And Will Not Do

What the Trump Nominees Have Not Done

And Will Not Do

By: Victor Davis Hanson

American Greatness

December 5, 2024

Deflated by the resounding November defeat, the left now believes it can magically rebound by destroying Donald Trump’s cabinet nominees.

Many of Trump’s picks are well outside the usual Washington, DC, and New York political, media, and corporate nexus.

But that is precisely the point—to insert reformers into a bloated, incompetent, and weaponized government who are not part of it.

Trump’s nominee for FBI director, Kash Patel, is already drawing severe criticism.

His furious enemies cannot go after his resume, since he has spent a lifetime in private, congressional, and executive billets, both in investigations and intelligence.

Instead, they claim he is too vindictive and does not reflect the ethos of the FBI.

But what will Patel not do as the new director?

He will not serially lie under oath to federal investigators as did interim FBI Director Andrew McCabe, a current Patel critic.

He will not forge an FBI court affidavit, as did convicted felon and agency lawyer Kevin Clinesmith.

He will not claim amnesia 245 times under congressional oath to evade embarrassing admissions as former Director James Comey did.

He will not partner with a foreign national to collect dirt and subvert a presidential campaign as the FBI did with Christopher Steele in 2016.

He will not use the FBI to draft social media to suppress news unfavorable to a presidential candidate on the eve of an election.

He would not have suppressed FBI knowledge that Hunter Biden’s laptop was genuine—to allow the lie to spread that it was “Russian disinformation” on the eve of the 2020 election.

He will not raid the home of an ex-president with SWAT teams, surveil Catholics, monitor parents at school board meetings, or go after pro-life peaceful protestors.

Decorated combat veteran Pete Hegseth is another controversial nominee for secretary of defense.

What will Hegseth likely not do?

He will not go AWOL without notifying the president of a serious medical procedure, as did current Secretary Lloyd Austin.

He will not install race and gender criteria for promotion and will mandate diversity, equity, and inclusion training.

He will not insinuate falsely that cabals of white supremacists had infiltrated the military—only to alienate that entire demographic and thus ensure the Pentagon came up 40,000 recruits short.

He will not oversee the scramble from Kabul that saw $50 billion in U.S. military equipment abandoned to Taliban terrorists.

He will not watch passively as a Chinese spy balloon traversed the continental United States for a week.

He will not allow the chairman of the Joint Chiefs to promise his Chinese communist counterpart that the People’s Liberation Army would first be informed if the President of the United States was felt to issue a dangerous order.

He will not rotate from a defense contractor boardship into the Pentagon and then leave office to rotate back there to leverage procurement decisions.

He will not oversee the Pentagon’s serial flunking of fiscal audits.

Health and Human Services nominee Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is certainly a maverick. He may earn the most Democratic hits, given his former liberal credentials.

But what will RFK also not do as HHS secretary?

He will not oversee his agencies circumventing U.S. law by transferring money to communist China to help it produce lethal gain-of-function viruses of the COVID-19 sort—in the manner of Dr. Fauci.

He will not organize scientists to go after critics of mandatory masking and defame them.

He will not give pharmaceutical companies near-lifetime exemptions from legal jeopardy for rushing into production mRNA vaccines that have not traditionally been vetted and tested.

He will not leave office to monetize his HHS expertise and thus make millions from the pharmaceutical companies.

Trump’s Director of National Intelligence nominee, former congressional representative and military veteran Tulsi Gabbard, will soon be defamed in congressional hearings.

But what has Gabbard not done?

She did not join “51 former intelligence authorities” to lie on the eve of the 2020 election that the Hunter Biden laptop “had all the hallmarks” of a “Russian information/disinformation operation”—in an effort to swing the election to incumbent Joe Biden.

She did not lie under congressional oath like former DNI James Clapper, who claimed he only gave the “least untruthful answer” in congressional testimony.

She did not encourage the FBI to monitor a presidential campaign in an effort to discredit it—in the manner of former CIA Director John Brennan, who lied not once but twice under oath.

She did not fail to foresee the American meltdown in Kabul, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Hamas terrorist attacks on Israel, or the Houthis takeover of the Red Sea.

We are going to hear some outrageous things in the upcoming congressional confirmation hearings.

However, we will not hear about the crimes, deceptions, and utter incompetence of prior and current government grandees.

The current crew, not their proposed Trump replacements, prompted the sick and tired American people to demand different people.

Voters want novel approaches to reforming a government that they no longer trust and now deeply fear.