What did Donald Trump do today?

He said he'd put his patron's lawyer in charge of civil rights enforcement.

Trump announced today that he was tapping Harmeet Dhillon to be the Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights. This position has responsibility for, among other things, making sure that Americans' right to vote is protected.

In her private practice, though, Dhillon has been involved in as many as 16 cases in which she sought to restrict Americans' ability to vote—and specifically to the benefit of her client, Donald Trump. Trump lost virtually all of his court challenges to the 2020 election. 

Dhillon is most notorious for having made a direct appeal through the media for the justices Trump appointed, and especially his most recent appointee, to show loyalty to him and find a way to rule in his favor. Claiming (falsely) that Pennsylvania election officials were not allowing Republican officials to witness the vote count, and that Philadelphia election workers were "filling in or 'fixing'" ballots to benefit Biden, she said:

We’re waiting for the United States Supreme Court, of which the president has nominated three justices, to step in and do something. And hopefully Amy Coney Barrett will come through and pick it up.

Dhillon also represented Elon Musk, the mega-billionaire patron who bankrolled Trump's campaign and is now, effectively, an oligarch within the Trump regime. When Musk took over Twitter, the site's usefulness to advertisers rapidly declined, thanks to the toxic climate he encouraged and technical issues that cropped up. When those brands reduced or stopped their ad buys, Musk hired Dhillon's firm to develop a legal theory saying, in effect, that other companies were not allowed to not buy ads on Twitter.

Why does this matter?

• Voters choose governments, not the other way around.

• Public servants should be chosen based on competence, not how loyal they are to the leader(s).