Trump's Cabinet is Filled with the Worst People
The cabinet embodies the worst traits of the President. 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 ...
Health and Human Services Secretary Bobby Kennedy Jr. spent time last 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.
Environmental Protection Agency 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 as the Director of National Intelligence? Please.
Russ Vought at the Office of Management and Budget? The actual devil.
Linda McMahon at the Department of 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. Last 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 2 a.m. 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.
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 U.S. 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 gross domestic product. 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 (NOAA). 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, 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 and 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.
 | A guest post by
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And yet the traditional media continues to treat these monstrous fools with deference . If the secretaries don’t respect the office, I find it hard to understand why the media bows to them. Our society has been abandoned by the people we expected to protect us.
Yes, the term is "kakistocracy." What an abomination.