Who Will Be Trump's First Indicted/Fired Cabinet Secretary?
Just kidding! They'll all escape indictment unless they personally anger him.
Donald Trump, or more likely president-elect Susie Wiles, has been announcing a whole bunch of pricks picks to top roles in Trump’s second-term Cabinet, yet another phrase we’d naively thought we’d never have to write. They’re all big Trump loyalists, of course, whom the Great Man should be able to rely on to carry out his directives, however poorly thought out or flatly illegal. The era of adults in the room is over, and there’s little danger that any of these bozos will ever tell Trump something is a terrible idea.
Trump may not even have to worry about any of his Cabinet picks getting confirmed by the Senate, not simply because it’s also under Republican control, but because the likely Senate leaders have already signaled they’ll abdicate their confirmation role altogether at the Great Man’s request.
TrumpLand has so far named Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-New York) to be United Nations ambassador, which should be the last we hear of her for a while since Trump hates the UN and probably already considers Stefanik a traitor for working there.
Marco Rubio will be Secretary of State, where his amazing rubber spine should serve him well in telling foreign dictators Trump will do anything they want, although he may at some point get confused about his job and accidentally say yes to America’s allies in Europe, even though they need to be crushed and resisted at all costs.
For EPA administrator, Trump is going with former congressman Lee Zeldin, who has exactly zero background in environmental policy at all, making him the perfect choice to do whatever the oil and gas industry asks.
Trump will also choose South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem to be Homeland Security Secretary, putting her in charge of the TSA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), Secret Service, the various immigration agencies like Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), as well as the Coast Guard, where opportunities for her to shoot a dog should be relatively few. As governor of a state that’s roughly 1,300 miles from the US-Mexico border, Noem has been a fanatical immigration hawk, sending South Dakota police and National Guard troops to the border to prevent any migrants from threatening Rapid City or Sioux Falls.
And as a diehard Trump loyalist who was once considered a possible veep choice, at least before the dog-murder news, Noem will also be in charge of making sure FEMA only provides disaster assistance to parts of the country that voted for Trump. In an interesting side-note, Noem may be the first Cabinet secretary to actually be banned from all tribal lands in her home state. Good thing Trump/Wiles didn’t pick her for Interior; we do hope no natural disasters strike South Dakota tribal areas in the period between Trump’s inauguration and Noem’s eventual firing.
Well of course she’ll be fired. We just assume that’ll be the fate of everyone Trump chooses, with the exception of Stephen Miller, who’ll be Trump’s “deputy chief of staff for policy,” meaning that if Trump gets too close to any kind of deal with Congress that might displease the far Right, Miller will hop in his ear like Jiminy Earwig and tell Trump to shut down the government instead.
Miller, Trump’s longtime Fascism Whisperer will be joined in the White House by former acting ICE director Tom Homan, who will hold the invented job of “Border Czar” and will no doubt really be in charge of all the immigration agencies that are nominally Noem’s bailiwick. Together, Homan and Miller will concoct plans for Trump’s beloved mass deportations, which are likely to be as cruel and chaotic as the family separation policy they were both in love with during Trump’s first term. Homan was in charge of the slapdash “Zero Tolerance” program, which took children from their parents at the border but never bothered to record which kids belonged to which parents.
Homan is an absolute creep, in case we needed to remind you; in October, he explained to 60 Minutes there won’t have to be any family separations during the mass deportation drive, even though many undocumented people have children or other family members who are US citizens. It’s really quite easy, he explained: “Families can be deported together.”
On “The View” Monday, co-host Ana Navarro angered Homan by explaining that if you’re deporting whole families with mixed immigration status,
“I mean, it’s chilling what he just said. You realize when he says, ‘Yes, families can be deported together,’ what he is saying is that US Citizens can be deported. What he is saying is, if the parent is undocumented and they have US Citizen children or US Citizen spouses, and you don’t want to separate them, then let’s deport the US Citizens.”
On the Sean Hannity Scare White People Hour Monday night, Homan defended his remarks, and tried to insist that “deporting families together” would magically not entail deporting US citizens along with their undocumented family members, because what if you ignore what words mean, huh? Homan told Hannity that
“‘The View,’ it's like the island of misfit toys; they don't know what they're talking about. […] President Trump made it clear we will prioritize public safety threats and national security threats first. That's what the focus will be. There are over 1.5 million convicted criminal aliens in this country with orders for removal who we'll be looking for, there are thousands of gang members we'll be looking for.
“If you're in the country illegally, you shouldn't feel comfortable, absolutely not. I wouldn't feel comfortable if I were in another country illegally; you shouldn't be comfortable either. When you enter this country illegally, you have committed a crime. You're a criminal, and you're not off the table.”
Here is the time to note that story we didn’t see, the week before the election, about how actually Donald Trump I actually released thousands of actual criminals (and hundreds of murderers) so his thugs could focus on asylum seekers instead. And then the news said Joe Biden had done that instead. Ho ho ho, isn’t life grand!
Homan also claimed on Fox Business that “US citizens” and “legal immigrants are perfectly safe, for God’s sakes,” but he made no attempt at all to explain how he and Miller would simultaneously deport mixed-status families together and keep US citizens safe from deportation.
Then again, Trump has already declared that he will use an executive order to eliminate birthright citizenship, guaranteed by the 14th Amendment, for children of undocumented migrants, so perhaps that means there won’t be any US citizen children of undocumented people anymore. Constitution, schmonstitution, they’re illegal, why are you sticking up for illegal humans?
Or perhaps, as happened during Family Separation Round One, noncitizen parents will be given the “choice” of having their citizen children or spouses deported with them, or of being deported without them.
So yes, this is shaping up to be quite a Cabinet of yes-persons for Trump, and we’re already seeing media outlets rolling over and describing Homan’s self-contradictory gibberish at face value, describing his comments on Fox News as “pushing back against” or “denying” the idea that he meant what he said about deporting whole families, even though his “explanation” makes no goddamn sense at all.
[CBS News / USA Today / Guardian / Newsweek / Reuters]
Yr Wonkette is funded entirely by reader donations. If you can, please become a paid subscriber, or if a one-time donation is more your style, here is a stylish button to do that.
Some good news - at a meeting today, we decided that going forward our guidance will be that any utterances of “your body, my choice”, “pack your bags” or references to minority students to go report to pick cotton will be presumptively considered to be student-on-student or staff-on-student bullying as well as gender-based/race-based discrimination.
Not going to fret over each cabinet pick.
I assume they’re going to all be unqualified evil pieces of shit. They will eventually get thrown under the bus and replaced with other unqualified evil pieces of shit.