The hearings of the members the new US president has chosen to serve in his administration continue, and the interesting element beyond the “hammering” of the Democrats – who have no substantive way to block the individuals – is the way Donald Trump is handling the situations.
The hearing of Robert Kennedy Jr yesterday by the Senate Select Committee on Health and Human Services to approve his nomination to take over as the new US Secretary of Health and Human Services was, as expected, intense. The truth is that one would not expect anything less from a politician who for two years after resigning from the Democratic Party ran his own independent campaign for the presidency until the proposal from Donald Trump came along and renounced most of what he had openly advocated up to that point.
The Democrats did not “give in” to Kennedy which no one was surprised by. Kennedy himself was embarrassed several times, he reconsidered his positions on vaccines once again, shifted from “no” to “yes”, made it clear that he could not answer ¾ of the questions asked with a “yes” or “no”, and reached a point where the attacks on him were more regrettable than substantive in terms of whether he was qualified to manage America’s severely ailing and chronically sick health care system.
Through the process, the important thing is not the end result, and that has already been made clear by the corresponding hearing for the nation’s Secretary of Defense. Hegceth also came under severe criticism and attacks on both a personal and political level and when the vote came to a tie (50 for – 50 against) Vice President Vance’s vote broke the first “Gordian knot” in favor of Trump. The new President’s picks all have something about him and that’s what Donald Trump knows how to do better than anyone else: pick people who provoke passions, who provoke provocations, who draw attention to themselves. Kennedy is in the same pattern. Robert Kennedy Jr. will take over as Secretary of Health and Human Services even if the Vice President has to break the tie again. For Trump it is impressions that count as his show of force wants to be absolute and at every level. The choices of Americans who have reddened not only the White House but also the House of Congress give the American President the ultimate comfort of such moves for the next two years.
However, the important element and the significant change in Trump’s second term is not that he wants to look and act and be dominant in every aspect of public policy and not only in public life but now he is attempting to do so by using every means available to him under the Constitution and the laws of the land. In his first term, there were numerous times when the Democrat camp and its cadre had the 45th President well and truly cornered. Today that seems like a very distant reality, and Trump is showing that his four years out of the White House were not spent playing golf at one of his many private resorts.
His new way of governing involves him once again in a leading role – absolute, in fact – but everyone else not in a puppet role but rather in the role of adviser rather than minister. The fact that in Trump’s second time ,his family circle exists only for his private moments and the absolute “command” of the White House is for the first time handled by a female chief of staff shows that the 47th is very different from the 45th.
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