Last week, Donald Trump's nomination of Anthony Tata to be the next undersecretary of defense for policy collapsed after Tata, a racist, conspiracy theory-promoting nut, failed to win support from even this Republican Senate. Because the role requires Senate confirmation, that would, in any other administration, have been the end of it.
It wasn't. Because Trump and his team of bottom-tier authoritarians withdrew the nomination—and immediately afterwards simply put Tata in the same role by fiat, without Senate approval.
The retired Army brigadier general with a penchant for conspiracy theories has now been appointed as "the official Performing the Duties of the Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Policy reporting to the Acting Undersecretary of Defense for Policy." No, seriously, that's his official title, with "Performing the Duties of" and "Acting" modifiers tacked on to do the embarrassing duty of informing bystanders just how ad hoc and patchwork the arrangement truly is as Trump simply dodges whatever small limits on his authority the Senate and Constitution might inconvenience him with.
The end result here is that The Artist Formerly Known as Tata is now the acting deputy of the still-acting undersecretary role he was nominated for, doing effectively the same job. And there's a bonus: Federal law prevents anyone from assuming the title of "acting" undersecretary unless they've worked at least 90 days in the deputy's role, law professor Steve Vladeck noted to CNN.
That means in 90 days, Trump's desired (and partisan, and racist) conspiracy crank can assume the "acting" authority of the very job the Senate rejected him for. It's a White House move to openly defy the Senate's constitutional authority by … simply ignoring it.
Just why Trump's team is so bent on filling the government with blatantly unqualified and sketchy people is still not entirely clear. Part of it is the simple truth that nobody with any sense wants to work for Trump, especially not as his presidency (hopefully) winds down. Part of it is that Trump surrounded himself with conspiracy cranks and D-list conservatives from the get-go, which quickly turned self-perpetuating. And part of it is that since Trump's only metric is absolute fealty to his royal orangeness, it doesn't actually matter what each nominee's record is, or what their positions are. Kiss the boot and you'll be fine.
So I take that back—we do know why his team seems bent on filling the government with unconfirmed, unconfirm-able weirdos. It's the Dunning-Kruger effect turned into organizing government principle.