During Donald Trump’s first campaign to ruin everyone’s mental health for nearly a full decade, the multi-indicted meme stock pusher who’s been found liable for sexual abuse famously—or perhaps infamously—claimed he hires “only the best” people. What he perhaps meant to say is that he hires only the best people and then fires them almost immediately—or keeps them around long enough for them to realize he’s a dangerous affront to democracy. Then again, by Trump’s own admission, a large percentage of his hires turn out to be awful, unqualified losers whom he hired only because they begged him for a job. In other words, he understood he was endangering the country by hiring incompetent people—but as everyone knows, Trump’s greatest weaknesses are compassion and generosity of spirit, so he simply couldn’t help himself. Unfortunately, when you make over your party to appeal strictly to lowlifes, your applicant pool becomes pretty shallow, and the dose of chlorine needed to disinfectant it could melt the eyeballs out of every skull within a 15-mile radius. So you get awful stories like this one from Wednesday. HuffPost: One of Donald Trump’s county campaign chairs in New Hampshire lost his job as a police officer after threatening to kill his colleagues in a shooting spree, murder the department chief and rape the chief’s wife in retaliation for his suspension over his relationship with a high school girl, according to a newly released report from an internal affairs investigation. Wait, was all that listed in an IA report or on his LinkedIn page? Because this sounds exactly like Trump’s kind of guy. Jonathan Stone, who is currently a second-term state representative, was announced as Trump’s Sullivan County chair by his campaign on June 27, 2023. The coup-attempting former president first came to know Stone during Trump’s 2016 run, when Stone gave him an inscribed AR-15 assault rifle at a campaign stop. At that point, it had been a decade since Stone had lost his job with the Claremont Police Department, which agreed to a settlement negotiated by the local police union that kept the investigative records secret. The documents were ordered to be released last week by the New Hampshire Supreme Court in a lawsuit by a local newspaper over Stone’s objections. Hoo-boy. A few bad apples, amirite? Well, no. Sadly, this is kind of a pattern. Ever since Sarah Palin made addlepated ignorance great again, Republicans have been trying extra hard to separate the wheat from the chaff. Unfortunately, they tend to throw out both the wheat and the chaff—and keep Herschel Walker instead. In other words, when it comes to vetting candidates, employees, and county campaign chairs, Republicans are simply awful, and arguably getting awful-er. Consider Walker. It should have been clear from the outset that he was a terrible candidate who didn’t have two brain cells to rub together, but apparently no one knew his Georgia Senate campaign wasn’t the only abortion he’d been financing. And, of course, former New York Rep. George Santos may have been the biggest vetting fail in American political history—if you disregard Trump himself. The Jew-ish congressman was a font of scandals and controversies—all of which slipped under the GOP’s glowing red (as in perpetually stoned) Eye of Sauron. Meanwhile, Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, whom North Carolina Republicans recently chose as their gubernatorial hopeful even though he’d favorably quoted Hitler and never saw a forced birth he didn’t like, has run into even more electoral roadblocks. ABC News: According to the United States Bankruptcy Court, Middle District of North Carolina, Mark and Yolanda Robinson, doing business as Precious Beginnings, filed for Chapter 13 bankruptcy on January 8, 2003. Robinson had previously filed for bankruptcy on two other occasions in 1998 and 1999. […] Robinson, according to the documents, had also failed to file income taxes for five years. After filing for bankruptcy in 2003, the Internal Revenue Service filed a motion for the Bankruptcy Court to compel Robinson to file taxes for the years 1998-2002. What is it that Republicans are always saying? Pick yourself up by your bootstraps and fucking file your taxes already? Something like that. And let’s not forget GOP Senate hopeful Tim Sheehy, who recently won the Purple Chickenheart for (allegedly!) shooting himself in the arm and claiming it was a war wound. Montana Public Radio: The presumed Republican frontrunner in Montana’s U.S. Senate race told the Washington Post he lied to a national park ranger about the origin of a bullet wound in his arm. The Post reported that Tim Sheehy was fined in 2015 for discharging a gun in Glacier National Park after a Kalispell hospital reported Sheehy’s gunshot wound to law enforcement. According to the fine, Sheehy told the responding ranger that his Colt .45 revolver had accidentally fallen in the park and discharged, lodging a bullet in Sheehy’s right forearm. Sheehy told the Post he had actually sustained the injury while in Afghanistan as a Navy Seal in 2012. But he said he never reported it, fearing it may have come from friendly fire. Sheehy said he lied about its origin in fear the hospital or the ranger would report the gunshot wound to the U.S. Navy, sparking an investigation into his platoon. And here’s another of Trump’s endorsees surrendering to authorities just over a month ago, per The New York Times: A Republican candidate who ran unsuccessfully for Congress in Nevada in 2020 with the backing of President Donald J. Trump surrendered to the police on Wednesday after he was charged with killing a man in Las Vegas last year, his lawyers said. The Las Vegas police issued an arrest warrant earlier on Wednesday for the former candidate, Daniel Rodimer, 45, a onetime professional wrestler, after he was charged with murdering Christopher Tapp, 47, at a resort on the Las Vegas Strip on Oct. 29. Medical workers found Mr. Tapp “suffering from injuries as a result of a purported accident,” and took him to a hospital where he was pronounced dead, the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department said in a statement. Only the best alleged murderers, right? Then there’s Texas Rep. Ronny Jackson, the former White House doctor who thought Trump might live to 200 if he had a better diet and/or the Kentucky Fried Chicken & Donuts Sandwich turns out to be a universally acknowledged superfood chock-full of antioxidants. Remember in 2018, when Jackson eventually withdrew as Trump’s nominee to lead the Department of Veterans Affairs after the White House failed to vet him properly? CNN: Lawmakers said they have received information that alleges Jackson over-prescribed sleeping medication and wakefulness medication during his tenure, as well as claims that an alleged power struggle with another White House physician decimated morale under his leadership in the White House Medical Unit. Jackson also faces allegations that he drank on the job – claims some White House sources characterized as false. The White House doctor is just the latest in a string of nominees – including Gina Haspel, whom Trump tapped to lead the CIA – facing resistance unexpected by the White House. Repeatedly, the Trump administration has failed to recognize potential pitfalls for their nominees or worked to ensure Republican lawmakers in charge on Capitol Hill are on board. Is CNN suggesting there’s a pattern here? Because, yes, there is. And it seems to have emerged as a result of deliberate negligence. For example, in 2019, Rep. John Ratcliffe withdrew from consideration as Trump’s director of national intelligence over concerns that he was dangerously unqualified and had exaggerated portions of his résumé. In 2020, Trump would renominate Ratcliffe—who remained dangerously unqualified—and this time he skated through on a party-line vote. Following Ratcliffe’s initial nomination, however, it became clear that the administration had failed to do even cursory vetting of their nominee, and that Trump had announced his pick before any adults had had a chance to weigh in. But that hardly mattered to Trump, who appeared to believe vetting candidates for high-ranking government positions was the kind of work best left up to the enemy of the people. MSNBC: In the immediate aftermath of the fiasco, a reporter asked the president, “What does this say about the White House’s vetting process?” Trump replied, “Well, no. You vet for me. I like when you vet. No, no, you vet. I think the White House has a great vetting process. You vet for me. When I give a name, I give it out to the press and you vet for me … I give out a name to the press, and they vet for me. We save a lot of money that way.” In other words, in Trump’s mind, the White House has no due-diligence obligations whatsoever. The president will pick someone he likes for an important government post, he’ll alert the media, journalists will uncover embarrassing information, at which point Trump’s nominee will slink away, humiliated, and the process will start anew. Of course, the half-assed vetting goes way, way back to the OG GOP embarrassment, Sarah Palin, who announced shortly after becoming John McCain’s running mate that her unwed teenage daughter was pregnant, très gauche to 2000s-era Republicans! The McCain camp had also somehow failed to discover before it was too late that her head was stuffed with newspapers—all of them. And by no means is this a comprehensive list. There are more examples here, for instance. And let’s not forget Brett “Bart O’Kavanaugh” Kavanaugh. So what does this tell us? That the party that elevated Donald Trump is lazy, irredeemable, and a really horrible judge of character? Well, yeah. But also: They don’t seem to care much about any of that. After all, what are they going to do? Hire sane, qualified people? If they did that, they wouldn’t be Republicans, now would they? Check out Aldous J. Pennyfarthing’s four-volume Trump-trashing compendium , including the finale, Goodbye, Asshat: 101 Farewell Letters to Donald Trump , at this link . Campaign Action
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