Dear Leader Trump Cleaning House of Insufficiently Loyal Military Brass

Tata’s past hits included a number of attacks on Obama, including claims that the president was trying to “subvert U.S. national interests to Islam.” But Obama was far from Tata’s only target. He also accused Hillary Clinton of treason and sedition. And he went at length into a theory that former CIA Director John Brennan—who Tata accused of being an ally of Vladimir Putin— was sending out coded messages to assassinate Donald Trump. For reasons that have to be read to be properly laughed at.

Naturally, all this endeared Tata to Trump, who named him to the No. 3 role at the Pentagon back in June. With Esper and Anderson out of the way, it’s Tata’s chance to move ahead.

As Politico reports, the fact that Tata was rejected the last time he went before the Senate for a variety of insulting and Islamophobic tweets—that’s no longer seen as an issue. Everyone Trump appoints from now on will simply be an “acting” appointment, without getting the Senate involved. After all, what harm could it do to hand the Defense Department over to a racist xenophobe with a long list of grudges, if it’s just for a few months?

Tata probably won’t be moving on up on his own. Previously, Anderson had pushed back against several other potential nominees that the Trump White House tried to plant at the Defense Department. That includes right-wing radio host Frank Wuco, who shares Tata’s Islamophobia in a ‘bigly’ way. That includes making claims that Hillary Clinton had ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, that former Attorney General Eric Holder was a secret member of the Black Panthers, and that John Brennan had converted to Islam. He also endorsed the idea that the U.S. should just turn Syria “into glass” and suggested that the best way to handle Afghanistan would be to drop “a couple of low-yield tactical nuclear weapons.”

But wait, there’s more. Anderson was also the person who blocked the appointment of Rich Higgins. As CNN reports, Higgins wrote a book in which he accused a conspiracy made up of ”the media, Islamists, Black Lives Matter, the ACLU, the United Nations, and cultural Marxists,” who all conducted a coordinated attack against Trump. Which is pretty impressive. If there’s someone who can coordinate all those disparate groups, maybe they should be offered a job at the Pentagon.

Tata, Wuco, and Higgins are emblematic of the kind of selections made by Trump—the kind of selections that, until now, have been held back by the last remaining layers of experienced professionals, or by some level of concern over public perception. But all that is gone now.

The only thing to hope for is that these people won’t be there long, and they won’t do lasting damage.

Edited via The Daily Kos