Trump's Cabinet Reflects Trump's Values -- Surfaces Are Everything

 

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.

--Maureen Dowd

 

How did Kristi Noem get her job at Homeland Security, and how's that going? Dowd supplies the short answer: "Even good-looking dodos are still dodos." What qualified Noem for her job? Not just good long hair and pouting lips but blind loyalty to Jethro, and the imagination to do what she thinks Trump will applaud -- not to mention a history of snap judgements, like shooting a puppy. Elevated to high office and confirmed by the U.S. Senate, Noem has rotely done the trumpian things: fired a bunch of people, froze a bunch of money, insulted the press, demonized foreign brown people.

But as an administrator over crucial Federal disaster agencies, for which no one ever swore she was remotely qualified, she's been a disaster. She doesn't know what she's doing, though she obviously thinks she's doing right, executing Trump's threat to shut down FEMA. She had already fired hundreds of emergency call center workers, so that almost two-thirds of all calls from the Texas flood zone went unanswered. She had also demanded tight control -- her personal authorization -- of any expenditure over $100,000. Can you not guess what happened next? Her personal authorization means FEMA’s deployment of rescue teams to the Texas hill country didn't get the orders until more than 72 hours after the flooding began.

The Trump Cabinet: Absolute loyalty plus a good Q rating* on TV, which means Fox News, which means MAGA's gonna cheer another dodo named Pete Hegseth, a 2nd-tier Fox host. Most recently he likely thought he was doing something Trump would applaud -- cut off arms shipment to Ukraine -- but he only managed to embarrass Trump in public. At a White House press conference, CNN’s Kaitlan Collins asked the president who authorized the pause on weapons shipments to Ukraine. Trump replied, defensively: “I don’t know. Why don’t you tell me?” Yikes.

And consider the blondie loyalty of Pam Bondi, who has played the MAGA crowd like a virtuoso choir director, but then she stepped on her weenie. She baited the conspiracy theory hook, promised a salivating MAGA a big Epstein scandal revelation, and then took it back: "There is no Epstein client list."  She's thereby and quite inadvertently reminded everyone of Trump's many connections to Epstein, and if there's one thing Trump wants everyone to forget, it's any connection he had to Epstein's life style and criminal activity. At a recent Cabinet meeting, with the press in the room, a reporter asked Bondi a followup Epstein question. But before Bondi could answer, Trump cut her off, turned on the reporter: “Are people still talking about this guy, this creep?” 

What's the old country saying? A hit dog will holler. "Are people still talking?" is a total self-own.

No end of Trump Cabinet brilliance. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins suggested people on Medicaid could replace deported immigrants as field hands. Some people think Robert Kennedy Jr. is beautiful like classic architecture, but he's leading us into a medical wilderness, starting with a spreading measles epidemic.

 * Q score is a measurement of the familiarity and appeal of a TV personality to a specific audience.