This is a huge week for Trump’s Cabinet-level nominees. Three of his most controversial picks will appear for confirmation hearings.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump’s nominee for secretary of health and human services, will testify before the Senate Finance Committee on Wednesday and the HELP Committee on Thursday.
Kash Patel, the FBI director nominee, and former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard’s (Hawaii), Trump’s pick for director of national intelligence, have their confirmation hearings on Thursday morning before the Judiciary and Intelligence committees respectively.
Let’s start with Gabbard, the most endangered of the three. We’ve reported extensively on GOP senators’ concerns with Gabbard — her foreign policy views, her trip to Syria, her support for Edward Snowden and opposition to FISA Section 702, her rhetoric on Russia and Ukraine and more.
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) alluded to most of these during his interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press” Sunday. Graham also revealed something that wasn’t supposed to be made public quite yet — that former Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.) will introduce Gabbard at her hearing. We’re told that Burr has been offering advice and counsel to Gabbard in recent weeks as well.
This is significant because Burr is a former Intelligence Committee chair who’s well-respected by incumbent Republicans, including those who are seen as potential swing votes on Gabbard’s nomination. Burr was among the Republicans who voted to convict Trump in his second impeachment trial.
Gabbard’s path to Senate confirmation remains fraught with trouble. At least two GOP members of the Intelligence Committee — Sens. Susan Collins (Maine) and Todd Young (Ind.) — are on the fence about Gabbard. Republicans have a one-seat majority on the panel, so it would be exceedingly difficult to advance her nomination to the floor if just one Republican defects.
For normal people, the job of government is setting and enforcing rules in the common interests firstly of citizens, with considerations about the wider world coming a distant second. How, then, are citizens to respond to a government which seems to have decided unilaterally to discard this approach, in favour of one which sets rules designed to address the interests of “humanity” in its totality? In Britain, a mood of frustration and betrayal is now widespread. And with small boat arrivals rocketing under Keir Starmer, such tensions seem likely to escalate unless policy changes. Similar arguments have driven a sharp increase in support across Europe for “populist” anti-migrant parties.
In this context, we can expect Trump’s example to have an electrifying impact. His willingness to threaten punitive tariffs — in effect, economic sanctions — not to further any “rules-based international order” but instead America’s specific interest, will invite questions as to why other countries should not follow suit. Why, for instance, should Britain not apply its still-considerable political, financial, and regulatory leverage toward the deportation of foreign criminals and illegal arrivals?
Until this week, leaders could shrug ruefully and point to “international rules”. Trump’s actions just demolished that excuse. Concerted inaction on border control, long justified by international rules, has been revealed as a political choice all along. Now, with the hegemon itself pivoting away from such abstract universal rules, it remains to be seen how much appetite Western leaders have for sustaining them, against the clear wishes of their electorates.
The left-wing gender insanity being pushed on our children is an act of child abuse,” Donald Trump declared in a 2024 campaign video. “On Day One,” Trump vowed, he would sign an “executive order instructing every federal agency to cease all programs that promote the concept of sex and gender transition at any age.” He would also ask Congress to ban child sex-change procedures, prohibit the use of taxpayer dollars “to promote or pay for these procedures” in adults, “support the creation of a private right of action for victims to sue doctors who have unforgivably performed these procedures on minor children.” He pledged to unleash the Department of Justice to “investigate Big Pharma and the big hospital networks to determine whether they have deliberately covered up horrific long-term side effects of sex transitions in order to get rich at the expense of vulnerable patients.”
Demonstrating how even gender ideology’s critics have been conditioned to use its language, Trump said that he would ask Congress to pass a bill declaring that there are only “two genders,” which are “assigned at birth.” Presumably, he meant two sexes, which are determined at conception and recognized at or before birth.
Assuming that these are not empty promises, Trump’s victory in November poses a serious threat to the gender medicine industry. That industry, however, was already on the defensive on the eve of the presidential election. Since 2021, 24 states have passed laws banning the use of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries for youth who feel discomfort with their sex. An additional two—Arizona and New Hampshire—have prohibited the use of surgeries, but not hormones. A challenge to one of these laws, from Tennessee, is on the Supreme Court’s 2025 docket. The case, U.S. v. Skrmetti, will determine how states can regulate gender medicine—and, with its 6–3 conservative majority, the Court likely will rule in Tennessee’s favor.
In the 2004 GSS, 31% of people believed gay couples should have the right to marry. Two years later, it was 35%, then it jumped four more points by 2008. Just think about this - when Barack Obama was elected president in 2008, 39% of the country favored same-sex marriage. When he faced Mitt Romney for reelection in 2012, support for same-sex marriage was 49%. When he left office in 2016 it was 59%. A twenty point increase during the Obama administration. That’s probably why Obama changed his public stance on the issue in the Spring of 2012 - the political winds have shifted.
Trump took his place in the Oval Office in 2016 when support for gay marriage was at 59%. Then it jumps a full nine points by the 2018 midterms. In a fourteen year time period, support for same-sex marriage went from 31% to 68%. That’s just a stunning shift in such a short period of time. And because of the velocity of the change, we cannot attribute that to generational replacement. This isn’t a case of old conservative people dying and being replaced by young liberals. That process is downright glacial. No, instead this is lots and lots of people changing their minds. Probably at least 30% of the country.
However, I took a look at the data that the General Social Survey collected in both 2021 and 2022. While the LGBT community made huge strides in advocating for the rights of same-sex couples, that came to a screeching halt in 2021 and 2022. Support for homosexual couples having the right to marry hit a brick wall at about 65%. The latest number stands at 67% - no different than it was four years earlier. Between 2014 and 2018, support rose 11 points. Between 2018 and 2022, it declined by a point.
Who is changing their mind here? Let me show you.
Partisanship is absolutely playing a role in this shift in recent years. It’s evident from this data that Democrats have always been more supportive of LGBT rights. A majority of Democrats were in favor of same-sex marriage in 2008, it took another decade for Republican support to rise above 50%. You can see that the Democrat and Republican lines move in a pretty consistent trajectory from 2004 even through 2016. For the Democrats that line has continued to move upward even in the last two survey waves. The same is not true for the Republicans - their support has dropped from the 2018 highs…
I think it’s helpful for me to spell out the share of each faith tradition that supported same-sex marriage in 2018, 2021, and 2022.
Evangelicals: 45% → 35% → 36%
Mainline: 75% → 68% → 67%
Black Prot: 54% → 56% → 55%
Catholic: 73% → 66% → 68%
Other Faith: 70% → 65% → 75%
No Religion: 85% → 83% → 88%
Notice anything there? Yeah, several Christian groups have reversed themselves on same-sex marriage. For evangelicals, support has dropped by ten points between 2018 and 2022. For the mainline, it’s down about 8 points. For Catholics, it’s down about six points. For the other groups (Black Protestants, Other Faith, and No Religion), there hasn’t been a whole lot of movement. It looks like the white majority Christian groups have moved clearly to the right on same-sex marriage in the last couple of years.
