Tag: Cabinet of Deplorables

Nobel Laureates Band Together Against RFK Jr.

Buck Banks

75

“More than 75 Nobel Prize winners have signed a letter urging senators not to confirm Robert F. Kennedy Jr., President-elect Donald J. Trump’s pick to lead the Department of Health and Human Services,” the New York Times reports. “The letter marks the first time in recent memory that Nobel laureates have banded together against a Cabinet choice.”

Trump’s Is a Cabinet of Deplorable Billionaires

Buck Banks

$9 billion

Trump has nominated at least 10 billionaires (or billionaire spouses) to cabinet positions and other top roles, making the incoming presidential team the wealthiest in history. Just his cabinet nominees are collectively worth more than $9 billion, according to New York Magazine. Though Biden’s cabinet is also a moneyed persons club, its wealth amounted to just $118 million in 2021, per Forbes.

Would Patel Confirmation Make the Senate Culpable?

Buck Banks

“The only reason to nominate someone like Patel to run the FBI is to commit impeachable abuses of power. Trump makes no secret that this is, in fact, his purpose. Patel is similarly explicit on the point. Yet the Senate might very well confirm the man once Trump removes the incumbent FBI director and nominates Patel to replace him. … If it actually does so, would that constitute ‘consent’ to impeachable offenses?”

— Benjamin Wittes</h2>

In Trumplandia Denial Really Ain’t Just a River in Egypt

Buck Banks

The author of an email critical of Fox News host-turned-Trump Defense Secretary pick Pete Hegseth threatened New Yorker writer Jane Mayer that “if you print that, I will deny I wrote it,” and when Mayer reminded him “that it had been sent from the same personal e-mail account that he still uses,” the author wrote, “I don’t care. I’ll just say it never happened.”

— The New Yorker

Trump’s Secretaries of Sexual Abuse

Buck Banks

“If everyone is a sexual predator, then no one’s history of misdeeds matters (or, at least, no one needs to be held accountable). … MAGA Republicans seem to be having their own #MeToo moment, except here, a growing cohort of men is essentially saying: Oh, another man accused of sexual predation? #MeToo—and so what? Being accused of sexual harassment, abuse, or assault is no longer disqualifying; on the right, it has been normalized. It may even be an asset.”

— Jill Filipovic