So, we’re a couple of weeks into the Trump pre-administration and we’ve had a chance to take a quick look at what he sees as his cabinet. Yeah, it’s pretty grim. Maybe it shouldn’t be a surprise that the people Trump is picking are so hard Right and so conservative, but he never seemed to be a political hardliner. He was, in fact, accused by many Republicans of being a Democrat, which he was for most of his life. In reality what he is, is an opportunist. That’s what he will always be and that’s a problem for the country.
Interestingly enough, except for Steve Bannon, Trump has abandoned most of the people who got him where he is. That was easy because he never believed that anyone but himself had anything to do with his success. Who knows, maybe he’s right.
So far t he has nominated an accumulation of generals and billionaires, that staggers the limits of rational thought when you consider that Trump ran on a platform of helping out of work, white working class Americans, regain their employment. Of course, most of us who have the ability to look outside our navels understood that most of the jobs these guys had lost would not return, mainly because they were now being done by robots.
This is the future of manufacturing. If you don’t face that fact, you can’t solve the problems that come with it, principally unemployment. But it isn’t just disappearing jobs Trump promised to solve; just as important are wages too low to support a family. So Trump chose as an advocate to attack these problems, Andrew F. Puzder, billionaire owner of several fast food chains that make a living by suppressing their labor forces and as vigorous an opponent of labor as can be found in the corporate swamp. Puzder opposes a higher minimum wage even though most of his employees can’t support a family on the wages he pays. He is against paying for overtime because he claims it will lower the amount of overtime commissioned. Yeah, think about that; he doesn’t want to get rid of overtime, he just wants it free. This is the guy who’s going to be protecting our labor force. This may be the worst man for the job in a cabinet that is already awful. This guy is the exact opposite of what the Trumpanzies voted for. With this pick Trump has absolutely betrayed his base.
Then we get to General Mike Flynn, nominated as National Security Advisor. Knowledgeable people have praised Flynn as possibly the best intelligence mind available today. That’s great, but this isn’t an intelligence job. This is a job for a man with an open mind, without prior attachments to either side of any military or political question. That is not Flynn. Flynn is a radical and he proved it in the past week by re-tweeting false information originated and published by his idiot son. Now, there’s nothing wrong with a dad loving or supporting his son, except when that son is a liar and a danger to his country. Then it’s a father’s duty to restrain his son, not encourage him in is folly.
We spent his morning watching pundits calling for Flynn to explain all the erratic nuances of the personality he has displayed both while he was head of intelligence and since his nomination. But that’s ridiculous. Trump should be nominating people who can stand without apology before the American public, not nut cases who have to make excuses for their actions before they even start to do their jobs.
General Barry McCaffrey who originally started out praising Flynn for his intelligence abilities has now called Flynn’s actions deranged and made a very definite point of the fact that Flynn is not only not qualified but he would be a disaster in the cabinet.
Then there’s the nomination of Scott Pruitt, the attorney general of Oklahoma as head of EPA. This is the department that s supposed to protect the environment. This is a man who s currently suing the EPA to overturn the construction of a clean energy plant in his home state.
This project is aimed at trying to keep the people of his state alive while the oil industry cavalierly goes about creating earthquakes that will eventually kill a good number of t them, just so the greedy oil-a-garchs can squeeze a few extra bucks out of a dried out, shriveled up state. Pruitt’s up there batting for worst pick but he has plenty of competition.
Trying o top off these futile picks, Trump nominated Ben Carson, a renowned pediatric brain surgeon, who in a moment of perhaps drug -nduced insanity gave up a perfectly functional career at which he was very good to run for president. Now, not satisfied to let this nut case slide back into the ooze, Trump has nominated him for Secretary of Housing and Urban Development. But this is a man who once stated that the poor chose to be poor. Does this really equip him to be their champion? If you think this statement fits the job description you are as demented as Carson
This clown has neither government experience, nor any in housing but he will be running a department with a $47 billion dollar budget. Good luck. If Trump wants so desperately to give this guy a job maybe he could put him in Health and Human Services but certainly not HUD.
With a huge plethora of disastrous nominations and not even being close to finished, Trump presents a huge problem to sane governance. The Democrats and some Republicans would like to oppose all of them but that’s just not practical. So where do you start? Is it with Jeff Sessions, a racist and bigot who has been nominated to enforce laws that attack racism and bigotry? Should it be Puzder, the billionaire that loves labor so much he always wants to f**k it. Or will it be Pruitt, the climate change denier who will be in charge of protecting the climate? Maybe they should go after Mike Flynn, a brilliant sociopath who will bring us to the edge of war or maybe even Betsy DeVos who wants to sell out our public schools to privatization so more billionaires can make more money while our kids don’t learn to read. Of course there’s always Steve Mnuchin who foreclosed on 36,000 homes of the poor during the crash and is now going to steal even more from them as he runs Treasury.
I haven’t seen a rogue’s galley like this since I viewed a picture of Hitler’s high command and even they tried to kill him. I always thought George Bush had headed the worst administration in national history but it looks like Trump is going to give him a run for his money.