If you can know a man by the company he keeps, you know a lot about Donald Trump by the men and women he named to his cabinet.
Two days before his inauguration, he described them as having “by far the highest IQ of any cabinet ever assembled.” As always with Donald Trump, the truth is quite the opposite.1
From the Texas oilmen who don’t know anything about their jobs to the billionaires who despise the poor and middle class to the conservative ideologues who want to destroy the agencies they lead while lining their own pockets, Donald Trump’s cabinet is a rogues’ gallery of ne’er-do-wells.
Together, they are, to paraphrase John F. Kennedy’s famous witticism about Thomas Jefferson, the most extraordinary collection of hucksters, grifters, liars, ignoramuses, and right-wing nut jobs that have ever assembled in the White House, with the possible exception of when Donald Trump dines alone.
50. JEFFERSON BEAUREGARD SESSIONS
Almost two years into the Trump administration, it’s still hard to believe that a man who was rejected by the United States Senate for a federal judgeship in 1986 because he was such an outright racist would be appointed, no less confirmed by the Senate, as attorney general of the United States—now responsible for enforcing the very laws he spent a lifetime opposing.2
It’s even harder to believe that Jeff Sessions is still on the job. After Hillary Clinton, perhaps nobody has been more frequently and viciously pummeled by Donald Trump than his own attorney general. Trump has repeatedly denounced Sessions for recusing himself from the Russia investigation, blamed him for Robert Mueller, attacked him for not investigating Barack Obama’s dealings with Russia and for not launching yet another investigation of Hillary Clinton’s emails, and called him “weak” and “ineffective.” He has publicly said several times he regrets nominating Sessions and wishes he had someone else in the job.3
As is his style, most of Trump’s attacks on Sessions came in early-morning tweets from the White House residence.
On July 25, 2017, for example, Trump hit Sessions for not being tough enough on Hillary Clinton: “Attorney General Jeff Sessions has taken a VERY weak position on Hillary Clinton crimes (where are E-mails & DNC server) & Intel leakers!”4
In Donald Trump’s mind, if Sessions was too easy on Clinton, he was also too easy on President Obama, as he fumed on February 21, 2018: “Question: If all of the Russian meddling took place during the Obama Administration, right up to January 20th, why aren’t they the subject of the investigation? Why didn’t Obama do something about the meddling? Why aren’t Dem crimes under investigation? Ask Jeff Sessions!”5
A week later, he again publicly criticized Sessions for following the rules of the Justice Department: “Why is A.G. Jeff Sessions asking the Inspector General to investigate potentially massive FISA abuse. Will take forever, has no prosecutorial power and already late with reports on Comey, etc. Isn’t the I.G. an Obama guy? Why not use Justice Department lawyers? DISGRACEFUL!”6
Again in June 2018: “The Russian Witch Hunt Hoax continues, all because Jeff Sessions didn’t tell me he was going to recuse himself. I would have quickly picked someone else. So much time and money wasted, so many lives ruined … and Sessions knew better than most that there was No Collusion!”7
And yet, despite such continual criticism from the boss, Sessions is, as of this writing, still there. Why? As I see it, two reasons. One, because, although he’s still nowhere near Mike Pence’s league, Sessions is among the biggest ass-kissers in the cabinet. The occasional dinner with Rod Rosenstein to get under Trump’s skin aside, he has rarely veered from supporting whatever Trump says or does. He was the first senator to back Trump in February 2016 and defended him even after release of the Access Hollywood tape in October. As for grabbing women by the genitals, “I don’t characterize that as a sexual assault,” Sessions explained. “I think that’s a stretch.”8
Second reason why Sessions has survived? Because no cabinet member, with the possible exception of EPA administrator Scott Pruitt, has done more to carry out Donald Trump’s personal agenda or been more effective at it.
Under his “leadership,” Jeff Sessions has, in fact, turned the Department of Justice upside down—from a government force whose historic mission is to defend civil rights to a nefarious power whose job is to undermine them; from an agency whose job is to enforce the law to a gang of lawyers whose job is to protect the president from the law.
In so doing, Sessions has reversed decades of progress in improving police–community relations, expanding voting rights, and achieving criminal justice and sentencing reform, while declaring war on states over sanctuary cities and relaxed marijuana laws.9
For anyone familiar with Sessions’s background, his extreme right-wing record at DOJ came as no surprise. Just ask the ACLU, who published an overview of his dangerous record in May 2017.10
On sentencing reform: As senator, Sessions opposed legislation cosponsored by conservatives Charles Grassley and Mike Lee to eliminate mandatory minimum sentences and reduce sentences for nonviolent drug offenses. As attorney general, he instructed federal prosecutors to seek the maximum penalty in every case. “If I were attorney general,” Sessions once told an Alabama newspaper decades ago, “the first thing I’d do is see if I couldn’t increase prosecutions by 50 percent.” Under Trump, he’s been working to make his dream come true.11
On policing reform: As senator, Sessions opposed efforts by the Obama Justice Department to improve police–community relations nationwide, which resulted in consent decrees signed with Chicago, New Orleans, Los Angeles, Baltimore, and other big cities that allow the Justice Department to get involved if serious police abuses occur. But, as the ACLU’s David Cole points out, Sessions called these agreements “dangerous,” and “an end run around the democratic process.” As attorney general, Sessions ordered an end to the community relations program and declared existing consent decrees invalid.12
Sessions also suggested, early in his tenure as AG, “that the greatest increase in violence and murders in cities” is happening because “we undermined the respect for our police and made, oftentimes, their job more difficult.” This is an oblique reference to what is called “the Ferguson effect”—the notion that crime is going up because police are more afraid to do their jobs if they are being more closely monitored for abuses.13
But there are a few problems with this line of thinking. First, despite Trump’s and Sessions’s continual claims that America is a crime-ridden hellhole thanks to Obama and that we now need to return to “law and order,” crime rates in the United States remain at historic lows. In fact, both violent crime and the murder rate in 2017 were lower than they had been in nearly forty-five years, continuing a downward trend that, despite a brief blip in 2016, has been going on for a while. Second, as many policing experts have noted, there’s no evidence that a “Ferguson effect” exists. And third, it wouldn’t be an excuse to let police act like criminals regardless.14
On civil liberties: As senator, Sessions opposed legislation extending hate crimes protection to women and gays and lesbians. “I am not sure women or people with different sexual orientation face that kind of discrimination,” he argued. “I just don’t see it.” Soon after becoming attorney general, he withdrew a Department of Justice rule protecting transgender students from discrimination.15
On freedom of religion: As senator, Sessions supported candidate Donald Trump’s call for a ban on all Muslims coming to America and called one of the world’s most practiced religions “a toxic ideology.” He also opposed a resolution sponsored by Senator Patrick Leahy that simply affirmed that no religious discrimination should be allowed in the enforcement of immigration laws. The resolution passed, 94–6. As attorney general, he defended President Trump’s first and second Muslim bans in federal court, insisting—despite Trump’s many public statements to the contrary—that they were not a “ban” and were not “anti-Muslim.”16
On voting rights: As Alabama’s attorney general, Sessions prosecuted three black civil rights activists for the serious crime of encouraging people to vote by absentee ballot. A jury found all three not guilty. As senator, he called the Voting Rights Act “an intrusive piece of legislation” and cheered when the Supreme Court in 2013 gutted the act, calling it “good news … for the South.” No surprise that, as attorney general, he immediately dropped a Justice Department challenge to a Texas voter ID law that a court later ruled was, in fact, a case of intentional racial discrimination.17
On separating families and rounding up children in detention camps: Sessions actually had the temerity to invoke “the clear and wise command in Romans 13 to obey the laws of the government because God has ordained them for the purpose of order.” As historians soon pointed out, this dubious biblical reading—all laws are just because the Lord said so—last had its heyday in the Antebellum era, when it was used to uphold slavery. So naturally it rolled right off the tongue of racist Jefferson Beauregard Sessions, with no sense of irony whatsoever.18
Of course, none of that matters to Donald Trump, who will never forgive Sessions for recusing himself from the Russia investigation—when, in fact, Sessions was forced to do so. In his confirmation hearing for AG, he had denied under oath having any “communications with the Russians.” Later, when it surfaced that he had actually met with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak at least twice while working on the campaign, Sessions, for once, had no choice but to recuse himself, whether Trump liked it or not. He’s lucky he wasn’t charged with perjury, and, in fact, FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe—before he was fired by Trump and Sessions—authorized an investigation into whether Sessions had perjured himself, but ultimately, it couldn’t be proved.19
Having Jeff Sessions in any cabinet post would be bad enough, but having him serve as attorney general is a real disaster. The attorney general is the nation’s top law enforcement officer. Under any president, his or her job is to serve as an independent defender of the rule of law, regardless of political party or rank. And with a president who doesn’t care about the rule of law—who, in fact, believes himself above the law—the need for a strong, independent attorney general is now more important than ever. Weak Trump foot soldier Jefferson Beauregard Sessions is just the opposite.
51. REX TILLERSON
The position of secretary of state is considered the most prestigious and powerful job in any administration: the person who represents the United States and speaks for the president everywhere on the planet. Trump’s filled the job twice so far but failed both times to nominate someone up to the job.
Rex Tillerson, his first pick, had zero diplomatic experience before taking the job, and even less when he left. In fact, it was soon clear that Tillerson wasn’t a player in Donald Trump’s foreign policy world at all. He was not included in White House meetings, he was absent from many sessions with world leaders, and he learned about many of Trump’s foreign policy initiatives the same way the rest of us do—by watching television or Twitter.20
It’s not that Tillerson didn’t have a lot of experience dealing with foreign governments before becoming secretary of state. It’s just that, as CEO of ExxonMobil, his experience with foreign governments consisted mainly in making deals, exploiting their resources, and cozying up with corrupt foreign leaders like Vladimir Putin, who honored him by inducting him into Russia’s exclusive “Order of Friendship.” So, on paper, sounds like a pretty good fit for Trump!21
Indeed, senators found Tillerson’s business practices so questionable that forty-three members of the Senate, both Republican and Democrat, voted against confirming him for secretary of state—more negative votes than any nominee for that position had received in fifty years.22
In a sense, they needn’t have worried, because Tillerson—due both to Donald Trump’s ignoring him and his own inability—never really took on the total job. It was obvious from the beginning that Tillerson’s reliance on diplomacy was out of step with Trump’s preference for bluster and nonsense. Tillerson never joined the “America First” crowd pushed by Steve Bannon. Plus, Trump undercut Tillerson from the outset by carving one of the premier foreign policy goals—negotiating peace in the Middle East—out from under the State Department and handing it to his even more inexperienced son-in-law, Jared Kushner.23
Instead, Tillerson mostly just proceeded to carry out Trump’s directive to gut the agency and leave the State Department an empty shell. Shortly after being sworn in, he announced his intention to cut the agency’s budget by one-third, thereby eliminating some two thousand diplomatic jobs and billions of dollars in foreign aid.24
Promise made, promise kept. When Tillerson left office on March 31, 2018, eight of the top nine positions at the State Department, including his own, were vacant. The job titles themselves tell how those vacancies have crippled the agency. There was no under secretary for political affairs, no deputy secretary of state for management and resources, no under secretary for management, no under secretary of state for arms control and international security, no under secretary for civilian security, democracy, and human rights, no under secretary of state for economic growth, energy, and the environment, no counselor of the department—and, for a while, no secretary of state. With all the attention on the Korean Peninsula and the Middle East, there was no assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs and no assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs.25
At the same time, seeing the writing on the wall, more than three hundred seasoned career diplomats quit, retired, or applied for sabbaticals. As of this writing in June 2018, five hundred days into the Trump presidency, at least forty top jobs at the Department of State remain empty, and Trump has failed to fill dozens of key ambassadorships, including ambassadors to the European Union, Mexico, Qatar, Turkey, and South Korea.26
Mostly all under Tillerson’s watch. Ironically, for a man selected because he ran one of the world’s biggest companies, Tillerson proved ineffective at the one thing he was supposed to be good at—executive leadership, or good management. As one State Department official quipped, “He took the job, and made it smaller.”27
As the Trump administration gutted diplomatic efforts, it also proposed increasing defense spending by $54 billion—roughly equal to the entire budget of the State Department—reinforcing Trump’s belief that force is more valuable than diplomacy in international affairs and that other countries, even allies, respond better to threats than to persuasion. As one senior White House official summed up the Trump approach to foreign policy in June 2018, “We’re America, Bitch.”28
Meanwhile, Trump undercut Tillerson at every turn. He ignored his advice to remain a partner in the Paris climate accord. He suggested a tenfold increase in America’s nuclear arsenal—which, no doubt among other things, prompted Tillerson to describe the president to friends as “a fucking moron.” And back before his sudden pivot, he publicly ordered Tillerson to cease and desist from any talk of holding talks with North Korea. “I told Rex Tillerson, our wonderful Secretary of State, that he is wasting his time trying to negotiate with Little Rocket Man,” Trump tweeted. “Save your energy Rex, we’ll do what has to be done!”29
Later, of course, it was Trump himself who agreed to negotiate with Kim Jong-un, but by that time Tillerson was gone, fired in true Trumpian fashion—on Twitter. He learned he was fired upon picking up his iPhone on Tuesday morning, March 13, 2018, on his way back from Africa, to read the president’s tweet:
Mike Pompeo, Director of the CIA, will become our new Secretary of State. He will do a fantastic job! Thank you to Rex Tillerson for his service! Gina Haspel will become the new Director of the CIA, and the first woman so chosen. Congratulations to all!30
Adding insult to injury, chief of staff John Kelly told reporters later that day how he had called Tillerson the previous Friday to inform him he might soon hear from the president about State Department matters. He delighted in adding, very likely at the behest of his boss, that Tillerson was suffering from a stomach bug when he called, and he reached him while the secretary was sitting on the toilet.31
He left office with scant praise from anyone. “Tillerson would be at or near the bottom of the list of secretaries of state, not just in the post–Second World War world but in the record of U.S. secretaries of state,” said Paul Musgrave, foreign policy scholar at the University of Massachusetts–Amherst. Paul Krugman of The New York Times called him “surely the worst Secretary of State since William Jennings Bryan.” Former Obama NSC spokesman Tommy Vietor proclaimed Tillerson “probably the worst Secretary of State in modern history. He gutted and demoralized the department and delivered nothing for this country.”32
But, as Jeet Heer sensibly noted in The New Republic, that raises an interesting question. While we criticize Tillerson because he was so ineffective, we also criticize some of his predecessors because they were so effective—in doing bad things. Certainly Tillerson did nothing to compare with Dean Rusk and the Vietnam War, Henry Kissinger and the secret bombing of Cambodia, or Colin Powell and the Iraq War.33
Is effective always better than ineffective? It’s not just a rhetorical question, especially when you consider Tillerson’s successor.
52. MIKE POMPEO
No doubt, Mike Pompeo started off as secretary of state with several advantages over Rex Tillerson, both in terms of experience—he’s a former army officer, a skilled politician, and successfully led the CIA, a big, complex government agency—and in terms of political philosophy; he’s a virtual clone of Donald Trump, who not only agrees with his bellicose approach to foreign policy but is willing to flatter the president shamelessly—which, as we now know beyond any doubt, is the key to success in the Trump administration. Pompeo also got a vote of confidence from Trump when he was secretly dispatched to North Korea to break the ice with President Kim Jong-un and lay the groundwork for a historic summit with the North Korean leader—and again when he went back to Pyongyang and returned with three Americans freed from a North Korean prison.34
On foreign policy, Pompeo and Trump are like peas in a pod. They both support keeping the Guantanamo Bay detention camp open. They both wanted to end the nuclear deal with Iran and did so early into Pompeo’s tenure. They both supported the CIA’s use of torture under President George W. Bush, with Pompeo declaring, “These men and women are not torturers, they are patriots.” And they both insist that our intelligence agencies concluded that Russia’s interference in the 2016 election made no difference in the results—when, in fact, the leaders of our intelligence agencies emphatically did not say that.35
All of which leads most foreign policy experts to believe that Mike Pompeo could prove to be a far more effective secretary of state than Tillerson ever was. Which may be good news, but with an important catch: He may also be unwilling ever to stand up to Trump and thus amplify Trump’s worst instincts instead of providing a badly needed voice of reason.
As one leading diplomat told The Daily Beast, “Pompeo will have the president’s trust, but enable his worst foreign policy instincts.”36
Pompeo is frightening for other reasons, too. As Senator Cory Booker made clear at Pompeo’s confirmation hearing, our new secretary of state has long ties to, and refused to repudiate, rabidly anti-Muslim, right-wing organizations and leaders. (Previously, Pompeo has declared that Islamic terrorists will “continue to press against us until we make sure that we pray and stand and fight and make sure that we know that Jesus Christ is our savior is truly the only solution for our world.”) He also, as Senator Booker pointed out, has called being gay a “perversion” and the Supreme Court’s decision allowing same-sex marriage “wrong” and “a shocking abuse of power.” Once again, Pompeo—now the chief diplomat of the United States—refused to repudiate these retrograde views.37
And then there’s the small matter of the end of days. As Ken Klippenstein of The Young Turks reported in April 2018, Pompeo’s colleagues at the CIA complained to watchdog organizations about the now secretary of state’s penchant for Christian doomsday rhetoric. “They were shocked and then they were scared shitless,” said Michael Weinstein of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation. Pompeo “is intolerant of anyone who isn’t a fundamentalist Christian.” We don’t have to take his word for it—Pompeo has used similar rhetoric on the record many times, as when he declared, in 2015, that “evil is all around us” and politics is “a never-ending struggle … until the Rapture.”38
Which gets us back to Jeet Heer’s central question about Tillerson and Pompeo: Which is better, competence or incompetence? Is it better to be incompetent and have the right policies, as Tillerson did, or be competent but have more dangerous policies, like Pompeo?
I know my answer. I’d take Tillerson any day. Though, in the end, given the lasting damage both of Trump’s secretaries have inflicted on the State Department, we will lose either way.
53. BETSY DEVOS AND ERIK PRINCE
In choosing his cabinet, Donald Trump apparently had one overarching goal in mind: Find the one person in the nation who is the archenemy of any agency—and put that person in charge of it. Not to lead but to destroy it.
As we will soon see, that seems to be how we got stuck with Scott Pruitt at the EPA, Ryan Zinke at Interior, Tom Price at HHS, and Ben Carson at HUD. And for the Department of Education, the nemesis in question is Betsy DeVos, who has long spent her career and considerable family fortune trying to destroy public schools—and now presides over them.
Betsy DeVos began life with both an impressive résumé in conservative circles and a massive fortune at her disposal, thanks to her father, Edgar Prince, an auto parts manufacturer and cofounder of the virulently right-wing Family Research Council. She also came into even more wealth and conservative cachet when she married Richard DeVos, heir of the Amway fortune.39
They are today the wealthiest people in Michigan, with an estimated family fortune of $5 billion. They are among Michigan’s most politically prominent. Dick ran unsuccessfully for governor on a platform that added creationism to the public school curriculum. Betsy served as chair of the Michigan Republican Party and member of the Republican National Committee. They are also leading members of the religious Right, having given hundreds of thousands to two organizations, Focus on the Family and the aforementioned Family Research Council. Both the Prince family and the DeVos family operate under the principle that patriotism and politics are inseparable from Christianity.40
Dick and Betsy DeVos have also plowed their fortune into several other right-wing causes—making Michigan a right-to-work state; supporting a 1993 law setting up charter schools; donating over $100 million to conservative candidates; sponsoring a “school choice” ballot initiative in 2000 to legalize taxpayer-funded vouchers for use at private and religious schools; and establishing a PAC to support candidates who backed charter schools and vouchers.41
While all that DeVos money surely caught his eye, too, the ultraconservative, anti–public schools agenda is likely why Donald Trump named Betsy DeVos to the Department of Education. In effect, he turned the department upside down, placing an advocate of private Christian schooling at the helm of the nation’s headquarters of public education. And clearly, DeVos’s mission was his mission. “There’s no failed policy more in need of urgent change than our government-run education monopoly,” he said in September 2016. “It is time to break up that monopoly.”42
Still, despite Donald Trump’s full-throated endorsement, she almost didn’t get the job. She demonstrated so little knowledge of fundamental education issues at her confirmation hearing—including suggesting that guns were needed in public schools to protect against attacks by grizzly bears—that every Senate Democrat and two Republicans—Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski—voted against her. Only a tie-breaking vote by Vice President Mike Pence, the first ever for a cabinet member in Senate history, saved the day for her.43
Her dim-witted performance at her confirmation hearing was outdone, a year later, by her disastrous appearance on 60 Minutes. After a year of flailing in the position, DeVos seized on the opportunity to patch up her reputation. Instead, she destroyed it. She made one gaffe after another. She lamented that so many schools were not doing well, yet admitted she had never visited any underperforming school. “Maybe I should,” she admitted to veteran journalist Lesley Stahl. Her most embarrassing moment came when she asserted that public schools actually do better after a large percentage of students have left them for charter and privately run schools. When Stahl, posing the obvious follow-up question, asked her if that were true in her home state of Michigan, DeVos could only stutter in response, “I don’t know. Overall, I—I can’t say overall that they have all gotten better.”44
That’s been true of all America’s public schools under Betsy DeVos. She has been quick to dismantle many critical programs of the Department of Education. For example, she rolled back new guidelines set by the Obama administration on campus sexual assault, thereby making it more difficult for victims of abuse to make their case. She scaled back investigations into civil rights abuses at public schools and universities and rescinded protections for transgender students and students with disabilities. She continued to undercut public schools by asking Congress for $1 billion to advocate charter schools and vouchers parents could use to send their kids to private schools. Fortunately, Congress rejected DeVos’s request, as well as her attempts to cut funding for after-school programs, grants to low-income students, and mental health services.45
The combination of her disastrous media appearances and draconian cuts to public education made Betsy DeVos, at a 40 percent approval rating, the least popular member of Trump’s cabinet. Which is quite an impressive feat when you consider the competition.46
But she’s probably still more popular than her brother, Erik Prince.
He’s not a member of Trump’s cabinet—yet!—but Betsy’s baby brother has a sordid reputation of his own and his own key part to play in the current fiasco in Washington. A former Navy SEAL, Prince first gained notoriety as the founder of Blackwater, the private security firm—in effect, mercenaries—employed by the Bush administration for various tasks during the second Iraq War. In 2007, five Blackwater employees fired into a crowd of civilians in Baghdad’s Nisour Square, killing seventeen people and injuring twenty more.47
Prince defended his contractors, even after Blackwater was kicked out of Iraq by the Defense Department. Three years later, the company was in more trouble: five former executives had been indicted on federal weapons, conspiracy, and obstruction charges, and two former contractors faced murder charges in Afghanistan for firing into a civilian vehicle in May 2009 and killing two men. Sensing big trouble, Prince, who was not charged, nonetheless changed the name of Blackwater to Xe and moved with his family to Dubai. (Just coincidentally, I’m sure. The United Arab Emirates does not have an extradition treaty with the United States.)48
From there, Prince continues to promote the use of private security forces, or mercenaries—like those employed by his firm, now renamed once again as Academi—to replace American troops in fighting ISIS in Syria, the Taliban in Afghanistan, or other antiterrorist missions. Had Blackwater contractors been on the job in Benghazi, he insists, no Americans would have been killed and Ambassador Christopher Stevens would still be alive.49
Even more trouble awaited Erik Prince when he decided to throw in with Team Trump. Even as Donald Trump was busy denying that any of his associates had ever met with Russian operatives, The Washington Post reported that Erik Prince, in fact, had traveled to the Seychelles Islands in January 2017, the week before the inauguration. There, he identified himself as an official representative of Trump’s and met with banker Kirill Dmitriev, an associate of Russian president Vladimir Putin, in order to establish, per reports, “a back-channel line of communication between Moscow and President-elect Donald Trump.”50
Under oath before the House Intelligence Committee, Prince testified that this was nothing but a chance occurrence. He just happened to be in the Seychelles, and he just happened to run into one of Putin’s best friends. Unfortunately for him, one of special counsel Robert Mueller’s cooperating witnesses, businessman George Nader, told investigators that the meeting had been planned in advance. Meaning that Prince—for reasons that will no doubt become clear when Mueller finishes his investigation—perjured himself before the United States Congress.51
And then, thanks to Nader, the plot thickened even further. In late May 2018, reports emerged that Prince had organized a meeting at Trump Tower in August 2016 with Donald Trump Jr., Joel Zamel, an “Israeli specialist in social media manipulation,” per The New York Times, and Nader, who was representing the leaders of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Prince introduced the pair to Junior, and they allegedly discussed ways that Saudi Arabia and the UAE could help Trump win the election, including through a multimillion-dollar social media effort run by Zamel’s company, Psy-Group.52
Needless to say, and much as with the Russia example we will discuss in further detail later on, this incident if acted upon also constitutes illegal collusion by the Trump campaign to win the election with the aid of foreign powers. They sure are keeping Robert Mueller busy.
54. SCOTT PRUITT
People can and will have long arguments about who’s the biggest crook in the Trump cabinet. To my mind, there’s no doubt about it: Scott Pruitt is the worst member of the Trump cabinet and will have done the most lasting damage.
Even more than Betsy DeVos, Scott Pruitt personifies Donald Trump’s modus operandi in filling his cabinet. He looked for the most anti-environmental zealot in the entire country, and he found him in the attorney general of Oklahoma. In that role, Pruitt had waged all-out war against the environment on behalf of oil, gas, and coal companies. He had sued the Environmental Protection Agency fourteen times. And today, in arguably the biggest ever setback to environmental protection since the dawn of the environmental movement, he’s the head of the very agency his mission is to destroy. “I’ve never known any administrator to go into office with such an apparent disregard for the agency mission, definition, or science,” said former New Jersey governor Christine Todd Whitman, EPA administrator under President George W. Bush.53
Donald Trump has not succeeded in “Making America Great Again,” but Scott Pruitt has succeeded, as a banner headline in Mother Jones well put it in the spring of 2018, in MAKING AMERICA TOXIC AGAIN. Yet ironically, Pruitt has probably garnered more press for his various ethical problems than his catastrophic antienvironmental record.54
Indeed, while DeVos may be the least liked, Pruitt gets the award for the Biggest Grifter in a cabinet full of grifters. His well-publicized and comically corrupt ethical lapses so far include: contrary to EPA rules, blowing millions of dollars on private planes and first-class airfare; spending $43,000 to have a soundproof phone booth installed in his office; hiring a nineteen-person around-the-clock security detail at a cost of $2 million annually and requesting a bullet proof limousine, just like the president’s; disobeying White House orders not to give a fat pay raise to two close aides and doing it anyway; staying in a luxury hotel room paid for by developers for whom he promised to scuttle guidelines protecting wetlands; using D.C.-stopping motorcades to get to restaurant reservations on time; forcing employees to run personal errands for him; asking a staffer to secure a $200,000 a year job for his wife; sending an employee to buy a used mattress from the Trump Hotel; using his official position to push Chick-fil-A to give his wife a franchise; and perhaps most notoriously, renting a room in a Capitol Hill condo for fifty dollars per night from the wife of an oil industry lobbyist, at the same time her husband was lobbying the agency. Even former New Jersey governor Chris Christie, who weathered his own storm with Bridgegate, said, “I don’t know how you survive this one.”55
It’s true. For anybody else, any one of those scandals would have been a fireable offense. HHS secretary Tom Price (as we’ll see) and VA secretary David Shulkin were fired for a lot less. So why is Pruitt still on the job? Because he is doing exactly what Donald Trump wants at the EPA. As a candidate, Donald Trump promised to “get rid” of the EPA “in almost every form.” Scott Pruitt is his one-man wrecking crew.56
In his inauguration address to EPA employees, Pruitt announced his goal of rolling back regulations adopted under President Obama—and he worked fast to do so, ordering EPA staffers to kill two existing regulations for every new one created. One year later, almost every positive step taken by Obama’s EPA is gone, starting with the elimination of the landmark Clean Power Plan, imposing new limits on greenhouse gas emissions from new and existing coal-fired power plants. In addition, he weakened new rules for limits on methane emissions from oil and gas operations; rescinded rules giving the agency wider latitude to regulate pollution of drinking water; withdrew a 1995 policy imposing limits on nearly two hundred pollutants; and refused to ban certain dangerous pesticides. By early 2018, Pruitt had scuttled nearly fifty existing environmental regulations. And in March 2018, even as the signs of accelerating climate change became unmistakably clear, he unveiled plans to eliminate new fuel-efficiency standards adopted by President Obama with the support of the auto industry.57
On his first day on the job, Pruitt promised to “listen, learn, and lead.” There’s no doubt whom he’s been listening to. In 2017, reports The Washington Post, Pruitt held 218 meetings in his office with representatives of industries he regulates. He met just a dozen times with environmental or public health groups.58
Meanwhile, Pruitt’s efforts to reverse progress made under Obama had a twofold impact at the EPA. One, enforcement came to a standstill. Fines against polluters actually declined by 60 percent in the first seven months of 2017 and have not picked up since. Two, just like over at the State Department, some eight hundred career employees or scientists left the agency or were fired, replaced by industry officials handpicked by Pruitt and loyal to his agenda.59
As busy as he is driving the wrecking ball at the EPA, Pruitt already seems to be plotting his next move. He makes no secret that he’d like to be the next attorney general if Trump ever gets around to firing Jeff Sessions. And he has reportedly talked to friends about running for president in 2024. Again, from anybody else, that public display of ambition would anger Donald Trump. But not Scott Pruitt. In Trump’s eyes, as long as Pruitt is taking care of his friends in the oil, gas, and coal business, Trump doesn’t seem to care.60
Except when he’s made to look bad. As this book was going to press, Pruitt resigned, the AP reporting that the “scandal-plagued” Pruitt “had become a constant source of embarrasment to a president who had entered Washington promising to “Drain the Swamp’.” Trump nonetheless tweeted: “Within the Agency Scott has done an outstanding job.”61
55. RYAN ZINKE
While Scott Pruitt is clearly Trump’s number one climate denier and anti-environmental zealot, Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke is nipping at his heels. So, naturally, he was awarded the number two environmental slot in the Trump administration—where, like his brother-in-arms Scott Pruitt, he also emerged as one of the most corrupt and biggest grifters of the Trump cabinet.
Some people have compared Zinke to President Ronald Reagan’s inept antienvironmental Interior secretary James Watt, but Zinke’s far worse than Watt. A more accurate comparison is Albert Fall, Interior secretary under Warren G. Harding, who became the first cabinet official to go to prison. Like Fall in the infamous “Teapot Dome Scandal,” Zinke’s already starting to sell off public lands to the highest bidder.
And, again like Pruitt, Zinke earned the nickname the “Gulfstream Cowboy” for his use of charter planes to visit wealthy donors to the Trump campaign—for which he is now under investigation for violation of the Hatch Act. Newsweek later reported that Zinke paid for his luxury travel out of the department’s wildfire preparedness fund. He chartered a helicopter to go horseback riding with Vice President Mike Pence. In one case, he even outdid Pruitt. As noted above, the EPA administrator spent $43,000 on a private phone booth. Zinke spent $139,000 for new doors to his office.62
Zinke, revealing an ego as big as Donald Trump’s, went out of his way to show how “outdoorsy” and Rooseveltian he is. He rode a horse to work through the streets of Washington on his first day on the job. He ordered a specially designed flag to fly over the Interior Department whenever he’s in his office. He had commemorative coins made to hand out to visitors and friends. He displayed his knife collection and a mounted bison head in his office and installed a Big Buck Hunter video game machine in the Interior cafeteria. He headlined a target practice fund-raiser for the NRA.63
It’s all part of the con. As Interior secretary, Ryan Zinke is responsible for overseeing four hundred million acres of federal lands, including our national parks and monuments. To Zinke, all those lands are his—to exploit, sell, or give away to oil, gas, coal, and uranium companies. One of his first acts was to overturn a moratorium on new leases for coal mines on public lands. He’s also opened up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to new drilling.64
As noted earlier, reversing decades of protection under both Democratic and Republican presidents, Zinke also announced he was opening up the entire American coastline—east, west, and south—to new offshore drilling, only to make a sudden exception for Florida because the Sunshine State was so dependent on coastal-related tourist dollars. Zinke never did explain why tourism won Florida special consideration but not California, Oregon, Washington, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Jersey, Delaware, Virginia, North and South Carolina, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas. But he insisted that the fact the Florida governor Rick Scott was preparing to run for U.S. Senate had nothing to do with his decision.65
Zinke also came under fire from several inland governors. Republicans Matt Mead of Wyoming, Brian Sandoval of Nevada, and Gary Herbert of Utah opposed Interior’s plan to auction ten million acres to the oil industry on lands long protected as habitat of the endangered greater sage grouse. In a related action, Zinke announced in April 2018 that the Department would no longer enforce a century-old law holding people or companies responsible for killing birds. Over the years, 90 percent of the fines under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act had been paid by oil companies—after the Exxon Valdez oil spill, for example—so naturally the oil industry has been trying to get rid of the law for decades. They finally found their man in Ryan Zinke.66
And as seen earlier, Zinke will also be remembered and rebuked for gutting two of our great national monuments. If you took a survey today and asked one thousand people to name the most critical issues facing this country, not one of them would say, “We have too many national monuments. We have to get rid of a few or cut them down.” But that’s what Donald Trump and Ryan Zinke believe. So, at Trump’s request, Zinke undertook a review of twenty-five national monuments and then rolled back federal protection on two of them: Utah’s beautiful Grand Staircase–Escalante and Bears Ears National Monument. President Trump hailed this desecration as a move “to reverse federal overreach and restore the rights of this land to our citizens.” Which makes sense, only if you define citizens as oil, gas, and coal companies.67
Adding insult to injury, Ryan Zinke carries on this destruction of our land and water even as he waxes poetic about President Teddy Roosevelt, whom he calls his role model. He’s even described himself as TR’s “unapologetic admirer and disciple.” Yet Zinke must know it was Roosevelt himself who signed the Antiquities Act in 1906—which he then used to establish eighteen national monuments, and under which both Bears Ears and Grand Staircase–Escalante national monuments were created.68
Destroying this legacy is a strange way for Zinke to honor his alleged hero. Unless his real hero isn’t Teddy Roosevelt at all, but Donald Trump.
56. TOM PRICE AND ALEX AZAR
Haven’t we heard this song before? Third verse, same as the first and second. First, you find the biggest enemy of the agency involved. You give him the job, and he or she proceeds to do the most damage possible while at the same time lining their own pockets.
Enter Tom Price. HHS secretary. Archenemy of Obamacare, Medicare, and Medicaid. And another grifter. Like Pruitt and Zinke. But since, in Trump’s eyes, Price mangled the attempted repeal of Obamacare, he got fired for it.69
After “the wall,” ending Obamacare was the biggest promise of candidate Donald Trump. To champion that goal, he couldn’t have picked a better (or worse?) crusader than Georgia congressman Tom Price. A physician himself, Price was arguably the most outspoken opponent of Obamacare in Congress. But he didn’t stop there. On health care, in fact, he was far more radical than Donald Trump. He advocated scaling back access to birth control, cutting funding for Planned Parenthood, and making abortion illegal again. He had also long fought for privatizing Medicare and turning Medicaid over to states through block grants—just the opposite of Trump’s popular pledge not to touch either program.70
Still, Tom Price appeared to be Donald Trump’s dream candidate for HHS secretary—until he ran into two potholes in the road. First, Senate Republicans couldn’t round up enough votes to repeal Obamacare. True, Mitch McConnell was in charge, but Trump blamed Price for failing to deliver—as he telegraphed earlier in his memorable rambling to the Boy Scouts (!): “He better get the votes,” Trump said. “Otherwise I will say, ‘Tom, you’re fired.’” Everybody thought he was kidding. He wasn’t.71
And ultimately, Price was also caught with his hand in the cookie jar, giving Trump the out he needed. After Politico reported that his use of private planes had cost taxpayers over $400,000—in addition to over $500,000 on military aircraft to Africa, Europe, and Asia—President Trump ominously admitted to reporters on September 29, 2017, that Price was a “fine man,” but he “didn’t like the optics.” By the end of the day, Price was out of a job.72
How do we know Trump wasn’t actually livid about Tom Price’s high-flying travel? Well, for one, Pruitt, Zinke, and Secretary of the Treasury Steve Mnuchin have all been racking up the frequent-flier miles as well, and, as of this writing, they all still have jobs. For another, this wasn’t the first walk down the unethical highway for Tom Price.
As a congressman, he faced criticism in Congress for buying between $50,000 and $100,000 in stock in a biomedical firm that would benefit from legislation he was carrying—a transaction which, in Price’s confirmation hearing, Senator Ron Wyden called “a conflict of interest and an abuse of position.” Price also came under scrutiny for campaign contributions from health care industry organizations with matters pending before his committee. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, in his 2016 campaign for a seventh term in the House, Price accepted more than $700,000 from physicians, hospitals, drug companies, and health insurers.73
You’d think, given a do-over, that Trump might pick somebody a little more ethically grounded for his next HHS secretary. You’d think wrong. Soon a man with his own conflicts of interest was in the job.
When Donald Trump nominated Alex Azar to succeed Tom Price as secretary of Health and Human Services, he called him a “star for better healthcare and lower drug prices.” Another big Trump lie. In fact, just the opposite is true.74
During Azar’s tenure as president of Eli Lilly, the pharmaceutical company tripled the price of insulin and was fined for colluding to keep its drug prices high. “The last thing we need,” observed Vermont senator Bernie Sanders, “is to put a pharmaceutical executive in charge of the Department of Health and Human Services.” And yet here we are.75
By putting Azar at the helm of HHS, you wonder if Donald Trump forgot his campaign pledge to lower prescription drug prices or simply decided to ignore it. In either case, Azar’s not the man to push for lower drug prices. He spent his time in Big Pharma trying to jack them up and thereby getting his company in serious legal trouble.
Just look at what happened with insulin, the key drug for treating diabetes. Drug companies usually justify high prices by claiming they need to recoup the cost of developing relatively new drugs. That’s not the case with insulin. It was developed in Toronto in 1921 and today costs pennies on a dollar to produce. But instead of reducing prices to reflect the lower cost of production, drug companies have done just the opposite. Today, thanks to pharma executives like Alex Azar, those suffering from diabetes in the United States pay an average $571.69 per month on drugs—the highest of any other nation on earth. And Americans—like Shane Patrick Boyle, who perished after his GoFundMe for insulin came up fifty dollars short, and Alec Raeshawn Smith, who was rationing his insulin after falling off his parents’ health insurance at age twenty-six—are literally dying because they can no longer afford the high price of a nearly hundred-year-old drug that should be completely affordable these days.76
As a candidate, Donald Trump accused big pharmaceutical companies of “getting away with murder.” Nothing’s changed. Big Pharma will continue to get away with murder—except now with the help of Alex Azar, one of their very own, as secretary of HHS.
57. BEN CARSON
Shortly after the 2016 election, conservative talk show host Armstrong Williams, a longtime friend and advisor of former Republican presidential candidate Dr. Ben Carson, told reporters, “Dr. Carson feels he has no government experience. The last thing he would want to do was take a position that could cripple the presidency.” Which makes you wonder why he ran for the nation’s top office in the first place.77
Yet, thanks to Donald Trump, he now sits in the cabinet anyway, as secretary of Housing and Urban Development.
Even in a cabinet filled with unqualified people, Ben Carson as secretary of Housing and Urban Development stands out. He may have been a leading brain surgeon, but what does he know about public housing? All the White House could offer was that he grew up in public housing. Which is not true. He grew up in Detroit near public housing. There’s a big difference.78
Coming in with no qualifications for the job, Carson has basically ignored it. He’s maintained the lowest profile of any cabinet member. In fact, coming into the position with no government experience, no political experience other than a comical run for president, and no desire to run a government agency, he has produced a situation at HUD that his predecessor, Julian Castro, describes as “benign neglect.” One longtime employee described the scene at HUD to New York Magazine: “It was just nothing. I’ve never been so bored in my life. No agenda, nothing to move forward or push back against. Just nothing.”79
But that doesn’t mean he’s avoided doing considerable damage. To be fair, HUD was already in bad shape when he arrived. Created in 1965 by President Lyndon Johnson as one prime hot spot of the Great Society, HUD’s mission had shrunk and its workforce had fallen from over sixteen thousand to fewer than eight thousand by the time Carson got there. But rather than pump new blood into the agency, Trump’s first budget proposed cutting HUD by $7 billion, or 15 percent.80
For an agency still responsible for overseeing rental subsidies for five million families and thirty-three hundred public housing authorities providing shelter to two million families, those cuts would mean real hardship. OMB director Mick Mulvaney himself estimated that cutting HUD by 15 percent would mean that participants in the Section 8 low-income assistance, public housing voucher program would need to pay at least 17 percent more of their income toward rent, and there would likely be over two hundred thousand fewer vouchers available nationwide—thirteen thousand fewer in New York City alone.81
But Secretary Carson didn’t seem to care. In a radio interview with his friend Armstrong Williams the day after Trump’s budget was released, Carson pooh-poohed the importance of programs to help the poor, saying that poverty was largely a “state of mind.” In other words, feel better, and no worries, your bills will be paid.82
A Republican-controlled Congress eventually rejected Trump’s severe cuts to HUD, but that didn’t stop Ben Carson from causing trouble elsewhere. On April 25, 2018, he unveiled a major overhaul of HUD’s low-income rental housing program. Complaining that the current system, whereby poor families pay 30 percent of their adjusted income for housing, discourages “families from earning more income and becoming self-sufficient,” Carson’s new rules will effectively triple the rent. They require participants to contribute 35 percent of their gross income for rent and will authorize housing authorities to adopt work requirements for all participants, excluding those over sixty-five and the disabled.83
Meanwhile, Carson proceeded to cut back on what few agency initiatives remained. He canceled a survey testing how efforts to reduce homelessness for LGBT Americans were working in Cincinnati and Houston. He required employees to get executive approval before making any contacts with anyone outside the building. He scuttled guidelines to homeless shelters on providing access to transgender people.84
While comfortably slashing programs to help the poor, however, Carson still found a way to make life easier for his wealthy friends. In April 2018, as part of the FBI’s investigation of Trump’s personal attorney Michael Cohen, it was revealed that Cohen had also advised Fox News star anchor Sean Hannity on several real estate deals. The Guardian subsequently reported that, over the years, Hannity had built up a personal real estate empire—in part, with the help of $18 million in loans from HUD’s National Housing Act—a special relationship Hannity failed to mention when interviewing Carson on his TV show.85
While these loans were first guaranteed during the Obama years, Carson’s HUD had strongly supported Hannity’s request and even increased the size of the loan by $5 million. Nor did Carson explain how he could preside over the decline of HUD’s primary mission of providing low-income housing while finding resources to help the rich buy more real estate and then foreclose on struggling people. After a 152-unit apartment complex in Perry, Georgia, was acquired by Hannity through various shell companies, foreclosures and evictions shot up 400 percent.86
Meanwhile, like the other cabinet members we’ve visited, Carson also seized the opportunity to live higher on the hog. No charter jets, so far as we know, just a new dining room table, chairs, and hutch for his office—in clear violation of HUD spending guidelines—for which taxpayers shelled out $31,561. After at first insisting he knew nothing about the purchase, Carson later blamed it on his wife, Candy. “I invited my wife to come and help,” he told reporters. “I left it to my wife, you know, to choose something. I dismissed myself from the issues.” She chose the style and colors of the new furniture, he pointed out, while adding, “With the caveat that we were both not happy about the price.” Still, the dining room set remains.87
The best that can be said about Ben Carson as HUD secretary is that he’s in over his head. Which he himself admits. “There are more complexities here than in brain surgery,” he candidly told The New York Times. He never should have been offered the job and never should have taken it.88
58. RICK PERRY
To give him credit, Rick Perry took Donald Trump’s approach to filling his cabinet one step beyond anyone else. Not only was he, like DeVos and Pruitt, the number one enemy of his department and vowed to eliminate it, Perry couldn’t even remember its name.
It was at the November 2011 GOP presidential debate in Detroit where candidate Perry, then the governor of Texas, infamously declared there were three government agencies that would no longer exist when he became president: “Commerce, Education, and … um … ah … um … ah.” After an awkward forty-eight seconds (!), he finally admitted, “The third one I can’t name … Oops!”89
That third one, of course, is the Department of Energy, at the head of which Rick Perry, God help us, is now secretary.
What soon became clear about Rick Perry at Energy was that he had no qualifying background for the job. In fact, even after he figured out its name, he still didn’t know what the department was all about. As former governor of Texas, reported The New York Times, he believed “he was taking on a role as a global ambassador for the American oil and gas industry that he had long championed in his home state.”90
And no doubt about it, Rick Perry has caught religion on fossil fuels. He’s so bullish on them he told utility executives it was “immoral” to withhold fossil fuel–powered electricity from people around the world who don’t have access to power (as if that’s the only kind of power available). “You look those people in the eye and say, sorry you can’t have electricity because we’ve decided that fossil fuels are bad.”91
Not only that, Perry has argued that fossil fuels protect women from sexual abuse: “But also from the standpoint of sexual assault, when the lights are on, when you have light that shines, the righteousness, if you will, on those types of acts.” In a way, it’s impressive that Perry is even more clueless than his boss on the subject of “clean coal.”92
In any event, Perry was no doubt surprised to learn that the Energy Department’s threefold mission is much more complicated than “Yeah, fossil fuels!” Rather, the department works to advance the energy security of the United States; to promote scientific and technological innovation in support of that mission; and to oversee America’s nuclear arsenal. It’s a mission previously entrusted to very smart people, like Nobel Laureate Steven Chu and MIT professor Ernest Moniz. It’s a mission that a failed politician who publicly questions the integrity of scientists, champions fossil fuels, opposes regulations on greenhouse gases, and insists “the science is still out” on climate change is particularly unqualified for. In fact, as governor, Perry’s only experience with our nuclear stockpile was leading a campaign to bring a nuclear waste facility to the Lone Star State, at a time when every other state was rejecting them. (You can be the judge on whether sizable campaign donations to Governor Perry from the billionaire head of a Dallas-based waste control company had any influence on this stance.)93
Once at Energy, in addition to promoting fossil fuels and nuclear power, Perry, like Donald Trump, became the champion of bringing back “clean coal” plants—in which, again like Trump, he soon proved himself ignorant of the market forces driving the energy economy. The fact is, as noted earlier, more and more utilities are abandoning coal, not just because it’s dirty, and nuclear reactors, not just because we don’t yet know how to dispose of the waste, but because cheaper alternatives—wind, solar, and natural gas—have become available. In 2017, that drove utilities to shut down more than twenty-two gigawatts of coal capacity across the country.94
Apparently, Perry didn’t know that. One of his first acts was to put forth a plan to reward existing coal plants, which have a ninety-day pile of coal on hand, and therefore, he argued, were less likely to cause blackouts. Having first met fierce opposition by consumer and environmental organizations, as well as by utilities, which rely more and more on renewable sources of energy, his proposal was then unanimously rejected by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), of which four out of five members had been appointed by President Trump.95
But any mystery about why Perry was so gung ho on coal evaporated once one top DOE staffer, Simon Edelman, leaked unreleased photos of the secretary sitting down, just four weeks after taking office, with Robert Murray, CEO of Murray Energy, a large U.S. coal company. Murray had donated $300,000 to Donald Trump’s presidential inauguration. At this meeting, he provided the administration with a coal industry wish list, which included, in addition to propping up failing coal power plants, replacing commissioners at three independent agencies, overturning safety and pollution regulations, and cutting the staff of the EPA in half.96
The meeting ended, as photos show, with Perry giving Murray a big hug. Eight months later, Perry made his ill-fated pro-coal industry proposal, as requested by Murray, to FERC. Perry called it a case of “energy realism,” but even Donald Trump’s own commissioners seemed to see it more as a case of “pay to play” and antithetical to market forces driving the energy industry. They rejected Perry’s plan. And Perry immediately fired Simon Edelman.97
59. “GOVERNMENT SACHS”
Donald Trump hates Goldman Sachs. Or at least that’s what we were led to believe. Indeed, during both the 2016 primary and general campaigns, he attacked them so often, we weren’t sure whether he was running against Ted Cruz, Hillary Clinton, or Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein.
Trump frequently criticized Clinton for her paid speeches to Goldman Sachs audiences. He released a campaign ad featuring a photo of Clinton shaking hands with Blankfein. He accused Ted Cruz of being their puppet: “Goldman Sachs owns him, he will do anything they demand.” And he called Goldman Sachs part of a “global power structure that is responsible for the economic decisions that have robbed our working class, stripped our country of its wealth, and put that money into the pockets of a handful of large corporations and political entities.”98
If Donald Trump hated Goldman Sachs, then it also seemed Goldman Sachs hated Trump. As Vanity Fair reported, “He was the poster child of the kind of client that Goldman, which has always prided itself on superb risk management, warned its bankers to avoid.” After at least four of his hotels and casinos went bankrupt, word went out that Goldman Sachs would never again do business with Trump.99
Then Donald Trump was elected president and the world turned upside down, or the mask dropped. Either way, suddenly, Trump loved Goldman and Goldman loved Trump.
As fast as an electronic transfer, Trump turned to Goldman Sachs to fill his administration’s top financial posts. Steve Mnuchin, Gary Cohn, Dina Powell, Steve Bannon, and Anthony Scaramucci all did time at Goldman Sachs before joining Trump in Washington. Billionaire and Commerce secretary Wilbur Ross, while not a Goldman Sachs alum, belonged to the same elite Wall Street crowd.
Trump’s newfound love for Goldman caused an exasperated Senator Elizabeth Warren, long a thorn in the side of Wall Street, to exclaim, “Donald Trump promised to drain the swamp. Then he put enough Goldman bankers on his team to open a branch office of Goldman in the White House.”100
Together, they proceeded to fleece the public from Washington the same way they used to fleece the public from Wall Street.
STEVE MNUCHIN
During the 2016 campaign, Trump (rightfully) scorned hedge fund managers in particular. “The hedge fund guys didn’t build this country,” he told CBS. “These are guys that shift paper around and they get lucky.” Yet he tapped Steve Mnuchin, a hedge fund mogul, to be his campaign finance chair. And when the dust settled, Trump made him secretary of the Treasury.101
It’s not such a surprising choice, because Trump and Mnuchin have a lot in common. Both got started in business with a huge inheritance from their fathers. (Mnuchin’s father was a partner at Goldman Sachs.) Both of their businesses had been accused of racial discrimination. Both men hedged their bets by donating to Democrats as well as Republicans. And like Trump, Mnuchin came to the administration with a shady business reputation, at best.102
After spending seventeen years at Goldman Sachs, Mnuchin worked for a couple of hedge funds before putting together a group of investors to buy the failed IndyMac Bank, which they renamed OneWest Bank. Within a year, according to the Los Angeles Times, Mnuchin and his fellow investors had paid themselves dividends of $1.57 billion, while foreclosing on tens of thousands of home mortgages, often for the tiniest of infractions. One judge called their treatment of a New York family “harsh, repugnant, shocking and repulsive.” California housing counselors ranked OneWest among the worst mortgage servers in the state. Their track record was especially bad in communities of color. With a résumé of racism, thievery, and corruption like that, why wouldn’t Donald Trump fall in love with the guy?103
Billionaire or not, it didn’t take long at Treasury for Steve Mnuchin to join the ranks of Pruitt, Zinke, Price, and Veterans Affairs secretary David Shulkin in the money-grubbing private plane club. In this case, Mnuchin and his actress wife, Louise Linton, famously used a military plane to fly to Fort Knox, Kentucky, to view the 2017 solar eclipse. According to the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, he spent $1 million in his first year on military aircraft, where previous Treasury secretaries have flown commercial. Reportedly, his request for a military aircraft to fly to Europe for his honeymoon was turned down.104
Pleasure trips aside, Mnuchin’s main goal at Treasury was to give himself and his fellow billionaires a massive tax break. Unfortunately, with Donald Trump, Mitch McConnell, and Paul Ryan’s help, he succeeded, with passage of the massive GOP tax cut bill in December 2017. In so doing, however, he made three big promises to the American people: that the tax cut bill would “pay for itself” and add nothing to the deficit; that everybody in the middle class would get a tax cut; and that the wealthy would not reap any special benefit—in his own words, there would be “no absolute tax cut for the upper class.” All three were big fat obvious lies.105
In fact, according to the Congressional Budget Office, the GOP bill will add $1.7 trillion to the deficit over the next ten years. The Tax Policy Center estimates that while some middle-class taxpayers may see a small tax cut initially, their taxes will actually increase under the plan by 2027. Again, according to the Tax Policy Center, initially three-quarters of total tax cuts would go to the top 1 percent. By 2025, they would receive a remarkable 99.6 percent of benefits.106
This wasn’t just Mnuchin breaking promises. He was straight-up lying the entire time. As Slate’s Jordan Weissman summed it up, “The man regularly says things that just aren’t true.” To take one more example, as the tax bill wended its way through Congress, Mnuchin promised everyone that experts at Treasury were working hard on assessing its impact on the American economy. “We have over 100 people working on this,” he proclaimed, “and it will be a completely transparent process.” Of course, it later emerged that no such comprehensive report or scoring existed. Instead, per The New York Times, the Treasury’s Office of Tax Policy “have been largely shut out of the process.” Mnuchin had just made the whole thing up.107
At a White House briefing the day after the tax cut bill was approved by Congress, I asked Secretary Mnuchin whether President Trump would release his tax returns so we might learn how much he benefited from the GOP bill. Mnuchin ducked, saying Trump’s position on releasing his tax returns was well known. I regret not asking Mnuchin how much he himself would benefit. He probably would have just lied to me anyway.
WILBUR ROSS
If you had taken the candidate at his word, Wilbur Ross as secretary of commerce seemed another strange pick for Donald Trump. Ross was not only another of those hated billionaire hedge fund managers, he was known for buying up ailing businesses, selling off their assets, firing employees, and screwing their creditors while walking off with the profits—a practice that earned him the nickname “bottom feeder.”108
A strange choice, indeed, for someone who campaigned as an “economic populist.” But unlike Trump, Ross doesn’t even pretend to be an economic populist. He showed his true colors in 2014 when he whined to a reporter that “the 1 percent is being picked on for political reasons.”109
In Trump’s eyes, however, Ross had several things going for him. For one, he was stupendously rich and had helped bail out Trump’s failing Atlantic City casinos in the 1990s. For another, thanks to the Panama Papers leak, we now know he’s got several shady connections with Russian oligarchs, among them a stake in a shipping venture, Navigator Holdings, partly owned by Vladimir Putin’s son-in-law. (He shorted his position in Navigator Holdings days before The New York Times reported his Putin connection.) Ross also engineered the takeover of the Bank of Cyprus in 2014, which has now become a destination for iffier Russian and Eastern European elements—and their friends like Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort—to park their lucre. When asked whether or not his bank was transacting with customers sanctioned by the United States, Ross shrugged. “That’s a question that is very complicated to answer.”110
And he once owned a coal mine! Although, had Trump looked closer, he would have learned it was West Virginia’s notorious Sago Mine, where a dozen miners lost their lives in January 2006, just months after the federal Mine Safety and Health Administration cited Sago for 208 “serious and substantial” safety violations.111
After the mine explosion, Ross declined to travel to West Virginia to inspect the damage or console the families of the dead miners. Instead, he sent $2 million for the twelve families to divide up. Two years later, he shut down the mine. That’s the type of callous disregard for working people, and pathetic pursuit of profit above all else, that will get you far with Trump, so Ross for Commerce it was.112
GARY COHN
Among the Goldman Sachs bankers who took the plunge, COO Gary Cohn appeared the least likely to join the Trump administration. A lifelong Democrat, he was instrumental in arranging the infamous closed-door paid speeches for Hillary Clinton. Under his direction, Goldman’s political PAC donated over $340,000 to the Clinton campaign and less than $5,000 to Trump.113
Yet reportedly, Cohn was getting restless at Goldman, tired of waiting for Lloyd Blankfein to step down so he could move up to CEO. Whether Cohn agreed with Trump’s economic policies, or whether he even knew what they were, by dangling the position of head of the National Economic Council before him, Trump gave Cohn an easy way out of the waiting game at Goldman—and Cohn seized it.114
For a year or so, Cohn actually exercised a lot of influence in the White House. Together with Rex Tillerson, national security advisor H. R. McMaster, and Secretary of Defense James Mattis, he was known as one of the four grown-ups in the room. He was credited with talking Trump out of some crazy moves but still threatened to resign in summer 2017 after the Charlottesville fiasco, when Trump claimed there were some “very fine people” among the white supremacists.
In the end, Cohn decided to stay in order to keep the economic recovery (for the 1 percent) on track and avoid what he believed to be the looming threat of tariffs. For months, he’d been warning the president that bringing back tariffs would start another trade war and wreck the economy. But Trump rejected his advice.115
In March 2018 (with the tax giveaway now law), frustrated by Trump’s decision to impose stiff tariffs on steel and aluminum imports and seeing his influence over Trump fade, Cohn finally resigned—which, to many, raised the question of why Cohn thought steel tariffs were a more important hill to die on than endorsing Nazis. By then, Tillerson and McMaster were also gone, leaving Secretary Mattis an ever-lonelier and increasingly ignored voice of reason in the room.116
LARRY KUDLOW
Looking for someone to replace Gary Cohn as chief economic advisor, President Trump turned to his favorite source of new hires. Avoiding leading economists in the financial industry or academia, he offered the job to someone who plays an economist on television.
Actually, he’s not just a pretty face on television. Before hosting his own shows on CNBC, Larry Kudlow held several impressive economic posts: he was chief economist at Paine Webber and Bear Stearns and chief economist at the Office of Management and Budget, number two man to OMB director David Stockman, under President Reagan. But it’s as a TV host that Kudlow’s best known and where his talent for being so often dead wrong really shone through. If he’s telling you to buy, sell. And vice versa.117
Kudlow’s erroneous prognostications are legendary. In 1993, he predicted that Bill Clinton’s tax hikes would kill any economic recovery. A boom happened instead. In 2002, he supported the war in Iraq, arguing that “the shock therapy of decisive war will elevate the stock market by a couple thousand points.” We did invade Iraq, but the market did not soar. As late as December 2007, in the wake of George W. Bush’s tax cuts, he was proclaiming that “the Bush boom is alive and well.” That same month marked the beginning of the Great Recession.118
A doctrinaire supply-sider, Kudlow firmly believes in the now completely discredited trickle-down theory, a.k.a. “voodoo economics”: that giving tax cuts to the 1 percent will rain down benefits on the 99 percent. As such, he was a strong supporter of the Trump tax cuts, predicting they would trigger 3–4 percent annual economic growth. (We’ll see, of course, but consider Kudlow’s track record here.)119
He, too, broke with Trump, however, on the question of tariffs. He even coauthored a column with Stephen Moore and Art Laffer denouncing Trump’s proposed tariffs on steel and aluminum. “Trump should … examine the historical record on tariffs,” they wrote. “If he does, he’ll see they have almost never worked as intended and have almost always delivered an unhappy ending.”120
In other words, Kudlow held the same position on tariffs as Gary Cohn. Both expressed their strong opposition. But once Trump rejected their advice and imposed tariffs, each responded differently. Cohn resigned. Kudlow changed his mind and came aboard—which doesn’t bode well for his willingness to stand up to Trump on other important economic issues.
60. MICK MULVANEY
On April 25, 2018, Trump’s OMB head and acting consumer financial watchdog Mick Mulvaney ripped the curtain off the way things work in Washington, and especially in Trumpworld. “We had a hierarchy in my office, in Congress,” the former South Carolina congressman told leaders of the American Banking Association. “If you were a lobbyist who never gave us money, I didn’t talk to you. If you were a lobbyist who gave us money, I might talk to you.”121
That admission tells you all you need to know about Washington: it’s strictly pay-for-play. And it tells you all you need to know about Mick Mulvaney: He’s for sale.
Naturally, then, this is the man Donald Trump has entrusted with two top jobs—director of the Office of Management and Budget and acting director of the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau. He brings to OMB and CFPB the same extreme agenda he championed in Congress as cofounder of the House Freedom Caucus: ending Social Security and Medicaid; abolishing the Environmental Protection Agency; ending federal support for student loans, medical research, and “Meals on Wheels”; cutting back on foreign aid; demanding deep spending cuts as a price for raising the debt ceiling; defunding Planned Parenthood; and shutting down the government whenever conservatives don’t get everything they want. Take it from the man himself. Mulvaney once jokingly introduced himself to Gary Cohn as a “right-wing nut job.” That he is.122
Mulvaney got his first chance to enact his conservative wish list in Trump’s 2018 budget, which he oversaw. It was a pure Freedom Caucus document, demanding deep cuts in domestic programs to offset $54 billion in new spending for the military. As proposed, the budget killed the National Endowment for the Arts, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the Children’s Health Insurance Program, and the Legal Services Corporation; cut the EPA’s budget by a third; cut the State Department by 29 percent; and stripped $7.7 billion out of the National Institutes of Health.123
On another front, Mulvaney led an effective administration effort to roll back regulations adopted across the board by the Obama administration, succeeding in rescinding 860 proposed regulations in year one of the Trump presidency.124
At the same time, in deference to Trump, Mulvaney agreed to go along with what would theoretically be a fiscal conservative’s nightmare. Between the tax cuts of 2017 and the omnibus spending bill of January 2018, Trump added $2.4 trillion—and perhaps as much as $6 trillion—to the national debt: a repudiation of everything Trump promised as a candidate for president and Mulvaney had preached as a member of Congress. But, a loyal Trump foot soldier, Mulvaney simply talked out of the other side of his mouth for a while.
In fact, Mulvaney told a lie for Trump so brazen that economists outside the administration called for his immediate firing. While cutting deeply in services that help poor and working-class Americans, the Mulvaney–Trump budget also presumed that the new tax law will generate $2 trillion in revenue—a very, very unlikely proposition to any responsible economist—that will offset the cost of the ridiculous tax giveaways to the rich. That was bad enough. But then Mulvaney’s OMB also argued that the same $2 trillion of magic money will balance the budget in ten years. In short, Mulvaney conjured up a ridiculous figure to make his budget work—and then double-counted it.125
Economists were appalled by Mulvaney’s innumeracy. “This appears to be the most egregious accounting error in a Presidential budget in the nearly 40 years I have been tracking them,” tweeted former Treasury head Larry Summers. “No business in the country would even try to get away with this type of phony accounting,” another economist told The Wall Street Journal. In Forbes, Stan Collender said this fuzzy math “may well have been the biggest mistake in US history.”126
But Mulvaney didn’t care. He just wanted to please his boss, and Mick Mulvaney has already made it abundantly clear that he’ll do anything for money.
And it worked. In Trump’s eyes, in fact, Mulvaney did such a good job gutting essential government services in his proposed budget that he decided to give him yet another job. When Richard Cordray suddenly resigned as head of the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau (CFPB), Trump didn’t search for a new director. In a classic Trumpian move, he just put Mick Mulvaney in charge. After all, as a member of Congress from South Carolina, Mulvaney had cosponsored a bill to eliminate the bureau.127
Now wearing two hats, instead of killing the CFPB, Mulvaney proceeded to turn the agency on its head: from adhering to its legislative mission of protecting consumers to following his own (bought-and-paid-for) agenda of protecting bankers and predatory lenders. In keeping with a memo he sent to CFPB staffers—“We don’t just work for the government, we work for the people. And that means everyone: those who use credit cards, and those who provide those cards; those who take loans, and those who make them”—he immediately dropped a CFPB lawsuit against four payday lenders in Kansas that were charging rates as high as 950 percent and closed an investigation into a South Carolina payday lender that contributed to his congressional campaigns. With that and similar decisions, the agency’s regulatory and enforcement work ground to a halt.128
Mulvaney then further weakened the bureau by asking Congress to rewrite its original congressional mandate to protect consumers by requiring that any new rules created by the bureau to help consumers first be approved by Congress before they could go into effect.129
Now, from all of this, you may think badly of Mick Mulvaney—I sure do. But even if he’s proved himself an impressive liar, he’s also at times been breathtakingly honest, arguably the most honest man in Donald Trump’s cabinet. After all, the man flat-out told us himself—he works for lobbyists and the rich, not for us. If only the rest of Trumpworld were as honest about their mission.