Trump's cabinet is filled with the worst people The cabinet embodies the worst traits of the
President. Naturally, that makes it dangerous, pathetic, stupid, cruel, and
greedy. America deserves so much better.
Is
there anyone in this administration you admire? That
question came to me while I was walking my dog just before sunrise. It was
the time of day when sunlight has not yet touched the ground but gives the
upper floors of buildings a soft glow. I love that time of day and it
generally puts me in a good mood. But the question nagged at me. Is it
possible the highest levels of the government of the United States consist
entirely of people who are either fools or crooks or characters that are
utterly compromised? I
went home and pulled out a list of cabinet members... HHS
Secretary Bobby Kennedy spent time this week lying to Congress. His
dishonest and incompetent leadership will result in parents watching their
children die of preventable diseases. Attorney
General Pam Bondi told us the Epstein files were on her desk, and that
she would release them. She lied. She has abused her office, weaponized it,
lost its most talented lawyers, wasted taxpayer resources on frivolous and
political prosecutions, and perverted justice. EPA
Secretary, Lee Zeldin moved to close the agency’s scientific research
division. He argues that allowing pollution will help with energy production,
but what he means is that it will boost oil company profits. He rolled back
air pollution standards, ignored PFAS (“forever chemicals”) limits in
drinking water, and gave away the legal basis for regulating greenhouse
gases. Tulsi
Gabbard at DNI? Please. Russ
Vought, at
OMB? The actual devil. Linda
McMahon, at Education? She promised AL would be in every
classroom to help students. Later someone whispered to her that it was
actually not AL but AI. Never mind, she fired almost everybody to effectively
shutter the department. Pete
Hegseth over at Defense? Besides being a white
nationalist thug, he’s an idiot who put highly secret battle plans on a
public chat and invited a reporter he didn’t know to join the conversation.
This week he bombed a boat. How did he not know that was illegal? One of the
first things he did was to fire the lawyers who might have told him. Now he’s
busy training our troops to invade our cities. Kristi
Noem at
Homeland Security shot her dog. Now she’s putting children on planes at 2am
to sneak them out of the country. To a
person, these leaders of our government are unfit for the work. Unfit not
just because, like McMahon, they really do not know what they are doing, but
unfit because they haven’t the character for leadership in a great nation. Let’s take a longer look at Commerce
chief Howard Lutnick. He’s not an idiot. But he’s just as unfit
as the rest of this bunch. His
financial services firm, Cantor Fitzgerald, paid more than $6 million in
penalties just last year for making misleading statements to investors.
Naturally, that qualified him in Trump’s mind to lead the Commerce
Department. Speaking of character references, he is favorite of Elon Musk’s. This
is a man who spent his life as a capitalist, but for Trump he’s willing to
forget all that. As Commerce Secretary, he’s been the point man for
strong-arming American companies. Remember, in our capitalist system, the
government doesn’t own businesses. But in Trump’s economy, well, the
government has taken ownership stakes in Intel and US Steel. Now Lutnick
wants the US to own defense contractors, too. So much for free enterprise. The Bureau of Economic Analysis is part of the Commerce Department. That agency develops data sets that are used to support fiscal and monetary policy. The department produces enormously important indicators. For example, it calculates the GDP. When Trump fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics Lutnick cheered. He said the independence of the agency was nonsense. Remember that when he reports on the GDP. The
National Weather Service is part of the Commerce Department? Lutnick slashed
it. Same with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Never mind
that accurate forecasts are important for business as diverse as aviation and
agriculture. He gutted them to make room for private entities to make a
killing selling us our own data, and so that they wouldn’t be able to warn
anyone about climate change. Two
weeks ago, Lutnick told us that Japan would make a $550 billion dollar
investment in the U.S. in a week. This week arrived, and Forbes reported
that deal was in limbo. Lutnick
was the guy who would make 100 trade deals in 100 days. He made two. He’s
been Trump’s lead tariff salesman for tariffs. Instead of helping American
businesses, he’s joining Trump in telling them to eat the extra taxes. None
of this helps America. Then
there’s this… His old firm, now run by his sons, is buying up the rights to
collect tariff refunds when the Supreme Court rules that Trump never had the
authority to impose them in the first place. According to Wired, and repeated
in TPM, the firm is paying 20 to 30 cents on the dollar for tariff refunds.
They stand to make an enormous windfall- somewhere between tripling and
quintupling their investment. Trump says we’ve collected trillions in tariff
taxes. Most normal people think it’s closer to $30 billion. That’s a lot of
room for the kids of the man in charge of the tariff scheme to profit from
the tariff scheme. That
sort of thing used to be a problem. Not anymore. In Donald Trump’s America,
if you can enrich yourself at someone else’s expense, if you can hurt someone
but do it on TV, if you are willing to help turn the coercive power of
American government against political adversaries and American citizens, then
you can be in the Cabinet. I
really didn’t have to look. The last Cabinet meeting should have told me
everything I needed to know about these men and women. You remember that
meeting? It was set up as a reality TV show where the contestants – those
cabinet members- competed to spend the most time kissing Donald Trump’s ass
in front of the cameras. It’s hard to image that taxpayers have to foot the
hefty salaries of officials who spent hours drafting and memorizing their
lines for that farce. Fools,
people helplessly in over their heads, liars, sadists, and folks like Lutnick
who don’t have a problem with breaking the global economy so long as they
make a profit. That’s what passes for the government of this once proud
nation.
|
||||||||||||||||||
