Wednesday, February 5

The first few weeks of President Donald Trump’s second tenure in the White House have been so chaotic and ruthless that it’s hard to not fall into total despair. In this week’s Eye On The Right, I explain why we should give more credit to the lawyers and pro-democracy advocates who’ve been planning for this moment for the better part of a year. Plus, a look at the latest updates on two of Trump’s most troubling cabinet picks: Kash Patel and Pam Bondi.

As always, thanks for reading.

— Matt Cohen, Senior Staff Writer

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Trump is Doing Exactly What We Expected

It hasn’t even been a month since Trump returned to the White House and yet, given all he’s done in such a short time, it feels like years. Executive orders attacking civil rights galore, pardoning of the Jan. 6 rioters and an assault on the federal workforce unparalleled in modern history. It all feels so sudden and scary, and the lack of any sort of coherent response from the Democratic Party adds an acute hopelessness to the mix.

But this is exactly what Trump said he would do and — despite how it may seem — people were paying attention, gearing up to meet this moment. I spent much of last year reporting on Project 2025, speaking with various legal experts and pro-democracy advocates about the legality of what it proposes and what can be done when Trump tries to implement its proposals. In my interviews and reporting, a common thread emerged: even The Heritage Foundation — the right-wing group behind Project 2025 — isn’t sure if everything Trump is trying to do is legal.

“Repeatedly throughout the Project 2025 chapters, they say to just move forward, go ahead and implement and worry about defending it in court later,” Jacqueline Simon, the public policy director of the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), told me back in November. “Expect legal challenges, because they know what they’re doing is unlawful.”

And that’s exactly where we are right now. Nearly every one of Trump’s executive orders have been hit with a lawsuit. And, in a lot of cases, it’s clear that the courts are skeptical of the legality of these actions.

None of this is to say that the courts will block all of Trump’s orders, just that this moment is one that many lawyers and pro-democracy advocates were expecting and prepared for. And, how judges will rule on these lawsuits — even conservative and Trump-appointed justices, of which there are many — isn’t predictable.

Kash Patel Refuses to Say Trump Lost the 2020 Election

The U.S. Senate has been busy in the past couple weeks holding hearing after hearing to consider all of Trump’s cabinet picks. And they’ve been nothing short of, well, tense. For good reason: these are the people Trump picked to help run the country and they need to be forced to answer to their various controversial stances and past problematic behavior.

But no other cabinet pick has, at least in my opinion, as many controversial views and problematic past comments as Kash Patel, Trump’s pick to lead the FBI.

Throughout Patel’s confirmation hearing last week, he refused to answer, or sidestepped, a number of questions about his loyalty to Trump, how he’d run the FBI and if he’d use the agency to punish the president’s enemies, as he previously promised. But one question in particular stood out to me during Patel’s hearing: Who won the 2020 election? The question came from Hawaii Sen. Mazie Hirono (D) and Patel refused to answer it. “Did Donald Trump lose the 2020 election, yes or no?” Hirono asked. “President Biden’s election was certified, he was sworn in and he served as the president of the United States,” Patel answered.

It’s no secret that Patel has a rich history of embracing far-right conspiracy theories and disinformation. He expressed agreement with the unhinged QAnon movement, promoted bogus supplements to help people “detox” from the COVID-19 vaccine and even published a children’s book called The Plot Against the King — yes, you read that correctly — that spread deep state and 2020 election conspiracy theories.

All of these are especially concerning for anyone who might run the FBI, but when it comes to voting and elections, the FBI plays a crucial, yet not widely known, role to keep elections safe. In Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for an authoritarian administration, it calls for the FBI to be completely reformed — including a mandate to prohibit the agency from “engaging, in general, in activities related to combating the spread of so-called misinformation and disinformation by Americans who are not tied to any plausible criminal activity.” It’s a frightening mandate, especially at a time when the heightened threat of election-related violence and harassment of election workers is on the rise, thanks to the proliferation of disinformation.

With someone like Patel running the FBI, there’s little doubt that the agency would follow the Project 2025 playbook to a tee.

Hundreds of Civil Rights Groups Oppose Pam Bondi to Lead the DOJ

Speaking of election deniers in Trump’s cabinet, Pam Bondi, the president’s attorney general pick, faced major pushback in her nomination from a coalition of more than 300 civil rights groups.

To recap: Bondi, who during her Senate confirmation hearing also refused to say who won the 2020 election, has a rich history of election denialism. Bondi played a pivotal role in Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election results. As one of Trump’s main lawyers, she spearheaded efforts in Pennsylvania to get absentee ballots tossed out, claiming that dead people cast nearly a million fraudulent ballots in the Key Stone State. She even went on Fox News to say that Trump’s legal team “have evidence of cheating” and “are not going anywhere until they declare we won Pennsylvania.”

These actions, along with her record opposing LGBTQ, immigration and reproductive rights, disqualify her as attorney general, according to a letter spearheaded by the Leadership Conference on Human and Civil Rights (LCHCR). The LCHCR represents more than 240 national organizations that promote and protect the rights of all persons in the United States; an additional 90 other various organizations signed on to the letter, including groups like NAACP, Greenpeace and AFL-CIO — the largest federation of unions in the country.

Though it was quite a large opposition to her nomination, ultimately Bondi was confirmed with much Republican support.