Maureen Dowd
Trump’s Cabinet of
Incompetents
July 12, 2025, 7:00 a.m. ET
By Maureen Dowd
Opinion Columnist,
reporting from Washington
It was a Jack
Nicholson-Tom Cruise moment. President Trump couldn’t handle the truth. He
didn’t even know the truth. And he has no respect for truth, so even if he
knew, why would he tell the truth about the truth?
At a White House lunch
with African leaders on Wednesday, Trump engaged in a bizarre exchange with the
New York Times White House reporter Shawn McCreesh.
The day before, when
CNN’s Kaitlan Collins asked the president who authorized the pause on weapons
shipments to Ukraine — at a time when Russia is engaged in a barbarous
onslaught, indiscriminately killing civilians — Trump replied, defensively: “I
don’t know. Why don’t you tell me?”
The Pentagon’s puer aeternus, Pete
Hegseth, was sitting right beside Trump. And reporters soon ferreted out the
information that perennial screw-up Hegseth had ordered the pause without
telling Trump, Marco Rubio and other top officials.
Trump reversed the
Pentagon chief, reflecting a belated awareness of the fact that Vladimir Putin
is playing him for a fool. Like a spurned lover, he keened that his Russian
boyfriend’s promises are “meaningless.”
In a follow-up the next
day, McCreesh asked Trump if he had figured out who had ordered the munitions
to Ukraine halted.
When Trump said no,
McCreesh pressed him: “What does it say that such a big decision could be made
inside your government without your knowing?”
Trump bristled. A jester
like Hegseth had kept the king in the dark on a consequential move.
“If a decision was made,
I will know,” Trump blustered. “I’ll be the first to know. In fact, most likely
I’d give the order, but I haven’t done that yet.”
It is not reassuring, at a time of
man-made and natural disasters, that the president is spouting gobbledygook and
his maladroit cabinet members are spinning out.
It’s a paradox: If you
choose your cabinet based on looks, you are likely to end up with a cabinet
that makes you look bad. Running government is harder than bloviating on Fox
News and assorted podcasts.
And if you demand
über-fealty from your advisers, you will end up surrounded by toadies who don’t
level with you.
In the dishy new book
“2024: How Trump Retook the White House and the Democrats Lost America,” Josh
Dawsey, Tyler Pager and Isaac Arnsdorf describe how Sergio Gor, a Trump aide
who rose by publishing Trump’s coffee table books, created draconian loyalty tests
during the transition.
“Trump believed the
biggest mistake of his first term was picking disloyal officials, and Gor was
determined to disqualify candidates who had ever criticized Trump or anyone
associated with him,” the authors write.
Kristi Noem is loyal to Trump. But
perhaps it was too much to ask that someone who executed her own puppy was
going to understand the humanitarian necessity of the Federal Emergency
Management Agency.
Noem has been parroting
Trump and talking about abolishing FEMA since she got the job heading the
Department of Homeland Security. She recently enacted a debilitating rule
designed to cut the FEMA budget, dictating that every grant and contract over
$100,000 needs explicit permission from her.
As CNN pointed out, that’s
“pennies” in an agency where disaster costs soar into the billions. At the same
time, The Times reports, the agency didn’t answer nearly two-thirds of
calls to its disaster line because it had fired hundreds of call center
contractors. (Now, confronted with the Texas disaster, the administration
is backing off the eradication plan.)
As Trump was preparing
to travel to Kerr County, Texas, to inspect flood damage on Friday, the White
House posted a meme of him as Superman, playing off the new movie about the Man
of Steel. But the initial federal response was less than super. Noem didn’t
authorize FEMA’s deployment of rescue teams until Monday, more than 72 hours
after the flooding began, CNN reported, and there have been questions about crucial staffing shortages at the
National Weather Service as floodwaters rose.
Pam Bondi enraged the
Trump faithful when, after she inflamed conspiracy theorists about Jeffrey
Epstein documents, her D.O.J. said Monday there was nothing more to see. No
client list. Move along, please. “Are people still talking about this guy, this
creep?” an irritated Trump asked reporters about his erstwhile pedophile
playmate.
Laura Loomer demanded that Bondi
resign, writing on X: “I cannot sugar coat how much good will Pam Blondi has
cost the Trump admin with the base this week. She is a massive liability to
President Trump.”
On Wednesday, Bondi
angrily accused Dan Bongino, conspiracist podcaster turned F.B.I. deputy
director, of leaking stories that whipped up expectations for
Epstein secrets. He denied it, and told people he was considering quitting.
Now furious right-wing
conspiracists think there’s a cover-up of the cover-up.
Vapidly, Agriculture
Secretary Brooke Rollins suggested people on Medicaid could replace deported
immigrants. They can pick our crops! It’s unreal, but Sean Duffy, once a “Real
World” cast member, is in charge of transportation and NASA. And don’t forget the scary spike
in measles cases fueled by the anti-vaccine crowd; thank you, R.F.K. Jr.!
It turns out, even good-looking dodos
are still dodos.
