If you wanted to test the loyalty of the U.S. Senate and its members’ willingness to capitulate to you and your agenda, you might do what the president-elect just did: nominate a slew of underqualified and unsavory characters to lead the nation’s most important institutions, all at once, and dare the upper chamber’s majority to say “no.”

In the past 72 hours, Donald Trump has named former Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., to lead the Department of Justice; former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, D-Hawaii, to oversee the U.S. intelligence community; and anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead the Department of Health and Human Services. All three lack relevant leadership experience and have been accused, respectively, of having sex with a 17-year-old, spreading deranged conspiracy theories about Syria and Ukraine, and having a literal worm eating away at their brain (actually, Kennedy said that about himself).

Then there’s the Fox News personality, Pete Hegseth, who doesn’t wash his hands and maybe has white nationalist symbols tattooed all over his body, that Trump picked to lead the Department of Defense.

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What are Senate Republicans going to do, their party’s 78-year-old leader seems to be asking: Go along with the MAGA agenda that was just embraced by a narrow majority of American voters or take the blame for immediately derailing the second Trump presidency? Seventy-six million Americans spoke — and they said, whether they knew it or not, that they want........

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