The worst cabinet in American history
And it's not even close.
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While he may not have quite the walking-car-crash charisma of the woman he’s set to replace, in many ways Markwayne Mullin is a perfectly emblematic pick to run a huge and consequential cabinet department in the second Trump presidency.
Comically unqualified, intensely partisan, and unflaggingly devoted to whatever ridiculous thing bubbled out of Donald Trump’s mouth five minutes ago, as the next Secretary of Homeland Security, Mullin will fit right in with what will undoubtedly be regarded as the worst presidential cabinet in history.
Peruse the headlines on a given day and you’ll see them in action, proudly bringing catastrophe wherever they go.
There’s Pete Hegseth, bursting with excitement at a war already turning bad after just days. There’s Robert F. Kennedy Jr., working out shirtless in jeans in a sauna with Kid Rock, while the country suffers through its worst measles outbreak in decades. There’s Pam Bondi, outraged that members of Congress aren’t asking her about stock market gains rather than Jeffrey Epstein and her multiple failed prosecutions of the president’s political opponents.
Before we consider the Trump cabinet in its entirety, let’s pour one out for Kristi Noem, a unique figure in almost every way. From her grotesque physical transformation (she is the prototypical case study in “Mar-a-Lago Face”), to the sketchy no-bid contracts, to the alleged mile-high affair with Corey Lewandowski, to the self-aggrandizing cosplay TV ads, to her slander of murdered protesters in Minneapolis, Noem was more content creator than administrator.
But now she’s out, and her replacement will have to find new ways to screw up. There’s little doubt he’s up to the task.
The worst ever? No doubt.
There have been corrupt and incompetent cabinet secretaries before, and even a couple whose actions in office landed them in prison. If we wanted to find the worst pre-Trump cabinet, it might be that of Warren J. Harding, which was consumed by the Teapot Dome scandal. Among those implicated was Attorney General Harry Daugherty and Interior Secretary Albert Fall, who went to prison for accepting bribes.
Even when no one winds up behind bars, every cabinet has a dud or two — the politician repaid for years of mediocre service with a post atop a department the president doesn’t care much about, or the party functionary who turns out to be terrible at the job of administering a large agency. When the better-known figures of the initial cabinet decide to leave after a year or two, they’re often replaced with lower profile but more experienced bureaucrats who can run things more competently. That happened even in Trump’s first term.
And seen from today’s vantage point, Trump’s first cabinet seems like a model of wisdom and competence. That was a reflection of how unprepared he was for the job; arriving without a cadre of loyalists, he wound up appointing a number of secretaries who might have been found in almost any Republican administration, including James Mattis at Defense, Elaine Chao at Transportation, and John Kelly at Homeland Security.
In his second term, however, Trump knew exactly what he wanted and who could give it to him. In many cases, that meant not just a weak choice but literally the worst possible choice, the person guaranteed to do maximal harm to the interests of the country and the purposes for which their department exists. In short, we have never seen quite the collection of clowns, cranks, and crooks that Trump has assembled.
The United States federal government is by almost any measure the most complex and influential organization on Earth, spending trillions of dollars every year while it creates and implements policies that affect the lives not only of the 342 million people who live within our borders but the citizens of every country in the world. At its center are 15 departments led by a Senate-confirmed secretary, each with a vast budget and a huge workforce. Effectively leading such an entity would at a minimum require considerable administrative experience and deep knowledge of the issues the department confronts.
Or not, apparently. Case in point is Markwayne Mullin, whose frequent TV appearances over the last few years have left millions of Americans asking “Who is this halfwit?” The Department of Homeland Security is a behemoth; its budget exceeds $100 billion per year, and it has over 260,000 employees. Mullin has about as much preparation to run it as anyone you would randomly pluck off the streets of DC. He has no national security experience, no law enforcement experience, and no experience in immigration or any of the other issues the department deals with.
On the other hand, he did run his family’s plumbing business.
Yet in the end, we may end up marking Mullin as one of the lesser catastrophes in the Trump cabinet. Joining Noem in the top tier of ignominy are these three:
Pete Hegseth was, by a country mile, the least experienced nominee for secretary of defense in American history — and that was before the allegations of drunkenness and sexual assault. The former weekend co-host of Fox & Friends has proven himself to be a model of incompetence; the word insiders use again and again to describe DoD under his leadership is “chaos.” Whether he’s compromising operational security, purging the top ranks of respected officers if they aren’t white men, or prattling on about “warfighters” and “lethality” while expressing his contempt for “woke” ideas like human rights and the laws of war, Hegseth resembles nothing so much as a deeply insecure boy trying to convince everyone he’s a real man.
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is so far outside the norm that he can’t be compared to any previous secretary of health and human services, or any cabinet member at all. If you had to find an analogue, it might be Trofim Lysenko, the Stalin-era agronomist whose pseudoscientific views set Soviet science back decades and led to famines that killed millions. Kennedy brought with him to HHS a bevy of anti-vaxxine and anti-science extremists who have rampaged through the NIH, the CDC, the FDA, and other agencies vital to American public health and scientific progress, with the effects only beginning to unfold. As a recent editorial in The Lancet put it, “The destruction that Kennedy has wrought in one year might take generations to repair, and there is little hope for US health and science while he remains at the helm.”
Pam Bondi — who, let’s not forget, was Trump’s second choice to be the nation’s chief law enforcement officer after Matt freakin’ Gaetz — has managed in one short year to utterly corrupt and degrade the Department of Justice, reversing a half-century of post-Watergate progress in creating a culture of professionalism and nonpartisanship. Unlike every attorney general of the modern era, she can’t even bother to pretend she is anything but the president’s lawyer, using the awesome power the DoJ holds to protect him and pursue his enemies. As a result, thousands of experienced lawyers have fled the department, leaving it a hollow and corrupt shell of its former self.
Even having one or two members of the cabinet as disastrous as Noem, Hegseth, Kennedy, or Bondi would be a stain on any administration; putting them all in one government has created a kind of Bizarro World 1927 Yankees, an all-star team of incompetence and malevolence. Then there’s the middle tier — Epstein pal Howard Lutnick at Commerce, scandal-plagued Lori Chavez-DeRemer at Labor, reality TV dudebro Sean Duffy at Transportation, and the preposterous Tulsi Gabbard, who, believe it or not, remains the director of national intelligence.
In fairness, there are a few members of Trump’s cabinet who are doing only what we expected, implementing horrifically pernicious policies in ways unlikely to grab headlines — Doug Burgum (Interior), Chris Wright (Energy), or Scott Turner (Housing and Urban Development), for example. But if you tried to point to a single exemplary member of the cabinet, could you find one?
Many hoped it would be Marco Rubio, who was confirmed in the Senate by a vote of 99-0 on the day of Trump’s inauguration. But rather than acting as a force of reason and restraint, Rubio has accelerated his long and possibly inevitable moral decline, becoming both an abject bootlicker and an enthusiastic implementer of Trump’s vision to turn America into a plundering far-right rogue state.
That isn’t even to mention the incredible collection of hacks and barbarians outside and below the cabinet marauding their way through the executive branch. The list would start with Stephen Miller, one of the most sinister government officials in the entirety of American history, and would include the likes of Brendan Carr at the FCC, Tom Homan at DHS (remember that $50,000 in the paper bag? Eh, who cares), and of course FBI Director Kash Patel, who possesses that signature Trumpian combination of confidence and ineptitude.
Is there any way this collection of buffoons could do any worse? Perhaps. We haven’t even mentioned Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought, a rarity in Trump’s cabinet in that he understands the government quite well and performs his job with skill. Unfortunately, his job as he sees it is to destroy the federal government’s capacity to solve problems or serve the public, and he has made great progress toward that end. If every member of the cabinet were as effective, the horrors might well increase.
The lion’s share of blame for the wreckage this presidency is causing lies of course with Donald Trump himself; it is his whims, his prejudices, his bottomless corruption, his stupidity, and his malignant hatreds that propel it forward. But those with whom he has surrounded himself form a group unlike any we have seen before. When they prostrate themselves before him in those North Korean-style cabinet meetings, we see how pathetic they are, people with vast power yet not a shred of dignity.
In a just world they would be cast out and condemned, their misdeeds exhaustively catalogued, never able again to show their faces in polite society. That world may not come to pass; when this presidency reaches its merciful end, most of them will probably wind up with sinecures at the Heritage Foundation or corporate gigs where their service to the cause of Trumpian fascism will be amply rewarded. A few of them will probably even run for president. As though what they’ve already done to the country isn’t enough.
That’s it for today
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I was hoping for just a little optimism. Maybe tomorrow. Thanks, Paul. You nailed it.😞
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