- White House Press Secretary - Sean Spicer: Aaaargh! The prospect of seeing this guy on TV every day for the next four years fills me with fear and loathing. Click here for my recent post, "The Latest Lie From Sean Spencer"; click here for another recent post, "Trump Lickspittle Sean Spicer On Conflicts Of Interest." His latest gig was director of communications for the Republican National Committee.
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The rest of Trump's White House media staff: Hope Hicks, assistant the the president and director of strategic communications; Jason Miller, assistant to the president; director of communications; Dan Scavino, director of social media. (Director of social media: will he have any control over Trump's itchy Twitter finger?)
According to a post at CNN, Scavino was “a lucky 16-year-old who happened to be in the right place at the right time” when in 1990 he was selected to caddie for Trump. He would later become general manager of Trump National Golf Club, then would “travel the world with Trump visiting courses” before becoming the social media director of the Trump campaign in February 2015.
Scavino has repeatedly promoted stories from Trump ally Alex Jones’ conspiracy theory website InfoWars. Scavino has shared stories from outlets including Western Journalism, The Conservative Tribune, The Angry Patriot, and Gateway Pundit on Twitter. All four of these outlets have produced fabricated news stories labeled by fact-checking websites as “false” or completely “unproven.”
The Guardian reported, “Journalist Megyn Kelly, who is under armed guard after receiving death threats, has accused Donald Trump’s social media director of stirring hatred on the internet.” Kelly said during a December talk in Washington, D.C., “It’s that far corner of the internet that really enjoys nastiness and threats and unfortunately there is a man who works for Donald Trump whose job it is to stir these people up and that man needs to stop doing that. His name is Dan Scavino.” [The Guardian, 12/6/16]
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The rest of Trump's White House media staff: Hope Hicks, assistant the the president and director of strategic communications; Jason Miller, assistant to the president; director of communications; Dan Scavino, director of social media. (Director of social media: will he have any control over Trump's itchy Twitter finger?)
- Specialist adviser - Carl Icahn, billionaire corporate raider-turned activist shareholder
- Special adviser to the president - Kellyanne Conway (Trump whisperer)
- Secretary of the Army - Vincent Viola, billionaire owner of the Florida Panthers (military background, apparently not a bad pick, so far uncontroversial)
- Office of Management and Budget - Mick Mulvaney, a founder of the Freedom Caucus, the House tea party group. Has embraced the term "Shutdown Caucus" because of his willingness to shut down the government over the debt ceiling. No relevant experience. Admitted he didn't know what the debt ceiling was during the debt ceiling crisis in 2011. Regularly demands cuts for benefit programs. Will be in charge of steering budget proposals. NY Times calls him "a fierce advocate of deep spending cuts." Has a degree in international economics from Georgetown and a law degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
In July, Mulvaney gave a speech to the John Birch Society. According to Mother Jones:After South Carolina Democrats criticized Mulvaney for appearing before the group, he defended the decision, saying, "I regularly speak to groups across the political spectrum because my constituents deserve access to their congressman. I can't remember ever turning down an opportunity to speak to a group based on the group's political ideology."
Would he address the KKK if invited? At one point, he said: "You all put out some really good stuff and it's always interesting."
An article by Matthew Rozsa at Salon says:Mulvaney has introduced numerous bills that have attempted to cut government spending, particularly on Medicare and Social Security. His argument has been that the programs need to be reformed in order to avoid bankruptcy.
Said "I don't like the fact that CFPB exists"; proposed raising Social Security retirement age to 70; pushed to shut down the government over Planned Parenthood; claimed the devastating budget cuts Ryan proposed did not cut Medicare and Social Security "rapidly enough"; called the debt ceiling emergency in 2011 -- when the country's financial rating was cut just because they came so close to the cliff -- a "fabricated crisis"; and said "We have to end Medicare as we know it." Just the guy you want in charge of the budget.
Like Trump, Friedman is an admirer of Vladimir Putin, and has portrayed the Russian president as fighting Islamic State in Syria despite little of the Russian war effort being focused on Isis.
“Vladimir Putin gets it,” Friedman wrote in November last year. “He may be a ‘thug,’ as he was recently described by Senator [Marco] Rubio, but he knows how to identify a national objective, execute a military plan, and ultimately prevail.”
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Deputy National Security Adviser - Monica Crowley. Ouch -- another terrible pick. Click here for a number of complaints about Crowley, conspiracy theory nut, in an article at Crooks & Liars by News Hound Ellen, entitled "Monica Crowley, Conspiracy Theorist Extraordinaire, To Be Trump’s Deputy National Security Adviser." Trump apparently saw Crowley on TV -- something Trump sees as always a good recommendation. Here she is in younger days, standing before the Berlin Wall. She tweeted the picture with the caption "Walls work!"
Yeah, they're great at keeping people in -- especially if you're willing to shoot anyone who tries to get out.
More after the jump.
- Energy Secretary - Rick Perry.
I will tell you, it is three agencies of government when I get there that are gone. Commerce, Education, and the — What’s the third one there? Let’s see.That of course, was Perry's suicidal "oops" moment in a Republican presidential debate. It was the Department of Energy he was trying to remember. So now he's leader of a department he is hostile to and wants to abolish. Another Rick Perry quote:
For example, they have seen the headlines in the past year about doctored data related to global warming. They know we have been experiencing a cooling trend, that the complexities of the global atmosphere have often eluded the most sophisticated scientists, and that draconian policies with dire economic effects based on so-called science may not stand the test of time. Quite frankly, when science gets hijacked by the political Left, we should all be concerned. . . . And it's all one contrived phony mess that is falling apart under its own weight. Al Gore is a prophet all right, a false prophet of a secular carbon cult, and now even moderate Democrats aren't buying it.According to an article in Daily Kos:
The current head of the Department of Energy is Dr. Ernest Moniz, a former Professor of Physics and Engineering Systems at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In fact, four out of the last five heads of the Department of Energy were world-renowned and/or Nobel Prize-winning scientists with a deep understanding of physics and nuclear weapons.So what did Perry, when he withdrew from the presidential race, say about Trump? This:
“He is without substance when one scratches below the surface. He offers a barking carnival act that can be best described as Trumpism: A toxic mix of demagoguery and mean-spiritedness and nonsense that will lead the Republican Party to perdition if pursued. Let no one be mistaken — Donald Trump’s candidacy is a cancer on conservatism, and it must be clearly diagnosed, excised and discarded.”I said it before (about Nikki Haley), and I'll say it again (with apologies to JFK):
I shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, to assure the survival and the success of my political career.Welcome to Trumpworld, Rick.
- Secretary of the Interior - Rep. Ryan Zinke, R-Montana. The Interior Department oversees management of about three-quarters of federal land and natural resources, along with programs relating to American Indian and territorial affairs. A strong supporter of coal, oil, and gas exploration and development, Zinke has a 3 percent rating from the environmental group League of Conservation Voters. Of Zinke, Charlie Pierce at Esquire says: "He is what will pass for a 'moderate' on the Trump environmental team, since he believes in exploiting the public lands rather than selling them off wholesale"; he calls Zinke "another Putin fanboy." He has vigorously opposed Obama's Interior Department's "coal rule" protecting streams from mountaintop removal (which goes into effect the day before Trump's inauguration), an executive order, easily overturned. Count on it.
- Head of National Economic Council - Gary Cohn, Goldman Sachs, president and CEO (thus, chief alligator in the swamp; click here for the excellent Matt Taibi article at Rolling Stone entitled "The Great American Bubble Machine," characterizing Goldman as "a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.") The NEC advises the president on economic policy, and its director works in the White House.
- Treasury Secretary - Steven Mnuchin, Goldman Sachs, hedge fund manager. Purchased the failed California-based bank IndyMac from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. and renamed it OneWest, nicknamed "the foreclosure machine"; performed 37,000 foreclosures in the 2008 meltdown. He personally contributed $425,000 to Trump's campaign.
- Secretary of Commerce - Wilbur Ross, billionaire private equity investor, nickname "The King of Bankruptcy." According to an article by Fred Grimm in the Miami Herald:
The Wilbur Ross business model was to buy failing steel mills, textile mills and coal mines, then jettison the unions with their niggling work rules, reduce wages, drop health care, renege on pension obligations and cut operating costs down to the proverbial bone.One of those properties was non-union Sago Mines, which had recently been cited for over 200 safety violations. An explosion, in 2006, killed 13 miners. According to Grimm's article:
Nineteen days before catastrophe struck, a federal inspector had cited the company for 'a high degree of negligence' for allowing potentially explosive coal dust to accumulate in the mine.Ross held one of Trump's earliest fundraisers, a dinner at $25,000 each; he personally contributed $200,000 to the Trump campaign.
- Department of Education - Betsy DeVos, heir to the Amway fortune. As described in an article in The New Yorker, DeVos is opposed to public education and is a champion of privately operated for-profit charter schools. A champion of soft money in politics, the article quotes her as saying she expects a return on her investment. And as Charlie Pierce says in an article at Esquire, "Also, she's a theocratic, homophobic loon." The DeVos family donated $1.8 million to Trump's campaign.
- Deputy Secretary of Commerce - Todd Ricketts, billionaire son of Joe Ricketts (who founded brokerage firm TD Ameritrade and funds right-wing causes and political campaigns). Todd Ricketts' related experience consists of one year with financial firm Knight Securities. Pop Ricketts donated $1.3 million to the Trump campaign.
- Chief Strategist and White House Advisor - Steve Bannon, Goldman Sachs alum, ran Breitbart News
- Anthony Scaramucci, an omnipresent financial industry booster and hedge fund salesman
- Secretary of Labor - Andrew F. Puzder, CEO of the company owning Carl's Jr. and Hardee's. According to an article in The New York Times, by Noam Scheiber, Puzder is opposed to a federal minimum wage, and rather than pay fast-food workers $15 an hour, advocates replacing them with robots or machines, which are “always polite, they always upsell, they never take a vacation, they never show up late, there’s never a slip-and-fall or an age, sex or race discrimination case.” He fought against an Obama proposal to raise the U.S. federal minimum wage from $7.25 to $10.10. He is opposed to rules that would make more workers eligible for overtime pay. Pudzer contributed $332,000 to the Trump campaign. According to Paul Krugman: "He’s anti-worker, anti-higher wages, pro-immigration."
Under that doctrine, large companies that have franchises or hire other companies as contractors are more likely to be held liable for violations of employment laws by those contractors or franchisees. Parent companies typically argue that they have no legal responsibility in these cases.
Mr. Puzder has been unambiguous in his disdain for the new standard. As labor secretary, there are certain immediate steps he could take to undo it, though there are some applications, like to the law governing unions, that would require action by the National Labor Relations Board or federal courts to overturn.
- Head of the Environmental Protection Agency - Scott Pruitt, Oklahoma attorney general, who has led the right-wing fight against the Environmental Protection Agency. Trump speaks with Al Gore on Monday -- head fake! -- and then appoints Pruitt on Wednesday.
- Secretary of State - Exxon Mobil CEO Rex Tillerson, buddy of Putin, recipient of Russia's Order of Freedom, highest award that can be given to a foreign citizen. First person in modern history to be nominated as SoS with no experience in government (but then again, Trump has no experience in government either).
- Assistant Secretary of State - JOHN FREAKIN' BOLTON (he of the Mustache of Doom). Never met a war he didn't like. Look for war with Iran in a matter of months -- if he is confirmed, but I don't think there's any way in the world he can be. (Rumour is he may not be named to this position because Trump doesn't like his mustache!)
- Head of the Small Business Administration - WWE impresario Linda McMahon, wife of WWE billionaire Vince McMahon. She had contributed $7.5 million to his campaign.
- Secretary of Homeland Security - John F. Kelly, blunt ex-Marine, non-political, frequent opponent of the Obama administration (on women in combat, practices at Guantanamo)
- Ambassador to China - Terry Branstad, long-serving governor of Iowa (in his sixth 4-year term). He has had numerous contacts with China on trade; Xi Jinping, president of China, has called him "an old friend."
- Secretary of Defense - James "Mad Dog" Mattis, nonpolitical ex-Marine
- Transportation Secretary - Elaine Chao, wife of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Secretary of Labor under W. for 8 years
- Secretary of Health and Human Services - Tom Price, House Budget Committee Chairman and most prominent House critic of Obamacare. Belongs to an association of right-wing quacks.
- Chief of Staff - obvious acronym Reince Preibus
- CIA Director - House member Mike Pompeo, Tea Party, rejects global warming, supports NSA surveillance, has criticized the Obama administration's decision to end the CIA's secret prisons (so-called "black sites"), and the administration's requirement that all interrogators adhere to anti-torture laws.
- Attorney General - Jeff Sessions, failed to be confirmed in his appointment 30 years ago as a federal judge for his racist views. Will now be in charge of the enforcement of civil rights violations. But more recently, in 1997, an Alabama judge accused the state attorney general's office, which had been headed by Sessions, of the worst prosecutorial misconduct he'd ever seen. According to an article at CNN:
"The court finds that even having been given every benefit of the doubt, the misconduct of the Attorney General in this case far surpasses in both extensiveness and measure the totality of any prosecutorial misconduct ever previously presented to or witnessed by this court," wrote James S. Garrett, a Jefferson County Circuit Court judge.
- Ambassador to the U.N. - Nikki Haley, photogenic governor of South Carolina, no international experience (but now she will have, which will look good when she runs for president down the road)
- National Security Adviser - pro-Putin General Michael Flynn, Breitbart aficionado and fake news tweeter
- Deputy National Security Adviser - ‘KT’ McFarland. According to Digby at Hullabaloo, in a post entitled "Michael Flynn's second in command is just as nuts as he is," "She likes torture, likes it a lot, and considers failing to profile Muslims to be 'political correctness.'” Digby goes on to describe McFarland as "yet another Fox News extremist who’s spent way too much time in the right-wing fever swamps."
- White House Counsel - Donald F. McGahn
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