The hits to the American people just keep coming. Trump’s cabinet is a who’s who of the richest, Rightist, wrongist group of characters ever seen in a Presidential Cabinet. We don’t know how well they will fare against the questioning of both Republicans and Democrats in Congressional approval hearings. Perhaps these will not be the final names. But we know one thing. This will be the wealthiest Cabinet of all time, worth, according to the New York Times, with the 17 already selected having as much collectively as about 43 million U.S. households.
But the situation for the average American family is much worse than mere numbers. Among them, they have stated plans to do away with your health care, reduce Social Security, privatize Medicare, end clean energy and revert to old-time fossil fuel extraction, end abortion rights, change public schools to Right Wing Christian Fundamentalist schools, remove financial regulations, transportation safety and workplace rules, maintain lower minimum wages and in general make your life miserable so that they, who now take 80% of all new income, can make more billions. Their greed is almost unimaginable.
So here is the next group on the list. And it is astonishing.
First, an oilman, head of one of the most Right Wing, non-tax-paying, arbitrary, reckless, climate denying corporations in the world, Rex Tillerson, will be the new Secretary of State. He has no government experience at all. He negotiates deals for EXXON/Mobil to exploit other countries’ natural resources for the sake of Texas billionaires. Make no mistake about it, Rex Tillerson is not your standard, global international diplomatic scholar. He is from that great anti-science, reality-denying academic institution, EXXON/Mobil, where they’ve never seen a wild swing in climate, a polar icecap melting, a hurricane covering the entire East Coast of the United States or a new higher annual temperature that they would not bow down before.
This is the man, Putin’s buddy, a buddy of every king and sheikh in the Middle East, who will direct our diplomacy for the same kind of privileged people that he feels he must work for here. Not the average citizen…who wants better relations with the average Arab or Russian or Chinese citizen, but for the rich and powerful to become richer and more powerful, while the poor fight the wars against terrorists that result from the horrible despotic conditions around the world.
One of the few bright lights coming out of all this darkness, however, may be Congressman Ryan Zinke for Interior Secretary. Zinke is from Montana, a former Navy Seal, has two Master’s degrees, and apparently is somehow opposed to Mitch McConnell who apparently did not want him for Interior Secretary. That, and the fact that he is from Montana, may mean that our National Parks and National Monuments and land deeded in perpetuity, miserable scrapes though they often are, to Native Americans may be safe if Zinke is finally allowed to be Secretary over the objections of McConnell’s lobbyist-Republican approval process in Congress.
What can one say about the qualifications of a Rick Perry, former Governor of Texas. He wants to abolish the Energy Department, the department for which…in his genius…Trump has nominated him. It is one of three that Perry wanted to abolish but he couldn’t remember the third and we have mercifully forgotten the other that he did. He’s a dummy. He’s not your scholarly, dedicated, driven public servant. He’s a typical Texas Right Wing hack, like Tom DeLay who, one may recall, never saw a lobbyist he wouldn’t take to Scotland for a round of golf before fleecing them of their money, like ex-con, Jack Abramoff. Perry may do away with the EPA and that would be interesting, that is, interesting to see what we would then do about all the nukes or nuclear (or “nucular” to use Perry’s friend, George W. Bush’s wording) installations. Without an EPA we might, maybe just sell nukes to other countries, like, Saudi Arabia, or just set them out in the desert, like old warplanes. He is a graduate of Paint Creek High School and has a degree in animal science from Texas A & M and began his life as a door-to-door book salesman. We are going out on a limb and suggesting that the book was probably the bible.
So that is the next group. More to come, more very bright people without morals or ethics. More outsourcing to corporations. More profits for corporations and more jobs going overseas. More retired military in key positions and undoubtedly more authoritarian controls in the states where there are Republican governors. And more spending by hugely wealthy individuals to elect their personal candidates. Not only did Trump buy his own election nationally, but Governor Rauner of Illinois, Governor Ricketts of Nebraska, Governor Snyder of Michigan and Governor Kasich of Ohio, among several other Republican governors were put in office by huge expenditures of the super-rich allowed by Citizens’ United.
The story goes on. Trump will be in office in a little over one month. His cabinet made up of billionaire cronies, military men and outright fools and lunatics, like Rick Perry and Linda McMahon will take office. What will happen after this group of cutthroats and petty tyrants take office is anyone’s guess.
But, God help us because we can’t seem to help ourselves.