Gravity and Trump’s Conspiracy Cabinet
This paragraph, describing the role that aspiring FBI Director Kash Patel played in Trump’s video collaboration with a bunch of mostly-violent Jan6ers, appears about two thirds of the way through a very good NYT review of how Trump has rewritten the history of January 6.
Mr. Trump recorded his contribution at his Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida, while the choir was recorded with a phone in the Washington jail. The song — a fund-raising effort that the Trump loyalist Kash Patel, now the president-elect’s nominee to head the F.B.I., helped produce — concludes with a defiant echo of the “U.S.A.!” chants that resounded during the Jan. 6 attack.
Kash Patel has been central to the success of Trump’s repackaging of his own crimes as grievance from the start.
And I’ve been trying to figure out how that’ll work as I contemplate what I think of as Trump’s Conspiracy Cabinet.
I’ve been thinking of his nominations as a combination of a highly competent Christian nationalist core (led by Stephen Miller and Russ Vought), largely filled out with people who’ll be in the business of graft and other kinds of corruption — whether for their own benefit or Trump’s. But the most unpredictable element is how Trump plans to fill government with embodiments of the conspiracies that have become central to his movement.
That’s most evident in virtually of Trump’s health-related appointments, starting with Bobby Kennedy (who might yet lose his confirmation battle). I don’t, for a second, believe the claim from someone adjacent to Roger Stone that Trump picked RFK and Tulsi Gabbard as a way to tap into a realignment of Democrats. Rather, Trump had to appoint them to keep the likes of Matthew Livelsberger , who invoked RFK in his manifesto, engaged, no matter the cost. And so after having presided over a heroic rush to develop a COVID vaccine in his first term, Trump will hand over America’s scientific crown jewels to people who don’t believe in science.
What will happen when these conspiracists confront the immutable laws of science? What will happen when gravity hits?
And how many children will die as a result?
The damage that Tulsi will be able to do (again, her confirmation is not assured) at National Intelligence is more measurable. US intelligence has been politicized for years. Forever. Such politicization as often as not cause self-perpetuating scandal cycles. And if not, Bad Things will likely result that will harm the US and lead to avoidable catastrophes that Trump should own.
It’s the damage posed by Kash’s likely installation at FBI — he has a better shot at confirmation than either RFK or Tulsi — that I can’t fully grok.
Back in the halcyon days of the Durham investigation, I came to believe that gravity would defeat these grievance myths, would defeat the kinds of conspiracies Kash sows, too. Even with Durham, Kash helped facilitate the false claims Durham spun out of theories of conspiracy hung on two false statements indictments. A key prong of the Sussmann prosecution — into what he said to the CIA in January 2017 — arose out of a question Kash somehow knew to ask on December 18, 2017. Then, after Durham deliberately misrepresented legitimate intelligence that Georgia Tech discovered dating to the Obama Administration to insinuate that Trump had been spied on, Kash made a number of unhinged claims to expand on Durham’s already false claim.
But the oddest statement came from “Former Chief Investigator for Russia Gate [sic]” and current key witness to an attempted coup, Kash Patel, sent out by the fake Think Tank that hosts some of the former Trumpsters most instrumental in covering up for Trump corruption.
Taken literally (which one should not do because it is riddled with false claims), the statement is a confession by Kash that he knew of what others are calling “spying” on Trump and did nothing to protect the President.
Let’s start, though, by cataloguing the false claims made by a man who played a key role in US national security for the entirety of the Trump Administration.
First, he claims that the Hillary Campaign, “ordered … lawyers at Perkins Coie to orchestrate a criminal enterprise to fabricate a connection between President Trump and Russia.” Thus far, Durham has made no claims about any orders coming from the Hillary Campaign (and the claim that there were such orders conflicts with testimony that Kash himself elicited as a Congressional staffer). The filing in question even suggests Perkins Coie may be upset about what Sussmann is alleged to have done.
Latham – through its prior representation of Law Firm-1 – likely possesses confidential knowledge about Law Firm-1’s role in, and views concerning, the defendant’s past activities.
In fact, in one of the first of a series of embarrassing confessions in this prosecution, Durham had to admit that Sussmann wasn’t coordinating directly with the Campaign, as alleged in the indictment.
Kash then claims that “Durham states that Sussmann and Marc Elias (Perkins Coie) … hired .. Rodney Joffe … to establish an ‘inference and narrative’ tying President Trump to Russia.” That’s false. The indictment says the opposite: Joffe was paying Perkins Coie, not the other way around. Indeed, Durham emphasized that Joffe’s company was paying Perkins Coie a lot of money. And in fact, Durham shows that the information-sharing also went the other way. Joffe put it together and brought it to Perkins Coie. Joffe paid Perkins Coie and Joffe brought this information to them.
Kash then claims that “Durham writes that he has evidence showing Joffe and his company were able to infiltrate White House servers.” Kash accuses the Hillary Campaign of “mastermind[ing] the most intricate and coordinated conspiracy against Trump when he was both a candidate and later President.” This betrays either real deceit, or ignorance about the most basic building blocks of the Internet, because nowhere does Durham claim that Joffe “infiltrated” any servers. Durham, who himself made some embarrassing technical errors in his filing, emphasizes that this is about DNS traffic. And while he does reveal that Joffe “maintain[ed] servers for the EOP,” that’s not infiltrating. These claims amount to a former AUSA (albeit one famously berated by a judge for his “ineptitude” and “spying”) accusing a conspiracy where none has been charged, at least not yet. Plus, if Joffe did what Kash claims starting in July 2016, as Kash claims, then Barack Obama would be the one with a complaint, not Trump.
Finally, Kash outright claims as fact that Joffe “exploited proprietary data, to hack Trump Tower and the Eisenhower Executive Office Building.” This claim is not substantiated by anything Durham has said and smacks of the same kind of conspiracy theorizing Louise Mensch once engaged in. Only, in this case, Kash is accusing someone who has not been charged with any crime — indeed, a five year statute of limitation on this stuff would have expired this week — of committing a crime. Again: a former AUSA, however inept, should know the legal risk of doing that.
Curiously, Kash specifies that the White House addresses involved were in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. That could well be true, but Durham only claims they were associated with EOP, and as someone who worked there, Kash should know that one is a physical structure and the other is a bureaucratic designation. But to the extent Kash (who has flubbed basic Internet details already) believes this amounted to hacking the EOP, it is based off non-public data.
So, like I said, the piece is riddled with false claims, but with two claims that go beyond anything Durham has said.
This one-two punch — first Durham misrepresenting evidentiary claims and then Kash spinning Durham’s misrepresentations free of all mooring — resulted in Trump making death threats targeting Sussmann and an entire campaign targeting Rodney Joffe.
But in the end, even though Durham’s lawyers repeatedly defied Judge Christopher Cooper’s orders, they ultimately mostly failed to present the theory of conspiracy they had about Sussmann’s alleged false statement. Sussmann, after paying superb lawyers a bunch of money, having his career disrupted, and facing death threats ginned up by the former President, was acquitted.
The process worked, but not before a great many people’s lives were upended, irrevocably.
So even though only NYT joined me, in exposing the degree to which a theory of conspiracy, and not any real evidence, lay behind Durham’s insinuations of guilt, even though the legacy media chased Durham’s theory of conspiracy hook line and sinker, I at least believed that the system would work.
The Hunter Biden prosecution has disabused me of that faith. Between the fact that Hunter really did evade taxes — the presence of a crime that could substitute for all the unsubstantiated claims about him — and the way a multi-year revenge porn campaign solidified the legacy media belief he was too icky for due process, prosecutors continue to make outlandish claims with little pushback, much less curiosity about why a witness to a crime is overseeing the investigation into it.
As FBI Director Kash will have the ability to do what he did in advance of the Sussmann hearing, find some nugget, tangential to any topic at hand, on which to hand a larger conspiracy theory.
Amid all the focus on Trump naming his defense team to run DOJ, there has been little focus on the fact that Emil Bove, whom he named to PADAG (even though the position doesn’t require confirmation and once confirmed as DAG, Todd Blanche could presumably put anyone he wants in the position), presided over a serious discovery violation scandal at SDNY, which forced him out of DOJ. If judges continue to hold DOJ to already weak discovery requirements, due process might survive. But if DOJ institutionally permits prosecutors to ignore their ethical guidelines, it will become far, far easier to frame defendants.
And the press has simply stopped reporting on due process, choosing instead to chase whatever dick pics propagandists unpack in front of them.
Kash Patel earned his nomination to be FBI Director by being the self-described wizard of Trump’s grievance myth. He has done such a tremendous job spinning that myth that even some good faith Republican Senators believe that myth as true.
And while I’m sure that gravity will eventually catch up to RFK Jr, as it did in Samoa, while I have every expectation to continue doing what I do, if only to witness further assaults on due process, I’m far less sanguine about gravity’s effect on a Kash-run Bureau.
Kash is the one that worries me most. Chris Murphy is saying he is worried they will just start arresting Democratic lawmakers. Would FBI do that without a warrant? Or would Federal Marshalls be more easily and quickly corruptible?
PS Greetings from Ramona.
99% of FBI arrests are via an arrest warrant that has been reviewed by a federal judge who determines-confirms the agent’s affidavit meets “probable cause” standards (same applies for search warrants). No FBI Director can “order” special agents to arrest anyone. He/she can try, but it just doesn’t work that way – the arrest will go no where; the court will dismiss it day 1. Same applies to US Marshals who are mostly at service of federal court houses.
Thanks TMcginty, but that brings up fear #2. There is nothing an aspiring autocrats likes more than vividly demonstrating the impotence of the judiciary.
At the time of Durham’s prosecutions, I had the nauseous realization that reporters covering the trials could not possibly have read his indictments. Surely if they had they would perceive the desperate flimsiness of each case, the grasping overreach that drove this palpable twisting of dissonant “facts” into supposed “evidence” (in Durham’s report) of the very great and very evil “Clinton Plan”—when that so-called plan was just opposition research and nothing more. (“Russia, if you’re listening…”)
If it were just Fox News, I might have shrugged. But no. Journalists who don’t do their homework, who rely on gossip instead, are worse than no journalists at all. They could have come here for a crash course. Obviously they didn’t.
The system? It will grind itself down, its gears emulsified by money, apparently. But it is not immune from our perceptions of it, and those continue to be shaped by journalists. It’s time for some in high places to do their damn job.
Kash Gordon’s antigravity suit won’t keep him from being hamstrung by those FBI officials who know far more about Newtonian physics than he does, right?
In my experience in science and medicine it is very helpful to know more science (or neuroanatomy, or whatever) than the other person – but it is only helpful if you can (1) leverage that to bring someone you are already in alignment with towards a shared understanding (like a patient seeking an explanation for symptoms whose been reading up in the National Enquirer equivalent areas of the internet – we are aligned in getting to a diagnosis that provides a path forward to effective treatment, we are not in an argument over whether the National Enquirer is garbage, or less entertaining garbage than the World Weekly News), or if (2) you are deploying that knowledge in a forum that supposedly runs on logic and not pure emotion (like in front of a judge??). Yes I understand humans do not have such forums but there are ones where the pretending is very strong. Is the inside of the FBI offices one of those places? Unclear. That sounds more like better knowledge of office politics than better knowledge Newtonian physics will help.
p.s. love the science handle, very amusing thank you for the smile. Particularly apt in this thread, as glutathione + nonsense words = vaccines are bad latest garbage
Even the republicans know Kash is untenable, but what I think the former guy may do is recess appointments for all his minions.
He’s already a lame duck.
What has he got to lose for trying?
Thanks for reminding about Kash, the “self-described wizard”.
The Plot to Lie to Children [< harpie: AND their parents]
I read Kash Patel’s three books for small children. They’re really weird. https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/the-situation–the-plot-to-lie-to-children
Benjamin Wittes Thursday, December 5, 2024, 7:06 PM
In an otherwise very good article, what’s this? – “And so after having presided over a heroic rush to develop a COVID vaccine in his first term …” Huh? I assume this was snark. The vaccine was developed during his term, but many hundreds of thousands of deaths was Trump responsible for by so underplaying the danger of Covid?
“presided over a heroic rush …” does not indicate that the presider was in himself heroic only that he was president when it happened.
[Welcome back to emptywheel. Please use the SAME USERNAME and EMAIL ADDRESS each time you comment so that community members get to know you. You attempted to publish this comment as “Simile” using a different email address triggering auto-moderation; it has been edited to reflect your established username. Please check your browser’s cache and autofill; future comments may not publish if username does not match. /~Rayne]
Not snark to me. You highlight a very concerning set of facts. Yes, scientifically the turnaround from “ack!” to effective vaccine was heroic. It was amaze balls. It was so amazing many of us scientists spent a lot of time parsing the rapidly evolving data to understand how this was possible and get on board. (were some more amazed at the science or that Op Warp Speed was an apt name? – either way, many gob smacked).
You’d think Trump’s ego would crow endlessly about this. It is ultimate bragging rights, worldwide. He (the fed funded science under his watch) is the savior of the world! Yet the need for immediate worship – oh no I’m being booed at a rally for touting these vaccines! – or whatever else I’m too exhausted by doing neuro consults in ICU’s across the pandemic peak to analyze – has meant he has not aggressively claimed this major achievement, and in fact encouraged many efforts to undermine it and needlessly rack up the death toll, efforts which have been successfully expanded to everything vaccine. WTF?! How is this so?!
I find the fact that the “heroic effort” statement is not snark to be a giant light shining on a big, big problem (WTF?! as above). Leaning into the reality of “heroic effort” helps maintain focus on the true contours of the big, big problem.
They’d spent many years working on one for SARS/MERS. They used that research to develop the COVID vaccines. The ones complaining about speed don’t know that.
That, and research on mRNA vaccines in general began decades earlier — as far back as 1960s-1970s.
Operation Warp Speed wasn’t just the vaccine; the name referred to the finalized development of multiple vaccine candidates including mRNA versions, manufacturing sufficient to expected needs, roll-out infrastructure, as well as testing and therapies for the virus. All of that combined happened in a tight window and therapies didn’t really keep pace with the vaccine.
Too much for Trump and his merry band of know-nothings to get their heads around in order to construct an effective pro-Trump PR program around it, though Team Trump may also have been getting pressed by domestic and foreign hostile entities not to encourage Operation Warp Speed as it didn’t serve certain anti-US interests.
Same entities may be those demanding RFK Jr. in HHS for the same reasons.
Credit where it is due, ‘operation warp speed’ developed multiple excellent vaccines in a fraction of the time it usually takes to develop one.
Trump, after a couple of attempts to claim the win, began to crap all over the vaccine, and failed to support it. When his supporters booed him when he tried to claim credit for the successful project he changed tack, and never looked back.
The one truly successful, positive project for his administration, and he crapped all over it.
ANd the tension you lay out is behind my fascination. Did he nominate RFK bc he owed someone? Trump never pays his debts and RFK, at least, didn’t have the means to force him to.
Or did Trump nominate RFK bc he really isn’t in control of the conspiracy theorists anymore? Because he really has to completely capitulate to it.
My theory is Trump nominated RFK because that accrues toward “expanding” his base. He’s got the hardcore MAGAts, who are basically racist and full of grievance. He’s got the lion’s share of evangelicals and radical Catholics too, so there’s the religious component. RFK, aside from being anti-vax and conspiratorial, is connected to the “wellness-bro” scene, which may be roughly categorized as “libertarians who make bank by selling supplements”. There’s a lot of them out there making tons of $$$ and they all love RFK Jr. Ever hear of Aubrey Marcus? Charles Eisenstein? (He was RFK’s campaign manager and speechwriter before the campaign disbanded). Many of them live near each other in gated compounds on the outskirts of Austin TX.
The MAHA bandwagon includes all these types plus the tradwifes, the free-birthers, and various nutty “new-age” types whose philosophies are more inclined toward conspiracies as opposed to grounded spirituality.
I highly recommend the Conspirituality podcast for info and extensive deconstruction of this whole scene. Here’s a link to one podcast (of many) they did on RFK Jr.:
https://www.conspirituality.net/episodes/222-rfk-jr-as-the-worm-turns
In the same way he’s finding himself forced to deal with Elmo across all issues, a guy he can’t make go away with intimidation, threats to primary them or to outspend them in litigation. And a guy who has a larger global social network than Trump.
I don’t think Trump believes he needs to control the conspiracy theorists, he just has to encourage them to create chaos. The real goal is that his voters can’t distinguish in a rational way the difference between lies and truth. That got him elected, and will allow him to continue to destroy the rule of law unchecked.
Trump often sends up trial balloons and sees how people react. That might be ‘inject disinfectant’ or ‘operation warp speed was an amazing win!’ If his crowd hates it, or people he is presently thinking are awesome (generals at the start of the first term, Elon now) hate it, he stops saying it.
Short aside:
If Elon hates it, but the crowd loves it, Trump will start paying less attention to Elon. There are a lot of monied businessmen agreeing with the HB visa stuff, but Trump’s crowd doesn’t like it. Trump will either avoid mention of the visa thing at rallies, or start being solidly against it and dump Elon if ‘Trump’s crowd’ come out aggressively against it. Elon made a potential tactical error by coming out so strongly in favour. He should have been more gentle. Look for the warm up acts at future rallies to test the subject.
End aside:
After a bit of time passes since he last brought the vaccines up, he notes that people (especially the warm up acts at his rallies) are getting cheers for being anti-vacs, and he adds it to his patter. Once it becomes an applause line he doubles down, and looks for the biggest anti-vacs guy in the world (who is also pro-Trump) and makes him an ornament.
If it becomes an effort to keep an ornament, Trump tosses it. If it helps him, he keeps it. It is an example of Trump’s need for adoration leading to his capitulation to ‘his people’s’ beliefs. That has always been a thing for him. He started adding Qanon stuff to his patter without any understanding of what Qanon was, but dropped it when it stopped working (and I expect many of the people around him were gently opposed to that stuff. As long as they are gentle, they can work an idea into or out of favour in Trump’s mind as his idea. I used to do that to an old boss all the time, never quite oppose his idea, but gently put it down as difficult to implement or to explain or to overcome resistance to the idea).
Trump’s capitulation was a gentle enough process he can pretend it was his idea. Trying to get a direct capitulation out of Trump to a concept or idea will always lead to him doubling down as a first response, and lead to a much longer period of time needed for capable people to get him to forget the outrage, and reconsider. I guarantee he doesn’t see his change of mind as capitulation or anything like it.
If he had stuck with the advancement of the mRNA vaccines and taken the credit that was in fact his due, and about the only decent thing he did in his first term, he would have won re-election.
I agree. But he couldn’t resist the urge to make vaccines, masks, and lockdowns into more wedge issues. RFK Jr. is just another wedge.
Trump isn’t really able to go against his crowd. He not only didn’t claim credit for the development, he became opposed to vaccines. The dissonance of claiming credit while his crowd is against it would have created other effects that would have effected the election.
Those ‘other effects’ complicate almost every ‘if they’d only done that, they would have won’ scenario.
In reply to Skelly00, “Trump isn’t really able to go against his crowd. ”
This is the way I’ve always seen Trump. He’s not a leader, he’s a follower. To the casual observer, he appears to be in control of his base, but as you also point out, he is just throwing out things he heard/read and seeing how his audience reacts.
Information that gets a big favorable reaction, he repeats and adds to his schtick, and then his faithful propaganda organs in the media amplify it in a way that it appears to have originated from Trump.
In my view, this trait gives Musk even more power over Trump, because he can pick what ideas, policies, disinformation and the like that he wants Trump to do/endorse/believe by amplifying it on X – which I believe has a lot of crossover with Truth Social – so Trump sees it’s something his adherents really go for, he will endorse and perpetuate it, unknowingly giving Musk what he wants.
I enjoyed your explanation of Musk and Trump’s pathologies in another post; do you think Musk is able to recognize Trump’s methods and use it in the way I describe above?
At a minimum, the confirmation of any of Trump’s incompetent picks guarantees immense internal stress in the institutions they head. Even with extensive housecleaning (which would encourage paralysis and confusion) there will be pockets that are opposed to chaos, or at least believe that gravity will apply to them if they go along.
And the metaphor of gravity for consequences is a good one. It gets at the impossibility of Trump’s immunity to consequences, and his minions’s belief/hope that it can extend to them. But Trump isn’t quute immune, like a mob boss he is very good at ensuring there is a surrogate who will “take the fall” for a scheme that doesn’t pan out. If things go south enough for the Incompetents, they will learn that very quickly.
uh oh – replied to !pverby! earlier but don’t see it – too many words? messed up name due to autocorrect? Apologies. Skelly00 more succinctly makes same points. Would only add: the disconnect between “positive project for his administration” and “crapped all over it” = the real problem here. Acknowledging that “presided over a heroic rush” is not snark keeps focus on the real danger, that WTF? disconnect.
[Moderator’s note: your earlier comment has been cleared by moderation. It’s not clear what triggered auto-moderation; some times we don’t know. Thanks for your patience. /~Rayne]
The dual problems presented with “gravity” and “conspiracy theory” are attribution and dead cats.
The former problem has been discussed here to death. “You can’t teach a person a thing when his paycheck depends on him not knowing that thing.”
The latter problem is that the decline will be under-reported and mis-attributed but dead cats bounces will be attributed to Trump and gang as evidence of the success of his misfit crew.
How does this shake out long-run, I dunno.
Oh, gravity is going to hit, and on many fronts. But we have learned that the media will not effectively inform Americans about it.
So, once again, I offer another possibility. Keep it simple. Some group could create a web page titled “Trump Administration Promises.” The page would have 3 columns: Promise(s), Action(s), Consequence(s). Each significant promise would be listed in very simple language. For example, one item in the Promises column could be one word: “Tariffs.” Underneath Tariffs would be a link called “See details.” Similarly, the second column would list any actions (stated simply) that were taken to fulfill the promise. After each action: A link to See Details. Finally, the third column would list the consequence(s) of each action, again in simple terms. This would be followed by the link “See evidence.”
All the information on the “details” and “evidence” pages would be well researched and documented. But the home page would remain simple! Many people just read the headlines of articles. Most people would probably just read the home page of this site. But if it were laid out clearly and simply, and with simple language, it could be a home page that people would return to, and a page that others could link to when they were discussing these promises, actions, or consequences.
As many have said, the media has particularly failed in identifying and explaining the consequences of politicians’ actions. Actions have consequences. Tell people what those consequences are in language they can understand and will peruse.
Gravity is coming! Make sure people know the outcomes. Other ideas to make this happen?
“while I have every expectation to continue doing what I do”
This sent a cold chill down my spine. I have been wondering what your thoughts are about traveling back to the US in the next four years. Kash (or whoever) confirmed— I might give some thought to whether it’s worth the risk.
Matthew Livelsberger openly expressed his belief in the “anti-gravity” conspiracy which is itself an off-shoot of “UFO” conspiracies. His instructions to “Rally around Kennedy” alludes to belief in all of RFK’s health related conspiratorial nonsense as well. Trump (really Bannon) recognized that once someone develops a fervent belief in one conspiracy, they can easily be led to believe in others; if the pipeline is constructed and streamlined. It was. Now the apparatus is being unified.
“What will happen when gravity hits?” you ask.
Conspiracists are neither bothered by science nor reality. Any evidence contrary to their beliefs will simply be folded into the delusion. Look into how the flat earth community recently handled 3 of their own traveling to Antarctica to witness a 24 hour Sun (this is incompatible with the flat earth model.) They demonized the three for agreeing to go, preemptively disavowing them and any evidence they might report on. (Candice Owens was invited and declined but she did send her producer on the trip. The cognitive dissonance/panic this induced in the flat earth community was truly something to behold). Most of them are now convinced NASA rolled out and placed a “Sun simulator” above Antarctica just for those 5 days in order to fool everyone.
Dr. Wheeler named dropped “grok”, I believe intentionally. The goal of generative AI is to output increasingly believable fabrications…..ie who can develop the most believable lie (conspiracy)? Inject Musk/AI/Technocrats deeper into that conspiratorial pipeline. A quick sample. Look at the wikipedia page for United States gravity control propulsion research. The names and dates are accurate but everything else is simply made up. Though believed by Matthew Livelsberger……and fed to grok’s knowledge base.
thank you, Dr. Wheeler. your posts are so amazing and so valuable.
i wonder if (hope that) your complete website could (can) be accessed from internet archive.
Obama’s administration selected quite a few records to be protected there, prior to his successor’s administration’s
ghastly rip-tide management. ah, well – back to finish reading, headache or not.