Donald Trump's first leadership picks: Racists, autocrats, and crooks, oh my!

Donald Trump's first nominations for his presidency are coming out, and the picks are about as bad as can be imagined. For national security adviser, Trump has picked retired General Michael Flynn, for attorney general, he has tapped Sen. Jeff Sessions (R- Ala.), and for CIA director, he has chosen Rep. Mike Pompeo (R-Kan.).

I will consider these men in detail, but we should remember much of what is about to happen is a clear consequence of President Obama's failure to bring the security apparatus to heel. He largely embraced the Bush-era security framework, and even pushed it further in the areas of dragnet surveillance and drone assassination. Bush and Obama built a turnkey tyranny, and now Donald Trump can go hog-wild with it. Here's the first inklings of how it's going to happen.

Let's take these nominees in turn, going from bad to worse. First, Mike Pompeo. This guy is a standard Republican hardliner, mainly known for writing a spittle-flecked 48-page addendum to the report of the Benghazi committee. He also opposes the Iran nuclear deal, and thinks that the minor reforms to NSA spying should be immediately repealed and full-blown dragnet surveillance should resume. Simply protecting one's communications is bad, he thinks: "[T]he use of strong encryption in personal communications may itself be a red flag," he wrote in January.

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Now, Jefferson Beauregard Sessions. This guy is — there is simply no getting around it — a gigantic racist. Named after a confederate general, he's a classic southern good old boy, best known for attempting to prosecute Albert Turner, a black political activist who registered thousands of black Americans to vote after the passage of the Voting Rights Act. As a U.S. attorney, Sessions prosecuted him on very obviously trumped-up charges of electoral fraud, of which he (and two other defendants) were found innocent.

Only a few months later, President Reagan nominated Sessions to a federal judgeship. During the hearings, witnesses testified that Sessions said the ACLU and NAACP were "communist inspired" and "un-American," that a white civil rights lawyer was "a disgrace to his race," and that he thought the KKK was "okay" until he heard they were "pot smokers." Oh, and he repeatedly called a black assistant U.S. attorney "boy." The Senate voted down his nomination.

Republicans have already been directing systematic disenfranchisement efforts at blacks on the state level. Now we may have a Strom Thurmond-esque figure in charge of the federal law enforcement apparatus, probably to be empowered with limitless spying capability. Left-wing, civil rights, and especially Muslim groups should prepare for a COINTELPRO-style campaign of harassment, infiltration, and sabotage.

Finally, General Flynn. This guy is one of the kookier of America's retired generals (and that's saying something), probably best compared to the Jack D. Ripper character in Dr. Strangelove. He is absolutely obsessed with Islamist terrorism, saying that Sharia law is spreading in the United States, that it is "RATIONAL" to fear Muslims, and that "I've been at war with Islam, or a component of Islam, for the last decade."

He's also friendly with strongmen the world over. He suggests America should work with Russia in Syria, and he attended a dinner in Moscow last year where he was seated directly next to Vladimir Putin. Flynn's consultancy was paid to lobby by a Dutch company owned by a Turkish businessman with close ties to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Lo and behold, on election day Flynn published an article on The Hill calling for help for Turkey, and lambasting the regime's old opponent, Fethullah Gülen. Conservative analyst Michael Rubin noted the article "sharply...diverged from Flynn's previous positions."

All in all, it's classic Trump, a highly alarming combination of authoritarianism, xenophobia, and corruption. Senators, take note.