If Donald Trump gets his way, his Cabinet will look more like a junk drawer, filled with unqualified crackpots who made names for themselves on television.
Pete Hegseth, Trump’s nominee to lead the Department of Defense; Sean Duffy, Trump’s pick for the Department of Transportation; Mehmet Oz, Trump’s choice to run the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services; and Linda McMahon, who Trump selected to lead the Department of Education that he wants to cut, all made names for themselves in the entertainment world.
Hegseth is a Fox News host who has spewed anti-Muslim bigotry and misogyny on the right-wing propaganda network for years. While Hegseth is a veteran, he has no experience running an organization as large and complex as the Department of Defense. The Defense Department makes up 17% of the entire federal budget, only behind the Department of Health and Human Services and the Social Security Administration, according to statistics from the Treasury Department.
Oz, meanwhile, was catapulted to fame by Oprah Winfrey (girl, you got a lot of explaining to do), and later branched out on his own with the “Dr. Oz Show,” where he gave medically unsound advice and peddled weight loss supplements that don't work but made him super rich.
Duffy got his start on MTV, appearing first on the “Real World” and later on two seasons of “Road Rules.” He used his reality TV past to help win a seat in the U.S. House in 2010, but resigned from Congress nine years later. He then took a job as a co-host and contributor on Fox News—Trump’s favorite television network that airs fawning coverage of Trump and the GOP.
McMahon got ridiculously rich with her husband by founding World Wrestling Entertainment, another one of Trump’s favorite programs to watch on television. Like the other cast of clowns Trump nominated, McMahon is not qualified to run the DOE. She was never an educator, and in fact had to resign from the Connecticut Board of Education after she lied about having a degree in education.
And who can forget Trump himself, who is famous for hosting the now-defunct NBC reality show “The Apprentice,” where he cosplayed as a successful businessman. NBC’s former head of marketing wrote an op-ed for U.S. News & World Report ahead of the 2024 election apologizing for his role in crafting the image Trump has now used to win the presidency twice:
To sell the show, we created the narrative that Trump was a super-successful businessman who lived like royalty. That was the conceit of the show. At the very least, it was a substantial exaggeration; at worst, it created a false narrative by making him seem more successful than he was.
In fact, Trump declared business bankruptcy four times before the show went into production, and at least twice more during his 14 seasons hosting. The imposing board room where he famously fired contestants was a set, because his real boardroom was too old and shabby for TV.
Trump may have been the perfect choice to be the boss of this show, because more successful CEOs were too busy to get involved in reality TV and didn’t want to hire random game show winners onto their executive teams. Trump had no such concerns. He had plenty of time for filming, he loved the attention and it painted a positive picture of him that wasn’t true.
At the end of the day, Trump doesn’t care about experience.
He is more concerned whether people fit the image of the role he’s choosing them for, rather than if they can actually do the job. As the Associated Press reported, Trump likes the “central casting” look.
“We are becoming the world’s first nuclear-armed reality television show,” Democratic Rep. Jim Himes of Connecticut wrote on X. “Just spitballing here, but what if the Attorney General and the Secretary of HHS fight each other in an octagonal cage?”
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