The Method Behind the Madness of Trump's Cabinet Nominations
Plus Senator Joni Ernst's shocking support for Trump's latest authoritarian power grab
Donald Trump’s astoundingly awful cabinet choices are no accident. I think there is a method to his madness.
Strangely, the hiring practices of a four term Iowa Congressman from thirty-plus years ago may provide a window into understanding what Trump is really doing with his string of terrible choices.
That former Iowa congressman is four term US Representative Fred Grandy (R-6th/5th IA) who served in the US House from 1987 - 1995.
I worked in the U.S. House during that time as well, and learned what I considered to be the very odd hiring criteria Grandy used when hiring his press staff.
I served as president of the Association of US House Democratic Press Assistants for several years when I worked in the House as a Communications Director. Part of my role as president of the House Democratic press secretaries association entailed meeting with would be congressional staff hopefuls who were looking to get hired as a press aide on Capitol Hill. It wasn’t a formal part of the job. It just kind of happened, and continued even after my time in the post ended.
They’d ask me for tips on how to pursue and land a press aide job in the House. I was happy to share what I knew, even with the occasional Republicans who came by. I met with mostly Democrats, of course, but it was not as rare as you might think for Republicans to stop in for some advice in those days.
I was happy to help - folks from both parties - because Capitol Hill can be a very tough place to get your foot in the door.
That’s how I came to learn about Rep. Grandy’s odd criteria for hiring press staff. He wanted anyone he hired to have no prior experience - what so ever - doing press or public relations work.
Which struck me as very strange. Who wants to hire staff - any kind of staff - with no experience doing what you are hiring them to do? Nobody I ever heard of except Rep. Grandy.
It was especially strange in his case, because at this point, Grandy was already a famous national celebrity. He had played the popular character “Gopher Smith,” the ship’s purser on the long running network television series The Love Boat .
He easily attracted interest from established public information and public relations pros to run his press office. But he wanted only newcomers.
One afternoon I was visiting with a Republican job seeker who told me he had applied at Grandy’s office. He mentioned Grandy’s insistence that his press officers have no prior experience in public relations or public information.
Grandy didn’t want anyone who knew anything they’d learned elsewhere about doing press work, he explained, because Grandy wanted whoever he hired for the job, to do the job exactly the way he told them do it.
He wanted to train them from the start and not have to untrain them from what they learned somewhere else.
Strange, yes. But given Grandy’s prior success in Hollywood where knowing your way around the public relations game is a huge part of success, it at least, finally, sort of made sense.
The similarity to Trump, I think, is that Trump welcomes a Cabinet full of blank slates for much the same reason as Grady wanted them for his press office, although for much more malignant reasons.
Trump wants incompetent people in those positions not because he intends to train them, but because he is specifically not looking for competent people, informed advice or leadership from them.
He wants people who will do what he tells them to do. Period. He wants people who will follow his orders.
With the possible exception of Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL), he is also nominating people who have no qualifications for the positions for which he is nominating them.
They have only demonstrated the single qualification Trump cares about: their willingness to be sycophants to Donald Trump.
That is precisely the recipe authoritarians around the world follow in filling out their governments - they pick sycophants who will follow even the most dangerous, destructive and ill advised orders without question, who won’t pushback because they either don’t know any better or lack the character to do so.
He wants no one at the table whose understanding of an issue or a process might outpace his own. He wants to give orders, and have those orders followed. Period.
The hollowness and corruption of his nominees make it obvious why Trump is urging the new Republican Senate to abdicate its constitutional duty to advise and consent on top level presidential appointments.
In an early power grab - and attack on the Senate’s constitutional responsibilities - Trump is now pressuring Senate Republicans to allow his cabinet appointees to slide into office without any Senate confirmation process or review at all.
He is pressuring them to use an arcane loophole next year which was originally designed to help keep key government agencies and departments running when it is physically impossible for the Senate to “advise and consent” to a president’s appointments. The device - a good one when responsibly used, but a corrupt scheme as Trump proposes using it - is known as “recess appointments.”
It is was meant to be available if a key government position needed to be filled urgently, but the Senate was in recess, and Senators could not be rounded up to return to Washington in a timely manner to complete its constitutional vetting process.
Today, recess appointments are mostly a dusty anachronism. Senators can be reached instantly by texts and phone calls. They can board jets and fly back to Washington, D.C. in mere hours from anywhere in the country and world.
Recess appointments were never intended or imagined, and certainly have never been used to ram a president’s whole cabinet through and into office in order to avoid constitutionally required scrutiny by the Senate of the fitness of the nominees for those offices.
Yet that is what Trump is insisting Senate Republicans allow him to do with this gang of MAGA misfits.
Keep in mind: Some of his cabinet nominees couldn’t pass an HR screening or background check required to work at your local Walmart. That’s not hyperbole, it’s fact. Give them a free pass wholesale? I don’t think so.
Sadly, Iowa US Senator Joni Ernst (R-IA) is speaking favorably about this brazen assault on democracy and end run around the constitution’s mandated “advise and consent” review by the Senate of a president’s appointments.
Senator Ernst was still running to lead the Senate Republican Conference when she appeared on Fox News last week. In her leadership campaign she repeatedly debased herself by demonstrating there was nothing too ill advised coming from Trump or the MAGA gangs that should would not endorse.
When she went on Fox, she used typical mealy-mouthed political speak to say something both absurd and dangerous. She made the case for Trump’s corrupt recess appointments scheme, and then concluded that it was something Senate Republicans were going to have to talk about.
Talk about? Nice try, but sorry. Once she made the case for wholesale recess appointments on Fox without so much as a clearing of the throat to recognize the grave danger they represent, she’s all in on that plan. All the way. Which was exactly the message she was sending to her fellow Republicans in the Senate who she hoped would elevate her to a partisan Senate leadership post.
Her main argument for recess appointments, by the way, was incredibly weak. It seemed to be that it takes time for the Senate to do its vetting of a president’s nominees, and Donald Trump only has four years in this term. Which, in case Senator Ernst has forgotten, is the same length of time every president has for their term, and nobody - including Ernst - ever suggested that because of that fact the Senate’s constitutional role to “advise and consent” on major presidential appointments should be junked.
Ernst’s remarks can only be read as one of two things, maybe both:
(1) Yet another swan-dive of personal debasement in her partisan quest to win a Senate leadership position. Which she lost anyway, by the way.
(2) A clear and shocking sign that she’s all in for Trump’s authoritarian power grab, his attack on the Senate’s responsibilities and on democracy.
The next four years promises to be tough for Iowa and the nation as America’s first authoritarian president in its 236 year history moves into the White House.
It would be nice if Iowans could count on Senator Ernst to stand with, and for, the constitution and democracy during the coming assault on them by Donald Trump.
There is no reason to think she will do that, however, after her support for his corrupt recess appointments scheme, which is little more than a ham-handed plan to “wise guy” his way around the constitution in order to slide incompetent, unprepared and unprincipled cronies into high public office.
Maybe now that the Ernst’s party leadership post race is over and lost, she can get back in the business of serving Iowa, Iowans and democracy rather than Donald Trump and the MAGA gangs in the Senate.
The Republicans certainly make it seem like everyone is corruptible. I always used to think I disagreed with Chuck Grassley on most things, but that he had integrity. That is completely gone. Power has certainly corrupted Iowa’s leaders. Thanks, Barry, for your clear perspective.
I don’t remember anyone in my entire family, Republicans and Democrats alike, who aspired to be a yes man or woman. Time to unelect the sycophant.