With hundreds of important administration appointments still percolating under Trump’s hairpiece, you might be feeling the need to conserve your outrage. You needn't bother. Short of appointing stuffed animals or corporate logos to cabinet posts, there’s no way the picks are going to any get worse than the choice of virulently anti-EPA Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt to head, yes, the Environmental Protection agency.
To say he's in the pocket of America's most polluting companies is an understatement. He was quite literally caught copying industry-written letters onto his own stationery and sending them to other government agencies as the opinions of his own office.
He's a crook, in other words. In exchange for pushing industry-written legal arguments as his own, he and other coordinating Republican attorney generals got, at last count, $16 million from those companies for their political campaigns. It's even fair to say that he only got on Trump's radar due to the ample financial padding provided by those firms.
Lobbyists and company officials have been notably solicitous, helping him raise his profile as president for two years of the Republican Attorneys General Association, a post he used to help start what he and allies called the Rule of Law campaign, which was intended to push back against Washington.
What does it profit a man to outsource his public duties to energy industry lawyers who will write up their preferred stance on issues for him to send out? It profits him plenty. We'll also be putting him near the top of the list of people who might end up facing indictments in the next two years.
Other new entries into today's basket of deplorables are, by comparison, not nearly as egregious as Captain Earthquakes Are Good For You. Trump-loyal Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad, who counts "a personal friendship with Chinese President Xi Jinping that dates back decades,” will be the new ambassador to China. His task will be to prevent a trade and/or shooting war with China even as Donald Trump belittles them on a daily basis and shreds decades of policy based on where he wants his blind-trust leading children to be able to put a new Trump-branded hotel.
There's Jim "Mad Dog" Mattis, a sharp-edged retired general who is Trump's pick for Secretary of Defense. His primary problem is that his very presence in the role would constitute a legal violation; the position is intended to be a civilian role, out of the very real and longstanding American belief that the military forces of our particular nation always be under civilian command. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi is signaling that Democrats won't accept an immediate new law exempting Mattis from this legal requirement as part of the next must-pass continuing resolution, but will accept an expedited process for considering it. That new "waiver" to the law will require 60 votes on the Senate floor, and Pelosi is, sigh, musing that he might get it because "compared to some of the other people [Trump] could put forth," he's at least not, well, a paste-eating idiot.
That's where we're at now, by the way. Both parties are pretty sure we'll grant exceptions to the normal American rule of law if it means Donald Trump will have a few scattered people on his team who might know just what the hell they're doing. The bar is, a month-and-a-half before inauguration, already that low.
Another general tapped for an administration position today: Gen. John Kelly, who Trump wants to place as head of Homeland Security. And yes, the seeming reliance of Trump on military figures for civilian roles is indeed making a few people concerned; when all the tools in your toolbox are guided missiles, you're going to have a tendency to see everything as a missile-solvable problem. This has long had a tendency to Not Work Out Well.
Also in the mix today? Pro wrestling rich person and generous Trump “Foundation” donor Linda McMahon, whose career helping to manage a steroid-soaked faux sport empire now apparently qualifies her to run the Small Business Administration.
Anyhoo, this has been your probably-soon-to-be-regular update on the chosen form of our destructor(s). I was hoping for the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man, but Scott Fucking Pruitt it is.