Juan Williams: Who will survive in Trump’s reality show?

Live! All day and all night on your big screen comes the opening drama of the Trump presidency, with a cast of love-them-or-hate-them characters.

This reality television show will be set on Capitol Hill as President Trump’s cabinet nominees fight for survival against angry Democrats looking for revenge after getting wiped out on Election Day.

The opening scene has Trump demanding that Congress should ignore concerns over the heavy military presence among his top advisors. Trump will wave the flag and stir public support for a waiver to allow a recently retired general, James Mattis, to become his Secretary of Defense.

{mosads}Trump needs the waiver to void a World War II-era law intended to protect civilian control of the military.

Trump is likely to win that battle. But then the fight for survival gets nasty.

It begins with hearings for a housing secretary, Ben Carson, who has no experience in the housing industry. He also has no experience in government.

That will be followed by consideration of a nominee for labor secretary, Andy Puzder, who is opposed to raising the minimum wage and giving overtime pay to more workers. This comes at a time when rising income inequality has a majority of Americans supporting a hike in base pay. 

Next the Secretary of the Treasury nominee, Steven Mnuchin, will find himself in a struggle against foes charging Trump with hypocrisy. Trump criticized Hillary Clinton for giving speeches to Goldman Sachs and cavorting with Hollywood elites; Mnuchin spent 17 years at that same Wall Street firm before becoming a Hollywood producer. 

The fight for political survival continues with hearings for the nominee to head the Environmental Protection Agency, Scott Pruitt. He is described as a “close ally of the fossil fuel industry,” by The New York Times. The paper reported that as attorney general of Oklahoma, the nominee sent a letter to the EPA on state stationery even though the letter was drafted by officials of big oil companies.

Somebody is definitely going to get hurt during the hearings on the nominee for Secretary of Health and Human Services, Rep. Tom Price (R-Ga.). It will be a fight over the future of the Affordable Care Act — ObamaCare — as well as a threat to privatize Medicare and Social Security.

Back at the White House, Trump is trying to prevent critics in the Senate from finding a way to publicly review his pick to be national security advisor, retired Gen. Michael Flynn. Flynn’s record is explosive and full of conspiracy theories, one of which linked Hillary Clinton to “sex crimes [with] children.” He has also sent anti-Muslim tweets.

All of that is just an opening act. The deep pain will come over Trump’s pick to be Attorney General — Alabama Sen. Jefferson Beauregard “Jeff” Sessions III. 

This is the same white southern senator who failed to be confirmed for a federal judgeship 30 years ago because of allegations of racism, including one instance where Sessions was heard to have said he liked the Ku Klux Klan until he heard they smoked marijuana.

Sessions did admit that he is “often loose with his tongue,” but meant “no harm,” when asked about his characterization of the NAACP as a “communist” organization. 

Now he is nominated to be the nation’s top law enforcement official. And in 2016 — with ‘Black Lives Matter’ still a movement — the country is far more sensitive to charges of racial slurs and injustice than it was three decades ago.

Democrats will put Sessions on the spot, not just about his own past comments, but about whether he agrees with Trump’s incendiary rhetoric during the campaign regarding Mexicans, blacks, and Muslim immigrants, among others.

Republicans are insisting that Sessions deserves some deference as a fellow senator. 

But Democrats recall that the Senate Armed Services Committee treated a former Republican senator, Chuck Hagel, shabbily when President Obama nominated him to be Secretary of Defense in 2013. Republicans on the committee trashed Hagel with baseless allegations that he held anti-Semitic views and had taken money from North Korea.

Hagel was ultimately confirmed.  

Incoming Senate Democratic Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) argues that there ought to be no special deference shown to Sessions, especially when there is such concern about what the Alabaman would do to the Justice Department’s civil rights division .

Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) told Politico last week, “They’ve been rewarded for stealing a Supreme Court justice. We’re going to help them confirm their nominees, many of whom are disqualified?”

Brown added, “It’s not obstruction, it’s not partisan; it’s [our] duty to find out what they’d do in these jobs.” 

This season of “Political Survivor,” produced by Trump, will blow away anything else airing in the 2017 television season.

Juan Williams is an author, and a political analyst for Fox News Channel.