Trump's Clown Cabinet

When Trump started making appointments for his second administration, I started breathing sighs of relief.  He made Susie Wiles his White House chief of staff, followed by his appointment of Marco Rubio as Secretary of State.  So far, so good.  More recently, there was the appointment Doug Burgum as Secretary of the Interior.  Okay, that makes sense - he's the governor of North Dakota, he's dealt with land-use issues, and the Interior Department deals with resource management.

Then came the flooding of the zone.

Trump appointed Pete Hegseth - a Fox News "journalist" with no experience in administrating - Secretary of Defense.

Hegseth is a combat veteran and an a National Guard officer.  Appointing Hegseth to lead the Pentagon would be like appointing the head teller of a bank branch as Secretary of the Treasury.  Oh, great, I might have just given Trump an idea!

One fear is that Trump would nominate Mike Davis to be Attorney General.  Davis is a combative lawyer who has verbally threatened New York State Attorney General Letitia James not go continue to investigate Trump further or the administration will "put her fat ass" in prison.

Instead, Trump named Matt Gaetz Attorney General. 

Gaetz is known for credible accusations against him for having sex with minors, and he's a lawyer who never had a case.  He's also never run anything larger than his own House of Representatives office.

And I'm so supposed to be happy that the Attorney General-designate is not Mike Davis? 

Meanwhile, a son of a former Attorney General is on tap to be Secretary of Health and Human Services - Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.  An environmental lawyer who would be more useful heading the Environmental Protection Agency, Kennedy is a vaccine skeptic and a conspiracy theorist who thinks he can make Americans healthier with home remedies involving chicken broth, honey, and a calf-liver compress or two - and he apparently believes that the best way to immunize Americans from the measles or the mumps is to have everyone catch them to develop herd immunity.

Kennedy is accused of having no experience with pharmaceuticals.  Not true - he's a former heroin addict!

You're going to need a shot of smack to endure Tulsi Gabbard, who's known for talking smack about American policy in Ukraine and Vladimir Putin's good intentions, in her new role as Director of National Intelligence!

A former congresswoman from Hawaii who was once a progressive and has no experience in intelligence and espionage - except for maybe having watched a James Bond movie or two - Gabbard, who's more of a Bond girl than Bond (yes, I said that), is a woman of Asian and Pacific Islander (AAPI) heritage, suggesting that she would be Trump's token DEI pick.

Ladies and gentlemen, the Cabinet of Trump Mark Two!

Second verse, same as the first.     

The Man, the Boy, and the Democratic Donkey

Joe Biden has been trying to build a "diverse" Cabinet to produce an executive branch that looks like America, but for every group he pleases, he ticks someone else off.  And sometimes he can't even please the groups he sets out to please.

Biden, under pressure from black groups to name more blacks to his Cabinet, named retired General Lloyd Austin (above) to be the nation's first black Secretary of Defense based on his experience with logistics in order to help ease the pain of the COVID-19 pandemic and get more vaccines out to the public.  Smart move, right?  Wrong!  Defense exert Michelle Flournoy was the favorite for Defense Secretary, and choosing her would have made her our first female Defense Secretary.  So women's groups are ticked off.  And progressives can't stomach the choice of Austin because he has too many ties to the military-industrial complex.  But guess what - had Biden chosen Flournoy, who's in even deeper with the armaments industry, progressive reaction might have been even more hostile.

The choice of Lloyd Austin as Secretary of Defense should have pleased black groups, which should have allowed Biden to get outgoing U.S. Senator Doug Jones (D-AL) as Attorney General, given Jones' stellar reputation as a defender of civil rights.  Nope - black groups want a black Attorney General, no ifs, ands or buts about it, despite two black Attorneys General having already served under Obama.  And, on top of all that, Austin needs a waiver form Congress to serve as Defense Secretary because he has not been retired form the military long enough - he's only been out of uniform for four years instead of the required seven years.  Given that James Mattis had to be given a waiver to serve as Secretary of Defense only four years ago, many members of Congress are wary of granting another waiver to anyone.  

Maybe Biden should pick a black Agriculture Secretary, which blacks also want, and that would free him to nominate Jones to head the Justice Department.  Instead, he wants to give former Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack - whom progressives have identified as being in with the big argibusiness companies - his old job back.  

Representative Marcia Fudge (D-OH), a black woman and also an agricultural expert despite representing an urban district, would have been a better choice for Secretary of Agriculture, but Biden has instead tapped her to run the Department of Housing and Urban Development, likely because he figures he needs a black person to run HUD, even though that black person may be less qualified than a white guy who's actually been a big-city mayor and knows how cities are run.  (I wonder if you know who I'm talking about?)  I'll have more on that later . . . and end for now by saying that I'm not pleased about this.

Biden should remember the moral of Aesop's fable "The Man, The Boy and the Donkey."  He who tries to please everybody pleases nobody.