It has been over two months since Donald Trump won the Presidency.
I had written quite a lot about the election and the danger that I believed Donald Trump posed if elected, both domestically and on the world stage.
In the interest of fairness, I decided to withhold any commentary about what kind of administration he might assemble and the direction it might take until I saw the people he would name to serve in his administration.
Looking at his cabinet choices and White House staff positions named so far, I’m afraid that the fears I held about what kind of administration he would preside over, are coming true.
While Abraham Lincoln assembled a “Team of Rivals,” Donald Trump is assembling a Team of Deplorables.
His choice for Attorney-General, the far right, racist dingbat, Jeffrey Beauregard Sessions, who represents Alabama in the United States Senate is a signal of what is to come. Sessions was one of the few judicial nominees in history to be denied confirmation by the U.S. Senate because racist remarks and views he held while a U.S. Attorney in Alabama during the Reagan Administration. His record on voting rights can be summed up in an episode where he indicted individuals that were registering African-Americans to vote in Alabama while he was U.S. Attorney. The jury hearing the case returned an acquittal in a matter of hours.
He has nominated Congressman Tom Price from Georgia to be Secretary of Health and Human Services. Price wants to repeal Obamacare immediately and strip the 20 million people who now have health care of their coverage. He is anti-choice, anti-LGBT and, along with Paul Ryan, would turn Medicare into a voucher system rather than a single-payer system.
His nominee for Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos, is an enemy of public education. Married to an heir to the Amway fortune, DeVos and her husband are the deepest pockets of Republican Party contributors in the state of Michigan. She championed vouchers and charter schools in an effort to starve the public schools in Michigan. When her campaign to expand charter schools in Detroit resulted in academic performance disaster, she resisted any attempt to remedy the situation legislatively.
Trump’s choice for Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, former presidential candidate, Ben Carson, will preside over an agency, notwithstanding his previous admission that he lacked the experience to run a cabinet department and has no background whatsoever in the issues the department must address.
Former Texas Governor, Rick Perry, is nominated to head the department of Energy. During the 2012 Republican primaries, Perry advocated abolishing the agency on the occasions he could remember its name.
Trump’s choice to head the Environmental Protection Agency, Scott Pruitt, is a “climate change denier.’ Pruitt has made it his career to sue the agency he has been nominated to run on behalf of the oil industry while he was Attorney-general of Oklahoma. He has been known incorporate oil company opposition arguments verbatim into his court filings and position papers on behalf of the state of Oklahoma.
The nominee for Secretary of Labor, an agency whose mission is to protect workers, is an opponent of an increase in the minimum wage and a rule that would make more employees eligible for overtime pay. Andy Puzder is the CEO of the parent company that owns Hardees, the fast food restaurant chain. Ironically, it was the fast food workers who were in the forefront of the successful campaign to raise the minimum wage to fifteen dollars per hour.
The two most deplorable choices do not require confirmation by the United States Senate.
Trump has chosen retired General Michael Flynn to be his National Security Adviser. Flynn apparently earned trump’s loyalty by leading Trump supporters in chants of “lock her up” about Democratic Presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton, at the Republican National Convention and at various events on the campaign trail to the embarrassment and chagrin of other military leaders both active and retired.
Flynn was fired from his position as Director of the Defense intelligence Agency because of his inability to work with others in the intelligence community. Part of the problem was he felt he was entitled to his own set of facts, whether true or untrue, which his colleagues called “Flynn Facts.”
Flynn has a demonstrated inability to be able to distinguish “fake news” from real news. During the campaign he often retweeted fake news stories that were obviously fabricated including one alleging that Clinton, former President Bill Clinton and others were involved in sex rings involving pedophilia. Flynn’s son, who was employed by the Trump Transition Team and slated to be his father’s assistant, was fired after an incident that occurred in a Washington, D.C. pizza parlor. The incident involved a gunman taking over the establishment and firing a gun, while claiming to “investigate” a fake news story that the restaurant was the site of a child sex trafficking ring. Once order had been restored and the fake news story debunked, Flynn’s son took to his twitter account to declare that the fake news story was true until proven otherwise.
Needless to say, common sense and good judgement isn’t part of the Flynn Family’s genetic makeup.
While the lack of these characteristics might be excused in many cases, having a National Security Adviser, who lacks them, making decisions about war and peace and possibly nuclear Armageddon is a bit disconcerting.
The other appointment that should send a shiver up the spine of every American is that of Stephen Bannon as Senior Counselor and Chief Strategist in the soon to be Trump White House. Bannon was a founding member and Chief Executive of Breitbart News, the anti-Semitic, anti-Gay, anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant, racist, sexist, xenophobic news organization which is a haven for Klan leader, David Duke, neo-Nazi’s and a wide assortment of hate groups. It appears that at long last America has its own native Joseph Goebbels.
One can only wonder what strategies will be employed.
We are about to inaugurate the fourth President in our history who has lost the popular vote.
His mission should be one to unite us rather than divide us.
These choices don’t do that.
America deserves better.