One important point that gets lost in the avalanche of coverage about Donald Trump’s appalling Cabinet nominees is that they’re all (except the ones who withdraw) going to have to undergo confirmation hearings next year. Those hearings are a long way away—they’ll be held in February or March, mostly. By nominating all these people faster and earlier than usual, Trump has given Senate Democrats a long time to prepare and plot strategy.

The Democrats are not going to block any nominees. They don’t have the votes or the power to do that. But they can still ask tough questions; they can still command the stage with national attention focused on them. And there is an obvious way they can use that spotlight to do the one thing most observers think is their top priority: to rebuild some credibility with working-class voters.

Let me start by asking you this question: Looking over Trump’s nominees, what is the great unifying theme? No, it’s not that they’re all Trump loyalists. That’s true, but it was a given and is thus uninteresting. No, it’s not that they’re awful toward women. That’s true of some of them, but only some. No, it’s not that they’ve said and promised to do shocking things. That’s true too, and they should be questioned aggressively on those matters, but that still isn’t the great theme.

The great theme is how many of them are massively rich. I saw on Alex Wagner’s show Thursday night that the combined net worth of Joe Biden’s Cabinet was $118 million. That’s not chicken feed, and no doubt if we went back to late 2020–early 2021 we’d find a bunch of Fox News segments on what a bunch of hypocritical plutocrats Democrats are.

But the total net worth of Trump’s Cabinet? It’s at least $13.3 billion, and that’s not because there are just one or two really wealthy picks. Just-named Small Business Administration nominee Kelly Loeffler and her husband, for instance, are worth $1 billion. By Axios’s count, at least 11 billionaires "will be serving in key roles in the administration" if they’re all confirmed. That’s not even counting Vivek Ramaswamy and Elon Musk, who won’t be official Cabinet members. If you throw them in, the total is $360 billion (the vast majority of which is Musk, the world’s richest man). And then, of course, there’s the billionaire presiding over all of them.

But let’s stick with the roughly $14 billion net worth of those nominees who’ll appear before the Senate. It’s a staggering figure. It’s often forgotten that one of the core characteristics of authoritarian regimes, along with extremism and nativism and so on, is corruption. Authoritarians are corrupt and self-dealing, from Hermann Goering’s art collection to Imelda Marcos’s shoes. And, accountability being a bourgeois democratic concept, it’s something they laugh at. It’s in their nature.

I don’t know how all these people made their money. I don’t quite agree with Balzac that there’s a crime behind every fortune, and of course there are certainly ways in which people who build large companies are to be admired because of their contributions to technological innovation or their communities or both. But I do believe two things.

Revisit this conversation with The New Republic’s senior editor Alex Shephard, literary editor Laura Marsh, and contributing editor Osita Nwanevu, as well as n+1’s publisher, Mark Krotov, about the state of culture during Trump’s first term and what the next four years will hold for books and the arts in his second.

One: The vast majority of great fortunes in this country in this day and age are made with a helping hand, somewhere along the way, from the federal government—a favorable agency ruling, a soft plea deal with a federal prosecutor for something or other, a government loan. Indeed, Tesla in 2010 got a whopping $465 million loan from the Department of Energy. Tesla, I should note, repaid the loan quickly, but still, the company apparently wouldn’t have been able to launch its successful Model S without Uncle Sam’s help.

Two: There may not be a crime on record, but there’s bound to be some kind of skeleton in almost any rich corporate closet. Labor violations, hiring discrimination, failure to pay certain fees or fines, price collusion or manipulation, lack of required legal transparency with consumers. Many companies—maybe most companies—engage in this kind of behavior to one degree or another. And the documentation is always there, for those with the capacity to dig.

So this tees up the Senate Democrats’ big job at these hearings. They have to make sure, when these hearings are over, and whether the nominees are confirmed or not, that America sees them through one lens only: as a bunch of out-of-touch plutocrats. They’ll need to pick their shots well, but surely they’ll be able to find three good cases in which these nominees have in some way made consumers’ lives a little harder than they needed to be.  

Senate Democrats need to bring that out fearlessly and plainly. We live in a country where, thanks to Fox News and the rest of them, your average person believes that the elitists in this country are people like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Well, AOC doesn’t even have a net worth to speak of (needless to say, the right spread rumors not long ago that she was worth $29 million). The real elites are the kinds of people who’ll fill Trump’s Cabinet. If the Democrats use the hearings to advance this argument with evidence and put some of these people in uncomfortable positions with respect to their corporate track records, either because they hypocritically took government handouts of some kind or because they weren’t straight with consumers, they can start to reframe the debate in this country about who is an elitist and who is not.

Will they do it? The Democrats’ track record, alas, suggests they don’t have the stomach for this. But they’d better realize that they are in a precarious position. Kamala Harris lost more working-class voters than Biden. Among non-college voters overall, Trump beat Biden by just 50–48; he beat Harris 56–43. Among non-college, nonwhite voters, Harris still won with 64 percent, but Biden won with 72 percent.  

Maybe Harris just lost working-class support because of inflation. I think that’s probably the case. But is that an assumption Democrats can afford to make? One more presidential election like this one will constitute a pattern that will be hard to break. Democrats must show voters between now and 2026 and 2028 that they are on the side of working- and middle-class people. Being in the minority, they’ll have few opportunities to show that. Confirmation hearings of nearly a dozen billionaires are a golden opportunity, Democrats. Go seize it.

I’ve been doing this kind of work a pretty long time now, and the past week has given me an opportunity as few weeks do to reflect on all that I’ve seen.

When I was a young reporter in New York City, the congressman for the West Side of Manhattan was Ted Weiss. A gentle man with a kind of odd Beatle-wig haircut, Weiss won the seat when the legendary Bella Abzug ran for Senate and lost in 1976. He was a classic West Side liberal—champion of civil rights, foe of Ronald Reagan and nuclear weapons, defender of Israel when that was still plausibly consistent with liberalism (although it was getting hard even then).

Weiss died rather suddenly in 1992—as I recall, shortly before the primary. Wikipedia says there was a special election, and I suppose there had to be, but I also remember a special meeting of the New York County Democratic Committee to somehow bestow its blessing on a nominee. I covered that meeting, somewhere in Chelsea, I think (help me out, Tim James!). The contenders were Tom Duane, then the first openly gay member of the New York City Council, and a youngish and very smart state assemblyman named Jerry Nadler. I liked and respected Tom, but I’d gotten to know Jerry four years before, and it was crystal clear to me if anyone in the New York City State Assembly delegation belonged in Congress, it was Jerry, and no one else was especially close. He knew the details of policy from New York Harbor (one of his passions, on which city power brokers should have listened to him ages ago) to Central America. And apparently it was clear to the voters, who overwhelmingly sent him to Congress, where he’s served very well. 

But now here we are, 32 years later, and Nadler has been deposed as the ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee by one of the most admired Democrats in Congress, Jamie Raskin, whom I profiled in 2022 (and with whom, full disclosure, I have become friendly since). Nadler is now 77, Raskin 61 (he’ll turn 62 on December 13). It’s time. To everything turn, turn, turn.

In its Friday morning edition, Playbook described the seniority fight currently taking place in the House Democratic caucus as not merely hot but "magmatic." I guess that’s inevitable. It’s pretty hard to walk away from being called Mr. Chairman, as Nadler graciously did when he saw Raskin had the votes. But Democrats really need to turn the generational page. On House Oversight, Gerry Connolly of Virginia, the current ranking member, should follow Nadler’s example and hand the reins to AOC. 

And beyond that, Hakeem Jeffries should institute a rule similar to the House Republicans’ rule of three terms as chair, and then you’re out. This is the Democrats’ second great imperative these days, after rebuilding their connection to working-class voters. They need to modernize.

The quiz has begun to recover from the election, although I might share with you that it is rather nervous about the state of thirst for general knowledge in these United States. But not among New Republic readers! So we sally onward.

This week’s quiz: "A state of war has existed …" A quiz on the attack on Pearl Harbor, 73 years ago tomorrow. 

1. Tensions were brewing between the United States and Japan for months over the course of 1941. In a Gallup poll just before the attack, what percent of Americans said they expected war with Japan?

A. 37

B. 45

C. 52

D. 61

2. How many Japanese aircraft participated in the attack?

A. 188

B. 222

C. 353

D. 408

3. The attack was of course a great success for Japan, but it wasn’t the success it might have been because …

A. U.S. anti-aircraft guns took out almost half of Japanese aircraft.

B. the three U.S. aircraft carriers based in Pearl Harbor were out on maneuvers that day.

C. the Japanese ran out of fuel before an anticipated third wave.

D. Yamamoto misread a telegram from the emperor and ordered a premature retreat.

4. The most famous phrase from Roosevelt’s declaration of war speech to Congress is typically remembered as "a day that will live in infamy." But he actually said:

A. "A date that will live in infamy"

B. "A date which will live in infamy"

C. "A day which will live in infamy"

D. "A day that will live in infamy" (i.e., the common rendering)

5. Interestingly, the United Kingdom …

A. declared war on Japan nine hours before the United States did.

B. coordinated matters with Washington such that Churchill spoke to the House of Commons at exactly the same time Roosevelt spoke to Congress.

C. waited to see what Hitler would do and didn’t declare war on Japan until December 12.

D. never officially declared war on Japan.

6. Which of the following is generally considered to be the best and most accurate Pearl Harbor movie?

A. From Here to Eternity (1953)

B. They Were Expendable (1945)

C. Pearl Harbor (2001)

D. Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970)

By the way, Hitler’s most boneheaded move, in a career of boneheaded military moves: reflexively declaring war on the United States on December 11, apparently without giving it much thought. The American people of 1941 would probably have been happy to fight only Japan. How different would the world be? Answers next week, after which the quiz takes another break! Feedback to fightingwords@tnr.com.

—Michael Tomasky, editor 

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