One of the funniest things that happened in 2016 was that Donald Trump nominated Texas Governor, Presidential Hopeful, and George Bush cosplayer Rick Perry to be the United States Secretary of Energy. As Secretary, Perry, who made headlines for forgetting which cabinet agency he wanted to get rid of and who in college received a “D” grade in a class called “Meats”, would be responsible for the United States’s stockpile of nuclear weapons.

Perry wasn’t the only “let’s do a silly one” pick in Trump’s 2017 cabinet, where other secretaries included Ben Carson, a nationally-renowned neurosurgeon whose medical experience made him a natural fit to head the… Department of Housing and Urban Development. The position of Secretary of Health and Human Services both would’ve been too obvious and was already taken by pharmaceutical executive and non-medical professional Alex Azar.

For Secretary of Education, the person responsible for government of the nation’s public schools, Trump appointed Betsy DeVos, heiress to a pyramid scheme fortune and hater of public education.

Many of Trump’s picks were boring, boilerplate Republican nominations, like picking Georgia Governor Sonny Perdue for Secretary of Agriculture and Marine Corps General Jim “Mad Dog” Mattis for Secretary of Defense.

Even some of his oddball picks weren’t entirely outside the realm of normalcy in a world where Pete Buttigieg went from mayor of one of Indiana’s less meth-tinged cities to main stage Presidential candidate to Secretary of Transportation in just a couple of years.

This was the story of Trump’s first cabinet, captured before that story could be rewritten and replaced with the world’s largest game of legacy chicken: nation-class politicians sitting side-by-side with the likes of the wife of the WWE guy (Linda McMahon, chair of the Small Business Administration), each trying to accomplish some part of their specific oddball agenda and quit before their capricious boss could come up with a reason to fire them. 

For the initiated, for people accustomed to marking Trump’s behavior and appointments as unhinged and leaving it at that, this year’s picks won’t seem unusual. He picked inappropriately-suited freaks last time and now he’s doing it again. But for students of psychology like me (Bachelor’s degree, focus on children, no diagnostic authority, too unserious for graduate school), there’s something deeper here. Maybe it’s obvious to you. Last time, Trump was partially bound by constraints of history and political normalcy. Never a normal candidate, to be sure, he acted from day one with the cadence of a lunatic who hadn’t yet outed the depths of his lunacy. But while it’s undoubtable that his desires were to immediately appoint insane people to the highest seats of government on a whim, there seems to have been a cautiousness exercised, an uncertainty as to how lithe and flimsy the norms and standards of our government were.

This time, the flexibility of those norms has been firmly tested. Among all of his whackjob appointments and insane schemes, the original host of NBC’s The Apprentice attempted to incite the overthrow of democracy and not only got away with it, but thrives in the shadow of his little pantomime, continuing to make fast money on branded Bibles, trading cards, and, in all likelihood, plutonium tanning lotion and exclusively heterosexual sex toys.

The testing and failure of these limits leaves Trump free not necessarily to grow worse, nor to change, but to be who he’s always been. Afforded the authority to fill these positions with whomever he likes, he will do as he likes, ranking them not according to our collective values, but by his own. And what Trump values most of all is a good, old-fashioned sycophant, a lickspittle who tells him what he wants to hear, reaches into his crevices to stroke his ego, and never challenges his authority.

This transcends the selfishness and grandeur espoused by even our worst presidents. The key criteria determining who gets to run our government is not talent or experience. It’s not even how much the President likes them. It’s how much they are willing to like the President.

So, to illustrate my point, let’s take a look at some of Trump’s early appointees, starting with my home state and the cancerous mole it allowed to metastasize, just to see what happens.

For Secretary of Homeland Security, the President-elect tapped South Dakota Governor and cowboy mom Kristi Noem, whose gubernatorial accomplishments include ending the unholy apartheid between church and state, sticking it to the libs by hosting a previously-banned fireworks show amid conditions of high risk forest fire risk, showering her nepo baby children with favors, and erecting a protective fence around her home in one of the least populated state capitals in the country. Pre-gubernatorial accomplishments include having a puppy so playful she had no choice to drag it out back and shoot it in the head.

If approved (and she will be approved), Noem will lead the Department of Homeland Security, a Bush-era hodgepodge of a little of this and a little of that from every other cabinet department, trimming the fat and fighting the terrorists in one go. In her role, Noem will be in charge of the Nuclear Incident Response Team, the National Biological Warfare Defense Analysis Center, the National Disaster Medical System, and, let’s be honest, the real meat of the department: the Immigration and Naturalization Service.

Noem, of course, is a farmer by trade who earned her college degree only in 2012 while serving in the House of Representatives, a position from which she claimed internship credit. I’m sure she’ll keep us all very safe and secure.

But Noem, of course, isn’t the only cabinet official responsible for our safety. For Secretary of Defense, Trump tapped Pete Hegseth, a military veteran who more recently, from 2016 to 2020, served in the presidential fellatio corps at Fox News. It’s an odd pick that has pundits scratching their heads, but in a rare period of relative peace for the United States, maybe what we need is a man with years of experience picking internal fights and leading targeted charm offensives.

For Secretary of State, the main character of the cabinet positions, Trump picked Marco Rubio, perennial “maybe this time” candidate and beneficiary of a first seat reveal convincingly designed to make us all think maybe these picks weren’t going to be as bad as we thought.

But then Trump, more famous for turning the car around to go back on his word than this next candidate is for digging into the gas pedal to plow right through bear cubs in upstate New York, went and stuck to his promise to nominate Kennedy family black sheep and black lung aspirant, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead the Department of Health and Human Services. Many have criticized the decision to put a brain worm-surviving vaccine denier in charge of the nation’s health, but the man deserves credit where credit is due: the start of his term of office is still months away and he’s already followed in the footsteps of the great disease curers before him, completely eradicating comedy by being more insane a caricature than any writer can possibly dream up.

Somewhat easier is former United States Representative and shortlister for Secretary of Dalmatian Welfare, Tulsi “Benedict Archipelago” Gabbard, who’s been picked instead to act as Director of National Intelligence. Confirming her nomination would put in charge of the CIA and broader intelligence community a woman described as “a Favorite of Russia’s State Media”. The same article that proffered that label reassures us “No evidence has emerged that she has ever collaborated in any way with Russia’s intelligence agencies. Instead, according to analysts and former officials, Ms. Gabbard seems to simply share the Kremlin’s geopolitical views”. In other words, we can sleep easy knowing that the person in charge of our national security isn’t a Russian agent, she just agrees with the Russian government, the eternal nice guys of history, about everything from “the invasion of Ukraine is actually good” to “the dictator of Syria is actually good.”

International conflict is stressful. Let’s do a fun one: remember a few paragraphs ago, when I took the 2016 appointment of World Wrestling Entertainment’s supreme commander Vince McMahon’s wife to lead the Small Business Administrator and used it to illustrate the insanity of Trump’s picks last time around? During the writing of this piece, the President-elect tapped this same woman, a woman whose work experience is almost entirely tied to her husband’s adult wrestling company, to lead the Department of Education.

Now, of course, to be fair, McMahon has pointed out that she has a college degree in the field of education. Also fair are the dozens of news agencies who have subsequently pointed out that McMahon definitely doesn’t have a college degree in education.

What I don’t want to spend too much time on is the appointment of tech weirdo Elon Musk and President of the Weeknight Donald Trump LARP Club Vivek Ramaswamy as co-chairs of the Department of Government Efficiency. Musk’s delved scrotum-resembling-head-first into his own imitation of Trump, surrounding himself with an even lamer army of internet-based sycophants unafraid to reward a fifty-year-old absentee parent for his unhealthy obsession with outdated memes, an obsession that extends so far as to name a new government department after a rotting meme and its associated cryptocurrency. This and the lack of government experience by both parties tapped to increase its efficiency (and, indeed, one’s notoriety for taking control of an effective private utility and turning it from a hub of journalism to a writhing pit for incels and basement lizards) aside, the jokes about appointing two men to lead the department designed to clear the government of unnecessary redundancy write themselves.

The original point of this piece was to gradually ramp up to the appointment that caught everyone’s attention: Florida representative Matt Gaetz for the position of Attorney General. Gaetz, whose three main interests are Trump, chemically-assisted foreheadmaxxing, and loud-and-proud sex with high schoolers, wasn’t most Americans’, or, indeed, most Republicans’ first choice to head the Justice Department, especially given his own history of legal issues stemming, again, from his what-we-would-call-statutory-rape-in-any-civilized-jurisdiction of teenagers. 

You can feel the crescendo, right? Anyway, it’s all gutted a little by Gaetz’s decision to remove himself from the running, perhaps influenced by the post-election clarity-fueled revelation that his Capitol Hill colleagues in the Senate don’t all love Trump more than they dislike sex of children. Many, of course, remain steadfast in their dedication to Trump and as ambivalent as ever on the latter topic, but Gaetz needs a majority, and it might have finally dawned that he wasn’t likely to get it.

This, I feared, would have been an event that Democrats lauded as a victory: saving the country from the awfulness of a Florida Man-incarnate-led Department of Justice. And, to a degree, it certainly would have been. On top of hanging out somewhere reasonably below the cutoff grade of a consummate professional and having almost no meaningful legal experience, the election of a crony creep like Gaetz to handle the nation’s legal affairs opens the door to even further and more flagrant disregard for the rule of law than the President-elect has already shown.

But I’m clearly ramping up to criticism, and so here it is: with Gaetz gone, the Trump administration has lost its smokescreen. In all likelihood, it will have another, an appointment that the few remaining Republicans who pride themselves on some sense of decency, no matter how inaccurate or outdated, will find reason to argue against. We may see one of Trump’s nominations fail and see the President forced to choose someone else.

But we will not see most or anywhere close to most of these nominations fail, and while few people can clear the bar set by Matt Gaetz in terms of unfitness to lead a cabinet-level department, we’d do well to take another look at his matriculating peers and remind ourselves that the qualifications for the rest of these guys, while not quite as shitty, at least qualify as piss-poor.

Not diving head-first into the sort of autocratic state that thinks a sex pest with alligator DNA would make a good attorney general is a good thing. Good job, us. But if any of the rest of these guys are successfully appointed, and, again, most or all of them will be, it’ll represent a significant backwards step for the story of our country. 

In the coming four years, we’re going to hear a lot of appeals to look for the good news. And we should absolutely do that. Log off of the Internet, stop reading my drivel, love a human. But recognize too that at the end of this, when all is said and done, we’re likely to find ourselves in a much worse place than where we started. And that starts with a government built exclusively of those people most willing to gently caress Donald Trump.

Tagged cabinet, secretary, succession was better