Cogito Ergo Non Serviam

Trump Administration May Suffer from Incompleteness, Inexperience

The Trump administration begins today, and it will hit the ground doing the opposite of running. The transition has not gone badly so much as it has not really happened. Mr. Trump has some 4,000 political appointments to make (a ridiculous number to be sure), and 690 of them are significant enough to require Senate confirmation. He has nominated just 30. Meanwhile, he has fired all the ambassadors and many top level officials effective as soon as he takes office, including the man responsible for his inauguration ceremony's security. The people whom he has nominated are, often, sorely lacking in experience. The nation will be run by empty desks and rank amateurs for several months.

At the very top, Donald Trump has no experience in government nor in elective office He has never served in the military. The company he runs for his own benefit is privately held, meaning he has no experience in the ways of running a major company that is required by law to be transparent. In fact, he was elected because he was seen as unblemished by such experience. The argument was either that no experience is better than bad experience, or he would surround himself with people who know what they are doing, so it will be OK.

Some of the appointments he has made are unfortunate, but they are within the boundaries of credible choices. Elaine Chao as Secretary of Transportation is not a bad selection as she has already held a cabinet post, although one dislikes her political vantage point. Steven Mnuchin of Goldman Sachs is a product of the vampire squid bank, but an investment banker at Treasury is plausible. Marine Corps General James Mattis at Defense is a similar choice; one would have preferred a civilian but there is no doubt he is up to the job.

Others are simply laughable. Governor Rick Perry as Secretary of Energy may be the worst choice one could have made. Five years ago, he famously couldn't remember that it was the Energy Department he wanted to close down when running for the White House. He will now be in charge of America's nuclear stockpile. His predecessor was a nuclear physicist. He was most recently a contestant on "Dancing with the Stars."

Dr. Ben Carson at HUD is a similarly ridiculous choice. "The President-elect offered him [Carson] anything he wanted to do," Armstrong Williams, Dr. Carson's business manager said in November. "But in the end he didn't want anything. His background didn't prepare him to run a federal agency." As a physician, a case could be made for Health and Human Services, just. He has no experience of his proposed portfolio, though.

Yet even with those bad choices, there is some hope that the people the next rung or three down the bureaucratic ladder can provide enough guidance that really awful policy decisions are few or non-existent. Where there are no people the next level down is where the real trouble is going to come, and it is in the most serious of areas.

Consider the Defense Department that General Matthis will lead. He personally requested that more than 20 people at the top retain their positions until replacements could be found, vetted and formally appointed. The transition team let him have 6 of them. It also seems that the White House has had more than a little friction with the general on appointments. The Washington Post reported, "Initially, both Mattis and the Trump team intended to engage in a collaborative process whereby Mattis would be given significant influence and participation in selecting top Pentagon appointees.

"But the arrangement started going south only two weeks later when Mattis had to learn from the news media that Trump had selected Vincent Viola, a billionaire Army veteran, to be secretary of the Army, one source close to the transition said. "'Mattis was furious', said the source. 'It made him suspicious of the transition team, and things devolved from there'."

It is not a promising start.

© Copyright 2017 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Ubuntu Linux.



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