As I See It: The cabinet Trump and we deserve

Jon Huer

Jon Huer

Pete Hegseth, center, President-elect Donald Trump’s choice to be Defense secretary, appears before the Senate Armed Services Committee for his confirmation hearing with Rep. Michael Waltz, R-Fla., left, and former Sen. Norm Coleman, at the Capitol in Washington, Tuesday, Jan. 14, 2025.

Pete Hegseth, center, President-elect Donald Trump’s choice to be Defense secretary, appears before the Senate Armed Services Committee for his confirmation hearing with Rep. Michael Waltz, R-Fla., left, and former Sen. Norm Coleman, at the Capitol in Washington, Tuesday, Jan. 14, 2025. AP PHOTO/ALEX BRANDON

By JON HUER

Published: 01-24-2025 11:07 AM

As I watch the Senate hearings on Donald Trump’s nominees, I am baffled: America just elected a great sinner for our new president, but the liberal senators expect his ministers to be saints. They are denying the new leader his kind of government, expecting a government run by the 12 disciples. America cannot love Trump without loving his minions. The nation just bathed in a cesspool and expects to smell like Irish roses.

The result is the oddity of Trump’s square pegs trying to find accommodation in Democrats’ round holes. In this comic process, liberal America has become the new “election deniers,” applying the normal checks and balances process to an abnormal president-elect and his government.

Typically, MSNBC’s star Trump critic Rachel Maddow had a blistering analysis of the unfitness of Trump’s nominees for his new government, headlined by Pete Hegseth for the Department of Defense (Jan. 13). She showed a parade of thieves, liars and nincompoops—more like a roster of prison inmates than cabinet hopefuls who want to govern the nation. The next day’s Recorder had an encore from columnist Bill Newman who writes thusly: “Donald Trump’s appointees, all sycophants ... sport vacuous resumes devoid of relevant education, training and experience. Others are masters of malevolence: Unqualified appointees and evil ideologues.” The column goes on to detail their present disqualifications and past evildoings.

Although I agree with the facts of the nominees’ unfitness presented by both Maddow and Newman, I disagree with their conclusion that they should not be Trump’s next government officials and caretakers: In an ultimate paradox, it is their unfitness that is precisely the reason they are fit for Trump’s cabinet.

But, listen to the non-sequitur common among the liberal news media and Congress: Trump has been elected by an American electoral plurality as president with the constitutional mandate to form his own government; however, liberals expect appointees with qualifications much higher than Trump’s, or our own. These liberals demand the high moral character of a Mother Teresa from their dog catcher.

In decorum, language and demeanor, even the Senate hearings are straight from some old movies: The man sitting in front of the inquisitors, Pete Hegseth, apparently no gentleman in either character or wisdom, is as unfit for Defense secretary as a drunken sailor performing brain surgery. He is shallow and amoral, but fiercely loyal to Trump, exactly the kind of cabinet secretary that Trump favors and needs. David Brooks of the NYT thinks Hegseth is perfect for the DOD job because the hearing made him “sick to my stomach.”

Virtually every liberal critic has been saying how immoral, unintelligent and unfit Trump is as the leader of the free world. There is not enough space in any tome that can chronicle all of his faults and faux pas. But Trump was elected in spite of his public persona and private biography — or perhaps because of them — and all his flaws were washed away by the election win.

Coincidentally, Jimmy Carter just died, prompting a reporter to say that Carter was perhaps America’s “best president,” thus giving us the “best” (past) and “worst” (future) presidents for an unforgettable contrast. Of course, the generations that elected Carter and Trump, respectively, are as different as day and night. Carter’s generation deserved Carter and our generation deserves Trump. As Churchill said, democratic systems always get the government they deserve.

But if Maddow and Newman, and virtually all other liberal critics, insist that Trump’s appointees are irredeemably unqualified, they need to be reminded that the president so elected and the voters who so voted are equally unqualified! When we elected such an unqualified leader to lead us into our future, why would we expect his government appointees to be different from the man we just elected?

If we just elected as president a man who could not be imagined to be our president, why should we expect his ministers to be straight from the textbook? To give the devil his due, we must allow his minions from hell to run our government.

Having elected someone like Trump, we cannot demand a King Solomon for the Department of Justice, a Cincinnatus for DOD, or a Marcus Welby for Health and Humans Services. In fact, we should expect the opposite: The Mafioso to run DOJ, an ignoramus to run Education, a witch doctor to run FDA, a drug dealer to run DEA, a mugger to run Treasury, and the Pentagon to relocate to Sodom and Gomorra. There, public power will be openly privatized, national wealth legally plundered, and American history rewritten by imperial decree.

We should expect, indeed demand, that the cabinet appointees be exactly like the president himself. As American electors, we deserve Trump as our elected leader and we likewise deserve all of Trump’s officials and caretakers, chosen according to his standards and purposes of qualification. If we deserve someone like Trump as our democratically elected president, which we do, we also deserve the minions he chooses who are as unsavory as he is.

So, let’s welcome our new ministers as they come, covered with filth and sin. Soon, they will be dripping with our blood and their ears filled with our groans. But, at least, our retribution fits our follies:

Our forefathers dreamed of founding another Athens in the new Eden, but we ended up creating a wealthy and strong, but decadent Rome instead. They hoped for self-governing moral citizens in the New World, but we turned ourselves into dog-eat-dog cannibals snarling at each other. America as the great beacon of hope for the poor and oppressed is no more, and the last free American will cry out, “Damn us all! We did it!”

Yes, America, we did it. We made our bed and we must lie in it and wait for our historic damnation.

Jon Huer, columnist for the Recorder and retired professor, lives in Greenfield and writes for posterity.