The ridiculous way that President-Elect Donald Trump has gone about selecting Cabinet nominees — parading candidates in and out of Trump Tower and Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, NJ — while making hinting comments to the press and sending tweets, has been entirely as I expected.
Instead of sober meetings held discreetly behind closed doors and news conferences to announce Cabinet nominees, Trump’s process has been a tacky and sordid combination of the Miss/Mr. Universe Pageant and “The Apprentice” reality TV show.
It is doubtful that he has actually vetted any of these candidates for Cabinet positions. He appears to be rewarding big-money donors for their financial contributions to the Republican Party or to his campaign and picking power-hungry but remarkably unqualified people who have assured him they will do the work he promised during his campaign, so Trump can keep his hands clean.
His pick for Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos, has contributed a great deal of money to the Republican Party and to conservative causes, and she has now received the reward or payback that she and the DeVos family expected, according to her article in Roll Call, which I referred to in my earlier post about her nomination to the Cabinet.
His pick for a non-Cabinet position, but an important position nonetheless, US Ambassador to the United Nations, is South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley. Haley is completely unqualified for the position. In her role as governor, she has gone on trips to other countries and tried to lured those foreign corporations to set up shop in South Carolina — but that appears to be the extent of her foreign policy experience. This makes her as qualified as Trump, who claimed that he had foreign affairs experience because he owned the Miss Universe Pageant for three days, before selling it.
Compare Haley to current US Ambassador Samantha Power. Power joined the Obama State Department transition team in late November 2008. Before that, from 1993 to 1996, she worked as a war correspondent, covering the Yugoslav Wars for US News & World Report, The Economist and other publications. After her return to the US, she attended Harvard, receiving her law degree in 1999. From 1998 to 2002, she was Founding Executive Director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of government. In 2004, she was named by Time magazine as one of the 100 most influential people in the world. Nikki has no similar distinctions.
Dr. Ben Carson, a retired physician and Trump’s pick to head the department of Housing and Urban Development, has no experience or expertise in housing policy. He’s never been in a government role, much less been the head of a federal agency. In fact, Carson originally declined a Trump job offer for another Cabinet position, Secretary of Education, saying that he thought his lack of experience could potentially “cripple the presidency” if Trump appointed him. But it seems that now that Trump has targeted him for HUD, he won’t let his inexperience stop him.
These are just three of Trump’s desired hires who are completely unprepared for what awaits them in their new roles.