Would you have voted for Trump if you knew beforehand his cabinet picks?

BALTIMORE – Here’s the nice part about the 2024 Presidential election results: within hearing distance, there’s not a single Democrat complaining that the race was rigged.

Unlike President-Elect Donald Trump, who spent four years whining outrageously about his 2020 defeat, and willfully dividing the nation despite 60 different courts telling him to sit down and be quiet, the Democrats have placed blame for their loss on the correct people.

Themselves.

They watched the aging Joe Biden slowly come undone but never had the foresight or gumption to make him start grooming a successor and step aside while there was still time. Whatever Biden’s accomplishments – and there were plenty – the Democrats’ deep thinkers never learned to market them to a public justifiably anxious and angry over kitchen table issues. And, across an abbreviated campaign for Kamala Harris, they never seemed to understand nor fully address those concerns.

And so Americans have elected our first criminal president: a man whose political ambitions are built around personal revenge and whose history is replete with predatory sex allegations, multiple felonies, business cheating…

Oh, and that business about leading a murderous riot in an attempt to tear down the U.S.  government in Trump’s hour of extreme petulance.

And all of this happened before the shocks of last week when Trump started announcing his cabinet picks.

They are, individually and collectively, an insult to the American people and contemptuous of all reasonableness. You wouldn’t trust Matt Gaetz to date your daughter, much less run the Justice Department. You wouldn’t trust Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to serve your child’s cafeteria lunch much less supervise the whole country’s health.

Even though no one’s crying foul on the last election, and no one’s asking for a re-count, it might be edifying to have one more national poll to add to the scores of them we’ve seen over the past months.

This poll could ask one question: If you knew this cast of dangerous, unqualified characters would be Trump’s cabinet picks, would you still have voted for him?

Remember who we’re talking about here.

There’s Gaetz, who resigned his congressional seat only hours before a House Ethics Committee was about to release a report on allegations of his sexual misconduct with an underage girl, illicit drug use, and improper acceptance of gifts.

It was Gaetz who called the rioters of Jan. 6, 2021 “patriotic Americans.” He called for the abolishment of the FBI and the entire Justice Department for investigating Trump.

Naturally, he’s the perfect Trumpian choice to take charge of that department. The two of them will make sure none of the existing legal cases against Trump will ever see the light of day.

Then there’s Pete Hegseth, known to most Americans as part of the weekend “Fox & Friends” crew. Trump wants him to be Secretary of Defense. He has no experience in government or national defense. Even the conservative Wall Street Journal is appalled at this choice.

The Journal’s editorial board called Hegseth a “culture warrior” – apparently referring to willfully provocative remarks he regularly makes on TV – and worried there was “no small risk…the bureaucracy will eat him alive.”

The New York Times editorial board added, that Hegseth “has said he was one of a dozen National Guard members removed from service at President Biden’s inauguration in 2021 because of concerns that he was an extremist –possibly because of a tattoo he wears that is popular among white supremacists.”

Then there’s former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard. Trump wants her to be director of national intelligence. As The New York Times noted, she is “not only devoid of intelligence experience but has repeatedly taken positions in direct opposition to American foreign policy and national security interests.”

Shall we mention the bizarre additions of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and the richest man in the world, Elon Musk, into the Trump entourage? Nah, the question for our little post-election poll remains the same.

If you knew these characters were part of the incoming White House package, would you still have cast your vote for Trump?

Michael Olesker

Michael Olesker, columnist for the News American, Baltimore Sun, and Baltimore Examiner has spent a quarter of a century writing about the city he loves.He is the author of several books, including Michael Olesker’s Baltimore: If You Live Here, You’re Home, Journeys to the Heart of Baltimore, and The Colts’ Baltimore: A City and Its Love Affair in the 1950s, all published by Johns Hopkins Press.