Trump’s An Enemy Of Democracy? What’s Wrong With That?
The latest and greatest misguided attempt by the liberal noise machine to push Donald Trump out of the public arena is the story making its rounds about how Trump allegedly told his staff chief, Mark Meadows, to pressure the Department of Justice into investigating false claims about election ‘fraud.’
According to CNN, this behavior is “absolutely terrifying.” The story then goes on to quote Senator Dick Durbin that such behavior is a “‘five-alarm fire for our democracy.’”
At the time that Trump was trying to get Meadows to get the Department of Justice to obliterate the last, remaining shreds of our democratic system that had been under assault for the previous four years, the DOJ was being managed by a nice, Jewish lawyer from Boston, Jeffrey Rosen, who had been in and out of government service for the past sixteen years, and was the Deputy Attorney General for the past year.
Prior to joining the DOJ, Rosen had no prosecutorial experience at all. But at least he had a working knowledge of how government agencies function, so we have to assume he didn’t necessarily buy into the idea that anything and everything the word ‘democracy’ means isn’t necessarily all that bad. Can we say the same thing about the other members of the team that Trump’s first put together to run the world’s largest corporation, a.k.a., the United States?
Secretary of —
State: Rex Tillerson who had plenty of experience lobbying the government for big-oil tax breaks but had no experience in government at all.
Treasury: Steve Mnuchin who worked for Goldman-Sachs and then started his own hedge fund. Government experience? Zip.
Defense: Jim Mattis. Retired 4-star general who knew government the way every high-ranking military guy knows the government, through some time spent in the Pentagon.
Attorney General: Jeff Sessions, who had been a prosecutor and then judge in Alabama and almost got thrown off the bench for making virulently racist comment in public court.
Interior — Ryan Zinke, who never ran a government agency but served as Montana’s at-large Congressman for one year before working for Trump. By the end of 2017 he was being investigated for using government funds to pay for thousands of dollars in personal trips, and he quit the following year.
Agriculture — Sonny Perdue, former Governor of Georgia, who actually had government experience although not at the federal level.
Commerce — Wilbur Ross, a Wall Street guy who was named to various government advisory groups over the years but was never on a government payroll of any kind.
Labor — Alex Acosta. who did have government experience except it was in the Department of Justice as a prosecutor. His connection to the labor movement was as an attorney for the D.C. firm of Kirkland & Ellis which represented businesses involved in employee disputes.
HHS — Tom Price, whose experience in government management of the medical system must have come from the fact that he actually held a medical degree and served as a member of the American Association of Physicians and Surgeons, an organization founded in 1943 to ‘fight socialized medicine’ which has also promoted the link between vaccinations and autism. Price also quit the Cabinet after he was accused of spending more than $1 million of the departmental budget for private chartered flights.
HUD — Another doctor, this one named Ben Carson, who never worked in any government capacity but had no trouble exceeding the $5,000 limit for redecorating his HUD office to the tune of thirty-one thousand bucks. He once stated that he knew ‘for a fact’ that the Great Pyramids were built by Joseph, the Old Testament figure, even though the story of Joseph in Genesis is set during Egypt’s Middle Kingdom, five hundred years after the Pyramids were built.
Transportation — We finally have a Cabinet member with real government experience — Elaine Chao. She has served in government ranks since 1989, leaving only when a Democrat moves into the Oval Office, then sitting around the Heritage Foundation waiting for a Republican to get back in. Incidentally, it doesn’t hurt that she’s been married to Mitch McConnell since 1993.
Energy — Rick Perry. A fool who once advocated that Texas, where he was Governor, should secede from the Union again. So much for his concerns about national government.
Education — Betsy DeVos, whose family ranks somewhere in the top 100 richest families in the United States. She has always been interested in quality education, as long as it is chartered at the primary level and privatized at colleges. It’s only fair to state that the day after the Capitol riot, both she and Elaine Chao resigned from the Cabinet and stated that Trump was responsible for the assault.
So here you have the initial senior management team put together by a guy who claimed that his business experience gave him management creds second to none. Exactly three of the thirteen were ever employed by Federal agencies, three if you count Mattis, but then one of the others, Alex Acosta, worked for the DOJ and was assigned to run the Department of Labor. Two others, Zinke and Price, had to quit because they dipped their fingers too deep into the piggy-banks of their respective agencies, Carson got away with grand-theft dining room set by blaming his wife.
Given the above, I really don’t see why anyone should be surprised thatTrump told his office manager to call up a Cabinet member and ask that some kind of activity be put on hold. Isn’t the whole point of the Cabinet to give the world’s most important and powerful CEO an opportunity to run his own shop the way he wants it run?
Am I missing something here?
