Vote for Trump’s Worst!
The
competition among his cabineteers is fierce.
By Gail Collins
Opinion
Columnist
·
Aug. 5, 2020
OK, people, I know you’re feeling a
little wan and helpless these days. Sure does seem like a long time until
November.
So let’s take an early vote and pick
Donald Trump’s Worst Cabinet Member. The competition is intense this year. Some
days it feels as if everybody in the administration is trying to grab the grand
prize. That they’re running around with a list in their pocket titled Things to
Screw Up.
Vice President Mike Pence has been a faithful
hanger-on from Day 1. He’s now doing double duty as Trump’s coronavirus czar.
In which capacity he predicted on April 24 that the epidemic would be “behind
us” by Memorial Day weekend.
Last season’s winner, Attorney General William
Barr, certainly
hasn’t been resting on his laurels. At a recent House Judiciary Committee
hearing, he had to be prodded twice before acknowledging that presidential
candidates aren’t supposed to accept foreign assistance. When asked if he
agreed with Trump’s shocking suggestion that a president could move
Election Day, Barr said, “I’ve never looked into it.”
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo came in
second-most-awful last time around. Can he make the big leap? He got a
boost recently from my colleague Tom Friedman, who hinted at his opinion in a
piece called “Mike Pompeo Is the Worst Secretary of State Ever.”
Nothing like the tried-and-true Trump
veterans when it comes to top-notch terrible. But there’s new talent, too,
thanks to all the shuffling that keeps going on. Chad Wolf, the acting head of homeland
security, is
the fifth person to lead the department in the current
administration. If he can hang on until after the election, he’ll have racked
up more than a year on the job — a Trump administration achievement that is no
doubt due to all the prior experience Wolf had as a travel industry lobbyist.
The postmaster general is no longer
officially in the cabinet, for reasons way too dense to explain. But we’re
going to leave Louis
DeJoy in
the mix because of his vigorous efforts to wreck the postal system — a goal
that we’re sure has nothing to do with the president’s hatred of voting by
mail. DeJoy’s top qualification for the job appears to be more than $2 million in
donations to Republican causes during the Trump regime.
Did we mention his wife has been
nominated to be ambassador to Canada?
The Worst contenders keep on
coming: Secretary
of Commerce Wilbur Ross Jr., another previous winner, has been relatively quiet
recently. Literally, since he reportedly keeps dozing off at meetings.
The man is 82 — what do you expect? But he’s still plugging away at the
administration’s priorities, like shutting down the census count four weeks early.
Interior Secretary David Bernhardt is a former lobbyist
for the oil and gas industries, a résumé you will notice crops up frequently.
This has given him the in-depth understanding that allowed him to take a lead
in the administration’s massive financial relief package for oil and gas
companies.
Bernhardt also seems to have been one
of the central administration players in the drama of Lafayette Square, when
protesters were ejected by military police to make way for Trump
and his Bible.
But he’s not volunteering any
information. “The Babe Ruth of stonewalling,” said Ron Wyden, the Democratic
senator from Oregon who’s been following Bernhardt’s career for a long time.
Bernhardt traveled recently to Wyden’s home state where he met with Native
American tribes — and refused, Wyden noted, to wear a
mask.
If you’re into the environment and want
another option, there’s E.P.A. head Andrew Wheeler, a former lobbyist
for — wait for it — energy companies. His latest crusade is extending the life of
gigantic pits of coal sludge.
Or how about U.S. trade representative
Robert Lighthizer? He’s not in the news as much as some of the others, but
we’ll always remember his speech defending Trump’s
China wars, revealing, “I don’t know what the end goal is.”
More! How about health and human services head
Alex Azar?
He’s been on the job a couple of years now, which by Trump standards makes him
a hardened veteran. When he’s not busy failing to respond to the pandemic, one
of his other missions is overseeing the administration’s attempts to gut the
Affordable Care Act and replace it with … some other thing.
You don’t have to reward splashy bad
behavior if you prefer the more modest figures who prefer to screw everything
up from behind the scenes. Like Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, whose standing in the Worst poll soared when people
realized they had a secretary of education who didn’t like public schools.
Secretary of Transportation Elaine Chao may not have done
much for infrastructure, but she sure is connected. Wife of Mitch McConnell,
Chao is also a member of a wealthy and powerful family that’s deeply into shipping contracts. That got up to $1 million from
our government’s recession-fighting Paycheck Protection Program.
So — who’s your favorite? Send me a
Worst Cabinet Member pick in the comments. Voting’s open until midnight Eastern
time on Sunday, and we’ll announce the winners next week.