Asshole of the Month: Vivek Ramaswamy
On November 6th of last year, half the nation awakened to the confirmation that the election results were not a sweat-drenched nightmare but a dreadful reality: We will have to endure four more years of the Orange Buffoon occupying the White House. To complete the horror, the House and Senate will be dominated by Republicans, along with the Supreme Court. For many of us, it feels like receiving a diagnosis of cancer. Can we and American democracy survive this onslaught?
Trump lost no time in appointing or nominating a rogue’s gallery of henchmen and unqualified half-wits to his cabinet and other positions in the federal government. It’s possible that many of them will not survive the confirmation process—one area where Democrats can still exercise some resistance. But Trump also created a whole new entity beyond the purview of Democrats or anyone within the federal government: the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), to be headed by two filthy rich oligarchs with zero experience in government —Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy.
DOGE is not really a department at all—the President cannot simply create a new one by fiat. It’s more akin to a blue-ribbon commission or committee created to study a problem and offer advice that could be implemented by executive order, regulatory bodies, or laws enacted by Congress.
DOGE is ironic because Trump was actually hostile to the whole idea in his first term, spouting this in 2018: “We can’t just keep setting up blue-ribbon committees with your wife and your wife and your husband and they meet and they have a meal and they talk. Talk, talk, talk…. That’s what I got in Washington. I got all these blue-ribbon committees. Everybody wants to be on a blue-ribbon committee.” Well, Elon and Vivek are going to be talk-talk-talking a lot soon about their mission to shrink or dismantle large swaths of federal government that they hold in utter contempt. It will then be up to Trump and his official cronies to make the talk walk.
