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Your Holiday Guide to Your New Leaders!

By Ed Goldman

In an apparent attempt to one-up legendary showman P.T. Barnum, President-Anointee Donald Trump has been assembling his own circus of performers to keep the United States on the edge of its seat for the next four years. Let’s meet some of your new best friends, kids!

– Pete Hegseth, the allegedly alcoholic/skirt-chasin’ U.S. Secretary of Defense-in-waiting, said the other day that having gays serve in the military is “Marxist.” Perhaps the Marx he was referring to was Groucho. If he meant Karl Marx, he was notably homophobic—as, apparently, is Pete Hegseth. (Why can’t he be more like Harpo Marx, who never spoke in any of the Marx Brothers movies?)

– Kari Lake has been tapped to head what will now be called the SVOA, or Shrillest Voice Of America. Like her mentor/idol Trump, the Arizona politician has never lost a single election that she actually lost.

– Sharpshootin’ Kristi Noem, who’s been tapped to head Homeland Security, is expected to keep the nation safe from pet dogs already believed to be within our borders.

– While Health & Human Services Secretary-to-be Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.—who proves not only that the apple can fall very, very far from the tree, but can also be infested with a brain worm by the time it hits the ground—didn’t attend UC Berkeley, when he’s around you can still hear sympathetic people yell, “Go, bears!”

– Education Secretary-designee Linda McMahon, the former wrestling exec, is expected to get the national teachers union in legendary grappler Dick (The Masked Destroyer) Beyer’s figure-four leglock until it leaves the political arena.  

– The likely-to-be-confirmed as Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, is a member of the Army National Guard and also, if you believe the rhetoric about her pro-Soviet stances, an international celebrity: the Manchurian Candidate. And if you’ve heard her speak, you’ve no doubt surmised that having a background in (or dollop of) intelligence was not a job requirement.

– Showing what a good dad he is, Donald Trump is also naming his namesake son’s erstwhile fiancée Kimberly Guilfoyle as ambassador to Greece. This is fitting, since Greece is the acknowledged birthplace of such other mythological lunatics as Maniae (often called the goddess of insanity—but rarely to her face) and the similar-sounding Medea, who killed her brother and her kids because she allegedly needed the space for a sewing room in her house. Trump, Jr. is said to be a little disappointed his ex- is going to be only 5,657 miles from Mar-a-Lago: He had hoped the U.S. had an embassy on Mars. If Guilfoyle’s name is familiar to you, maybe you recall her screaming like a banshee at the 2024 Republican National Coronation (oops. Convention) or from the early 2000s, when she was married to then-San Francisco Supe/now-California Governor Gavin Newsom, who first began running for President on his third birthday.