28 July 2023
The Trumpers who think he’d be perfect for a second term might ask: Who would be in the clown show this time?
When Trump came into office, it didn’t matter whom he appointed to the cabinet and other jobs. He was going to do everything himself, like he did in business.
Lacking a philosophy, he outsourced that to Stephen Miller and Steve Bannon, who roamed the White House like sugar-drunk two-year-olds at a birthday party. Until they got on each other’s nerves and even Trump’s. He took away Bannon’s toys and pushed his frame out the doggie door, leaving Miller in a White House closet building border walls with his Legos, coming out now and then with a new plan to harm immigrant children.
The drift out the door began immediately as even pseudo-normal people – more than 150 of them in no time – realized having a clown for a boss, or being one yourself, wouldn’t look good on a résumé.
Those who remained weren’t people you’d bring home to dinner. Former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson might make pronouncements on your front lawn that being gay is a choice (and not pleasing to the Lord), same-sex marriage is akin to bestiality, public housing is too comfortable and poverty is a state of mind. Former Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin might park a military plane on your lawn. Former Attorney General Bill Barr might bury a copy of the Constitution there.
Trump was delighted when Scott Pruitt slipped through the doggie door and planted himself at his feet as head of the EPA. He had sued the Environmental Protection Agency 14 times as Oklahoma Attorney General. Now he could bring down the whole damn thing. Alas, he was overzealous, trying to roll back vehicle emissions in 38 pages that took Obama 1,217 pages to write. Courts undid nearly all of his efforts, but Trump kept him on.
Hadn’t he heard about Pruitt’s penchant for flying on expensive military and charter flights? He said he did it for security reasons – his security. The low-life passengers on commercial flights were mean to him, maybe because he was trying to destroy clean air and clean water.
Pruitt also had monarchical tendencies that just wouldn’t quit. With delusions of grandeur (and afraid for his life), he rode around Washington, even to his favorite restaurant, in an armed motorcade with lights flashing and sirens blaring. He had armed guards even at EPA headquarters. He built a $43,000 soundproof phone booth in his office. Soon even Trump partisans couldn’t take it. Said one, “If the President wants to drain the swamp, he needs to take a look at his own cabinet.”
Pruitt resigned after 16 months.
Mnuchin wasn’t an Okie with delusions of grandeur. He had amassed a $300 million to $500 million fortune at Goldman Sachs using lessons learned from his father, a Sachs partner, and had business dealings of his own.
Mnuchin was finance chairman of Trump’s campaign, which might have meant a lot to a candidate who didn’t expect to win, and he won Trump’s heart early, and unpredictably, for someone who is Jewish. When Neo-Nazis stormed Charlottesville chanting, “Jews will not replace us,” and when Trump declared there were “very fine people on both sides,” Mnuchin stood by him. Three hundred of his Yale classmates called on him to resign. He stayed.
He survived again when he said, based on a report that didn’t exist, that Trump’s 2017 tax cut, benefitting mainly corporations and the wealthy, would pay for itself by stimulating expansive growth. Many economists laughed uproariously, and it didn’t happen. Not a problem. If Trump believed it happened, it happened.
Mnuchin might have escaped his worst misdeed if his wife-to-be, Louise Linton, hadn’t flounced off a military plane at Fort Knox displaying her designer labels, then posted a photo of herself on Instagram.
A watchdog group filed suit, and out tumbled the rest of the story. Mnuchin had never flown commercial. He spent $1 million in taxpayer money for seven trips in 2017 alone.
He didn’t want just any plane: he wanted the Gulfstream G-IV. When that plane wasn’t available for another one-day trip, at a cost of $26,953.33, an FAA employee reminded him it would cost under $700 per person to fly commercial.
When Trump fired an earlier cabinet member for using private planes, he crowed: “Not good optics.” For Mnuchin, whose offense was much greater, not a word.
Now that a new clown show is threatening to suit up, candidates should shine their shoes and line up. The competition will be fierce, led by Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Kevin McCarthy, plus Tommy Tuberville, Matt Gaetz, Lauren Boebert, Lindsay Graham, Josh Hawley, Jim Jordan, Mo Brooks, Louie Gohmert, Andy Biggs, and George Santos. These and countless others are experienced at knavery and clownery; they know how good they are at it; they’re perfect to serve in an autocracy run by a narcissistic, amoral individual who wants to take back the power that was so rudely taken from him.
As a newspaper reporter for 32 years – in New York and Maine, ending with 17 years at the Star Tribune – I wasn’t allowed to have opinions. “Just the facts, ma’am.” As a retiree, I keep track of my government and let lawmakers know what I think. Not that it gets me anywhere. When I wrote to former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos about school shootings, she sent me a list of existing gun laws and said a committee was studying gun safety measures.
Donna Hasleiet Halvorsen, a native of Peterson, Minnesota, lives in South Portland, Maine.