Seward here.

  Trump also has tapped 2020 GOP presidential aspirant, businessman Vivek Ramaswamy, to join multi-billionaire Elon Musk in a much hyped efficiency project to slash $2 trillion from the federal budget.  Ramaswamy was more of a punch line in the presidential contest.  Another possible Cabinet member, North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum, seems like a nice fellow but as a candidate never got out of the starting blocks, dropping out last December.

    No team of Rivals here.

   Most of Trump's choices were predictable.  His migrant deportation zealots, Tom Homan and Steven Miller, have little concern if children are separated from their parents; that reflects Trump's position. The anti-China views of his national security team are pretty much mainstream.
  If, as I think likely, Gaetz is too far a reach even for those accommodating Republican Senators, it doesn't get a lot better.  Waiting in line are such tough-talking right wingers, close to Trump, as Mark Paoletta and Mike Davis who've signaled Trump can go after anyone, especially Special Counsel Jack Smith.  Davis pointedly warned New York Attorney General Letitia James to lay off Trump or "we'll put your fat ass in prison for conspiracy." 

   There is a role model for any newcomers who want to pander to Trump: Elise Stefanik. She came to Congress a decade ago as a moderate Republican leader. In a few years she saw where the political winds were blowing and morphed into an election-denying, conspiracy-spewing Super MAGA. She has been tapped to be the U.S. Representative at the United Nations.
   One thing about this team of lapdogs: No dissent here.