The Potential Upsides of Trump’s Insane Cabinet Picks

Displaying his astonishing aptitude for outside-the-box mind-fuckery, Trump has been making cabinet nominations this past week.

While every pick he’s made seems like a sick joke, and may seem like he’s trolling everyone, there’s a deranged logic underlying every prospective appointment.

It may, for example, seem insane to appoint someone like Matt Gaetz as Attorney General. While Gaetz has zero experience in any law enforcement role, he has obviously had some relevant experience with law enforcement and the criminal justice system, albeit as a criminal suspect. It’s like when banks and security agencies hire safecrackers and thieves; who better to catch criminals than a criminal? In that sense, perhaps it’s a brilliant appointment, rather than an asinine and corrupt one. Maybe it makes perfect sense to make a pedophilic, sex-trafficking, drug-abusing, embezzling, shamelessly perverted, thieving rapist the most powerful law enforcement official in the country.

Many of Trump’s other picks follow similar lines of logic. Some might balk at the idea of appointing a man with little scientific background, and in fact an apparent hostility to scientific reasoning and research, to be the head of the Health and Human Services department. They might say that someone who favors the ignorant babble of conspiracy theorists over evidence-based medical science isn’t an ideal candidate to be in charge of the agencies monitoring national health and food safety, or that the worm that was discovered in his brain had by then eaten too much of it and left him a blithering idiot. But, maybe, Robert Kennedy Jr is on to something. Maybe he’s just the right combination of stupid, crazy, and a liar to get things done. Whether those things will be beneficial to the country, well, that will have to remain to be seen, and may require some creative interpretation of the word, “beneficial.” To some folks, it would be beneficial for measles and polio to make a major comeback in the absence of vaccines and thin the population of those without strong immune systems. Those folks would be psychopathic eugenicists, but those are hardly the worst character traits it’s socially acceptable to display these days.

Then we have Kristi Noem, whose only qualification other than an online bachelor’s degree is that she has the decisive and bold nature to execute a puppy rather than take the time to train it, who is set to lead the Department of Homeland Security. To be fair, Homeland Security is kind of a joke of a department, despite its apparently great power. Apart from being stupidly named, its creation was born of the failure of other agencies to prevent the 9/11 attacks, and there’s little specific evidence to suggest that adding DHS as another bureaucratic organization to the alphabet soup of US government agencies has done anything to improve security or prevent subsequent attacks, mass killings, or make the country safer. So, how bad a job could Noem do? Perhaps she’ll shoot every law enforcement official under her auspices that misbehaves. Granted, she might not have great standards for misbehavior, but maybe that kind of mercilessness is what the bloated national security state needs to trim the fat.

We can look at the appointment of Pete Hegseth as Defense Secretary through a similar lens. Sure, he’s a jabbering jackass filling the ears and rotting the brains of anyone unfortunate enough to be in a room where Fox and Friends is playing, and his military experience wasn’t in a leadership role, and he’s a Christian nationalist, a misogynist, a white supremacist, and a rapist, but are any of those things really so disqualifying for a position running the entire US military? It’s not exactly breaking any historical norms. And if he does a shitty job, maybe the US won’t manage to kill as many people.

No one should be that surprised by any of Trump’s picks. You only have to endure listening to him for a few minutes to learn he knows virtually nothing about anything. It’s only natural that he’d pick other people who know nothing about the work involved in the positions they hope to hold, but approach them with the confidence only narcissists who’ve never had to be that qualified or work that hard for any of the successes they’ve enjoyed can.