Meet your new legion of doom: Trump’s potential cabinet
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Donald Trump is going to be president. That’s awful. But the bad stuff isn’t ending there. Trump has the next two months to pick a cabinet, and some of the names reportedly being considered are truly disturbing.
Here are some of the people (nearly all of them men) waiting in the wings to “serve” their country for the next four years.
Secretary of State
The job of the secretary of state is to be America’s chief diplomat to the rest of the world, our public face to international leaders. This could end up being that face:
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Multiple outlets are reporting that former Speaker of the House and GOP primary candidate Newt Gingrich is being considered for the post as a reward for his loyalty to Trump.
There’s a lot you could write about the horrible ideas of Newt Gingrich, like his desire to overturn child labor laws. But if we limit our scope to just his foreign policy views … sorry, they’re pretty bad, too. He thought George W. Bush was too lenient on North Korea and Iran, supported the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and doesn’t think waterboarding is torture.
One of Trump’s other candidates, John Bolton, is a veteran of the second Bush administration, having previously served as ambassador to the United Nations until he was forced to step down when the Senate would not confirm his recess appointment.
A known neo-conservative, he once wrote a New York Times op-ed with the title “To Stop Iran’s Bomb, Bomb Iran,” showing him to be a true believer in diplomacy.
Attorney General
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If you were wondering why Rudy Giuliani went all-in for Trump in the later stages of the campaign, it’s possible the former mayor and federal prosecutor had his eyes on this prize. And he would be one of the worst people to hold the office of America’s top prosecutor.
The Justice Department is currently engaged in efforts with multiple police departments to institute reforms regarding racial bias in policing. What will happen to those efforts when the department is led by a man who thinks Black Lives Matter are the real racists? He is singularly equipped to do a disastrous job.
Another former U.S. Attorney who went big for Trump is Chris Christie. He surely would like the job to, assuming Trump isn’t turned off by Bridgegate.
Interior Secretary
There are several candidates being thrown around for this job, such as Lucas Oil co-founder Forrest Lucas or former Bush official Robert Grady. Both would be bad (sure, put an oil company founder in charge of America’s natural resources, what could go wrong?)
But I’m about to write some of the scariest words you’ve ever seen together in a sequence since “President-elect Donald Trump.”
Secretary of the Interior Sarah Palin.
Palin actually said she wanted to be Secretary of Energy during a CNN interview last January, but, in typical Palin fashion, listed responsibilities that all fell under the purview of the Department of the Interior. Is there any higher recommendation in Trumpland than “doesn’t know how to do their job?”
Secretary of Defense
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This list is starting to get into real horror show territory as we examine who Trump wants leading the nation’s armed forces.Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-AL, is a former Captain in the Army reserves. He once said he thought the Klan was “OK until I found out they smoked pot.”
But we’ll be here all day if we look at Sessions’ history of racism, so let’s stick to defense issues. He vehemently opposed repealing the military’s Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy in 2010. He was strongly in favor of invading Iraq and was one of only three Republicans to vote against a bill to increase funding to the Department of Veterans Affairs.
We can’t avoid discussing Lt. Gen. Mike Flynn—another longtime Trump booster who will probably be interested in the job—either. Flynn’s military career eventually saw him rise to Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency under President Obama. Congress would have to issue a waiver for him to serve as Secretary of Defense since he has not been out of the army for more than seven years.
Since leaving the military, he has mainly distinguished himself by not knowing how digital forensic analysis works and retweeting anti-semites.
Homeland Security
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David Clarke? Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke? The guy who:
- said Black Lives Matter was a terrorist group.
- that they were going to team up with ISIS.
- who cheered “Blue Lives Matter” at the Republican convention.
- said it was “pitchforks and torches” time when a police shooting set off protests in Milwaukee.
That’s just stories Fusion has covered and we’re not even a local news outlet.
Environmental Protection Agency
The head of the EPA working group on Trump’s transition team is Myron Ebell, a longtime climate change denier. And so we may end up having the leader of the agency that is supposed to be mitigating global warming being someone who doesn’t think that global warming is real.
That may be the scariest thing on this list—and remember, this list included the words “Secretary of the Interior Sarah Palin.”
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