Donald Trump’s latest cabinet pick is yet another third-rate charlatan with baggage. Last seen running for a PA US Senate seat from his home in NJ, TV's Dr. Oz is Trump’s pick to head the the agency that oversees Medicare/Medicaid.
He is not Trump’s worst pick — Gabbard, Gaetz, Hesgeth, and RFK Jr. lead that race to the bottom. However, he has no obvious qualifications for the role.
It’s a position that needs management ability, while Oz’s talents lie in separating the gullible from their hard-earned by shilling snake oil and useless weight-loss nostrums.
Not that anyone, besides the easily deluded, thinks that Trump picks people because they can do the job. The man is a vandal looking to tear things down. Ergo, he is looking for incompetents to blow things up.
But that explanation does not hold water. If you want to raze a building, you don’t send in mouth-breathers with bags of dynamite and no plan. Destruction may require less strategy than construction, but demolition is still a skill.
The people behind Project 2025 are probably ecstatic at the general tenor of Trump’s appointments. However, I expect there is whispered muttering in the right-wing think tanks expressing consternation that their boy is not appointing the best people for the teardown.
They would like to see efficiency in their fascism. Their role models are people like Albert Speer, Hitler’s architect and armaments minister. A man who managed his bailiwick with Teutonic precision — and increased Nazi war production every year until 1944, even as the Allies carpet bombed everything that could make or move materiel. Dr Oz has yet to show such mission commitment.
Trump is stupid, but he’s not an idiot. So why is he picking people who will not get the reductio ad nihilum completed as quickly and comprehensively as more able candidates?
I think the answer is twofold. On the one hand, he is playing chicken with the Senate. He aims to browbeat, cajole, and threaten the Republican Senators into rubber-stamping absurd cabinet picks. Thereby reducing them to the independent status enjoyed by Saddam Hussein’s legislators.
The other reason is that this self-aggrandizing buffoon thinks he can do all the jobs himself. If he had ever studied he would have noticed that the federal government is not a mom-and-pop store. It isn’t that easy to dismantle a nearly $7 trillion annual dollar enterprise (10x the global revenues of #1 company Walmart).
I suppose you could try to fire all federal employees and ignore the court cases saying the job cull is against the law. But that would come with a downside. It would be like curing someone of bone cancer by removing all their bones — technically effective, but the patient dies. Killing the federal government would kill the country — and what’s the point of being a plutocrat in a wasteland where no one has the money to buy stuff?
Downsizing the government, hurting the right people, and installing compliant drones takes skill. Does Oz have it? I doubt it. Not that Trump gives a shit. He’s just taking the piss.
As I write this my phone tells me Trump has picked ex-WWE impresario Linda McMahon to be the Education Secretary. There is no risk of the MAGAs getting smarter.
From your friendly party in power: "Take this, my fellow Americans." And you're worried about the price of eggs?
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