The hottest competition in Washington, D.C. these days is not any political race nor is it the ridiculous “grand prix” that bumped its way across the city’s potholed streets this week as the latest entertainment to soothe Mr. Harp, our president.
No, it’s the ongoing contest among Trump’s Cabinet members to demonstrate who is the worst among them. When Trump spoke of “the worst of the worst” during his campaign, not everyone was clear on the fact that he was referring to his future stable of advisors.
Those in hot pursuit of the “distinction” of being the most corrupt, most incompetent, and most dangerous can be comforted by one fact: No matter where they finish among a group that seems dedicated to finishing off this country, each will very likely end up being the worst ever to hold their particular post.
That is no small distinction. We have had some bad Cabinet secretaries in our history. Remember Don Rumsfeld? Remember Nixon’s Attorney General John Mitchell? What about former Secretary of the Interior Albert Fall, who was at the center of the Teapot Dome Scandal? He was the first Cabinet secretary ever to be convicted of a crime and sent to prison. How about A. Mitchell Palmer, Woodrow Wilson’s atrocious attorney general who drummed up Steven Miller-like hatred for foreigners and oversaw mass arrests and deportations during one of America’s first Red Scare eras? Let’s go back further? Grant’s Secretary of War William Belknap resigned just before he was impeached for receiving kickbacks.
Bad as all these guys were, their scandals and failures were merely a prelude to Team Trump’s disastrous tenure. When they stole, they stole less. When they hate-mongered, they did it at a smaller scale. When they sought to obstruct justice, they were just setting the stage for the real wholesale debasement of our justice system that we are seeing today.
Before we go on, I want to make it clear: I’m not drawing these conclusions lightly. I’m not making a big bold statement for dramatic effect. I’ve written many books and articles about presidents and their cabinets. I’ve studied them for years. I’m sure that other historians, over time, will validate my conclusion. Just as they already recognize Trump as the worst president in our history, they will see his Cabinet as the worst ever.
This is not a mere matter of my not liking their politics, although candidly, championing fascist white nationalist authoritarian corruptionalism (and make no mistake, even if it is not a word, the biggest “ism” that defines their “movement” is “corruptionalism”) is not so great. Further, it is not a condemnation merely of their oligarchic distance from and contempt for the American people—even though with something like 15 billionaires and nearly 60 centimillionaires it is quite clear they are, collectively, the most out-of-touch leadership of the executive branch in our history.
No, these guys are earning their bad reputations the old-fashioned way.
Let’s start with the most senior Cabinet post, Secretary of State. Here we have Marco Rubio, who has overseen the most disastrous collapse in American standing ever. He has gutted the State Department and overseen the shutdown of USAID that has eviscerated U.S. soft power and will result in the deaths of millions upon millions of people worldwide in the next several years. Perhaps 750,000 have already died, most of them children. Diplomacy on his watch? A catastrophe from Ukraine to Iran. Alliances are crumbling. Our enemies are beaming.
That record also reflects terribly on the rest of Trump’s national security officials, including notably his Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. But even without sharing the blame on those counts, Hegseth is surely the worst ever at the Pentagon (or the War Department) given his record of gross mismanagement, losing a war to a much lesser power, depleting our most important military assets, lying about casualties, shutting down departmental transparency, firing top generals and admirals for racist and sexist reasons, violating international law, overseeing war crimes, and wasting hundreds of billions on ill-considered projects that will actually make us weaker.
But wait, you say, what about Scott Bessent? Under his “leadership” we have just seen the national debt pass $40 trillion—by the end of this term, Trump’s contribution to that debt will undeniably be the greatest of any U.S. president. The dollar is weakening and its time as the world’s reserve currency may be coming to an end. Bond markets are howling, and his interventions are not helping. And his mismanagement of the IRS has included efforts to cut a corrupt sweetheart deal with Trump.
Can Attorney General Todd Blanche be worse than Mitchell or Palmer? At a trot, ladies and gentlemen. He has already made it clear that the Department of Justice serves only one American, the president. He has overseen the cover-up of the Epstein scandal (and cut a deal with Ghislaine Maxwell), the negotiation of Trump’s tax amnesty, efforts to offer payouts to insurrectionists, vindictive prosecutions against Trump’s enemies… and he’s just getting started. Just wait until you see what he does to tamper with election outcomes.
Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum has overseen widespread attacks on our national parks and, through his championing of fossil fuels, on our environment and that of the planet as a whole. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins is presiding over the most sweeping food safety crisis in our history at the same time as food prices are skyrocketing and the president is turning to foreign beef suppliers to make up for a shortage caused in part by a screwworm outbreak that the USDA should and could have prevented. Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick has the distinction of having just been called out by Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney for being particularly unhelpful in the failed U.S.-Canada negotiations that have led to the current trade war with our former friends to the north. Lutnick has also championed Trump’s disastrous tariffs (along with the worst USTR of all time, Jamieson Greer, whose terrible trade policies will be studied for years to come) while he and his sons are seen as tightly wrapped up in the efforts by top administration officials to cash in on their high offices.
Over at the Department of Labor, we have only an Acting Secretary in Keith Sonderling, but the department has, unsurprisingly, been battered by the anti-labor policies of the administration and new questions that have arisen concerning the output of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, once a bastion of credible economic data reporting.
RFK Jr.? Need we say more? He is the anti-HHS Secretary, waging an active war against science and health while promoting crazy crackpot quackery. Vaccine science is being set back by two centuries in some parts of America, and the results are mounting as diseases like measles and tuberculosis spread and available cures or measures to prevent flu or COVID or other diseases are being kicked to the curb.
At Scott Turner’s Housing and Urban Development department, they are doing less and less for fewer and fewer Americans. They have systematically weakened civil rights enforcement, cut fair housing programs and budgets, and undercut reasonable programs to help the homeless. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy is a laughing stock, overseeing decaying air traffic systems, cutting back on infrastructure investments, fighting common sense fixes for mass transit, fear-mongering about urban transit systems, and all the while spewing idiocies and filming reality TV projects.
Secretary of Energy Chris Wright, despite catering to the needs of the fossil fuel industry, has been one of the masterminds behind our current national energy crisis—spiking prices, failed measures to offset the consequences of the Iran War, depletion of the national petroleum reserves to historically low levels and attacks on the clean energy sources of tomorrow that the world is embracing, thus ensuring foreign companies own wind and solar and battery markets for decades to come. All this to support Trump’s crazy anti-windmill fetish.
Secretary of Education Linda McMahon, a woman who is on the record confusing AI with A1 steak sauce, is working to shutter her entire department. But along the way she is offering up choice ideas like, just the weekend, suggesting that more kids in elementary school need to be put on the track to trade schools. Meanwhile, Veterans Secretary Doug Collins has presided over massive cutbacks at VA hospitals and has made it harder and harder for veterans to get the care they need and deserve. (No surprise, given how badly Hegseth treats the troops or how often Trump derogates them.)
And last, but not least, we have Markwayne Mullin—and before him Kristi Noem—at the Department of Homeland Security. They have overseen the creation of a national Gestapo, serial violations of due process and the law in the mistreatment of both American citizens and immigrants. They have overseen the murder of Americans and the deaths of many in their concentration camp-like detention centers. They have cut deals to deport people, innocent and otherwise, to foreign countries they have nothing to do with.
The Cabinet, of course, cannot do it all alone. Prime Minister Stephen Miller is widely viewed as a candidate for the Hague. Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought is often cited alongside Miller as one of the principal architects of the administration’s destruction of U.S. institutions. Director of National Intelligence Jay Clayton has none of the requisite experience for his job. The list goes on and on: Witkoff, Kushner, Natalie Harp… remember DOGE and Elon? Everywhere you look, you see previously unimaginable incompetence, bad governance, malfeasance, misfeasance and nonfeasance.
Of course, none of this would be possible without President Trump and Vice President Vance. You don’t get a Cabinet like this by accident. You don’t do this much damage by accident. You must wage a careful campaign to destroy what is best about America, to pillage the ruins of the government you’re destroying for cash to line the pockets of high officials, and to put in place the kind of scumbags and goons that will oversee, as this Cabinet has, rendering the MAGA agenda into one of the darkest chapters in American history.
No, it’s no accident. But it’s a disaster.
