Thread by @pleasesaveour

🚨Trump cabinet thread🚨

They were the best people, the finest in the land, tasked with returning the nation to greatness. Only some of them had fallen by the wayside. They had not known it was improper to secretly communicate with Russian diplomats
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news.yahoo.com/trump-admits-h…

during the presidential transition (national security adviser Michael Flynn, 24 days in the Trump administration); they had not figured that good-government types might get to asking questions about $25,000 flights between Washington, D.C., and Philadelphia
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(Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price, 231 days)

In the new book, "The Best People" by Alexander Nazaryan, he takes an engrossing look at the Trump cabinet: the scandals, the incompetence, the assault on the federal government, the bungled attempts to impose order on 3/

an administration lost in a chaos of its own making.

He argues that the “assault on the administrative state” promised by Steve Bannon in early 2017 never came. What the American people got instead was Wilbur Ross hauling his tennis pro to confirmation

hachettebooks.com/titles/alexand…

hearing preparations; Scott Pruitt running away from rattlesnakes; Reince Priebus enduring insults from junior White House staffers.

And yet, bungling as Trump’s cabinet members have been, they have managed to either damage or arrest many of the gears that make government run.

They have given away public lands to oil companies and allowed corporate lobbyists to make decisions about what is best for the American people, and have done it all while flying on private jets and dining at the finest restaurants, at taxpayers’ expense.

Yet even as the total

number of inquiries and investigations into his Cabinet approached 50, Trump retained unwavering — or at least apparently unwavering — confidence in the men and women he said, during the presidential campaign, would be far superior to the public servants who came before them.

In February, during a meeting with a journo, Trump read off a list of cabinet members, saying they were great. There were some members missing:

He had, for example, utterly lost faith in Wilbur Ross, the commerce secretary. (“He’s just not tough,” And he had little respect for

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, who had only gotten the job because she was connected and rich.

“There are those that say we have one of the finest Cabinets,” Trump claimed. That is not a commonly held view. In fact, it is difficult to think of anyone even halfway credible

— Republican or Democrat — who has said anything approaching that. Even some of Trump’s most ardent supporters have expressed dismay at the people he has hired

Trump admitted that, during the presidential transition, he allowed himself to be influenced by outside groups,

whether the Heritage Foundation or energy magnate Robert Murray. “I wouldn’t say that I agreed with all of the people,” he told me, “but I let them make their decision.

Once he got into office, Trump quickly signed a stern ethics order that seemed to close the notorious

revolving door that allowed people to move freely between working for the fed gov and lobbying the fed gov on behalf of private interests. But he just as quickly granted waivers that allowed political appointees to violate the rules that Trump had just put in place.

he seemed clearly discomfited by the fact that where Trump saw a political movement, others saw nothing but a means for profit. He did not know, for example, that Ryan Zinke, had joined Turnberry Solutions, a Capitol Hill lobbying firm started by Corey Lewandowski, Trump’s

first campaign manager.
politico.com/story/2019/02/…
“I didn’t know that Zinke…”
In fact, Trump didn’t know at all about the existence of Turnberry Solutions. “That’s an interesting name,” he said sharply. The name was interesting because Turnberry was also the name of a Trump-owned

golf course in Scotland.

politico.com/story/2017/11/…

Among the 33 former officials, at least 18 have recently registered as lobbyists. The rest work at firms in jobs that closely resemble federal lobbying.
propublica.org/article/the-lo…

There was also the matter of more than 100 key administration positions that remained unfilled. Trump

contradicted this, unsurprisingly, because it did not fit his radiant vision of his own administration, however warped that vision was. “I have 10 people for every job,” he added. “The hard part is choosing, because I have great people.”
news.yahoo.com/trump-admits-h…

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