A Presidency That’s Off the Rails. It Took Only Two Weeks.

Opinion|A Presidency That’s Off the Rails. It Took Only Two Weeks.

Bret Stephens: Hi, Gail. Who’s worse: Tulsi Gabbard, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. or Kash Patel?

Gail Collins: Gee, Bret, good question. Easy to imagine R.F.K. Jr. screwing up the vaccination system and sending throngs of people to the hospital, if not worse. But I have to go for Kash Patel — just the idea of giving Donald Trump an F.B.I. director who’d be his yes-man is truly scary.

Who’s your pick?

Bret: They’re all dreadful, though I think Patel came out of his hearing looking marginally less awful than he did when he came in. Stressing the word “marginally” here because, ethically and intellectually, he’s about as far from his predecessor, Christopher Wray, as the Earth is from Pluto. The idea of any F.B.I. director “purging” his bureau of ideologically suspect employees smacks of some Warsaw Pact dictatorship.

On the other hand, both Gabbard and R.F.K. Jr. were … atrocious, abhorrent, anaphylactically abominable. The idea of having a director of National Intelligence who for years was a leading apologist for dictators like Bashar al-Assad and traitors like Edward Snowden is hard to stomach. But maybe not as hard to stomach as a legal shakedown artist, conspiracy theorist and medical misinformer in charge of the American federal health system. So I guess my vote for worst nominee in U.S. cabinet history goes to Bobby-Baby-Chickens-in-the-Blender-K.

Do you think they’ll get confirmed?

Gail: Well, you know how good-natured Trump is about Republican shows of dissent. There are a handful of party moderates who may be trying to figure out a way to look at least a teeny, weeny bit sort-of independent. If any of them comes up with the guts to cast a vote against one single nominee, Kennedy seems like a relatively easy choice — even his cousin Caroline can’t stand him.

And Tulsi Gabbard — you didn’t really think this administration was going to have a wise director of National Intelligence, did you?

Bret: I suspect that Trump wouldn’t mind seeing Gabbard and Kennedy voted down. Unlike Patel, whose job is to protect Trump from legal scrutiny, those two were chosen for purely transactional reasons — two former Democrats giving Trump their public support and whatever votes they brought with them. I don’t think he feels any loyalty to either of them, or any need politically for them.