(Dobbs) Trump's Picks: Quite A Lineup

If Trump's nominees are unfit, unsuited, or sometimes unhinged, the Senate ought to reject every last one of them.

Donald Trump’s nominees for high-level positions are proving to be quite a lineup. He has put up a rogue’s list of allies to help him run America. Maybe to run it into the ground.

Not all of them. Many of his nominees, although coming at issues from different directions than I would, are able and accomplished with no hint of major scandal defining them.

But look at the controversial picks. Including the newest, Keri Lake.

She ran two years ago for Arizona governor and lost. She ran this year for Arizona senator and lost. But as a strident election denier who has ceaselessly regurgitated propaganda about our elections being rigged— she’s as perfidious as Trump— she has never conceded defeat in either race, let alone Trump’s irrefutable 2020 loss. Yet Wednesday he endorsed her to lead the Voice of America, the agency that promotes America’s values to the rest of the world, particularly human rights. It is America’s counterbalance to propaganda from autocrats.

If Lake gets the job, she will succeed a man who not only is a former correspondent for The Washington Post but also, before running VOA, was president of Freedom House, which supports and defends human rights advocates around the globe. Those are the qualifications the job deserves. Lake’s aren’t. But when Donald Trump posted about appointing her, he ended with a clue about the qualifications that matter to him: “Kari was a beloved News Anchor in Arizona, which supported me by record margins, for over 20 years.”

Only the day before, he nominated a lawyer named Harmeet Dhillon to be the assistant attorney general in charge of the Justice Department’s civil rights division. It is an offensive choice because Dhillon has spent much of her career trying to reduce people’s rights, not reinforce them. As an official in the California Republican Party, she led efforts to banish corporate diversity and transgender rights. Now, if she gets the job at DOJ, hundreds of civil rights lawyers working there will have to follow her lead. If history is any guide, she will lead us down a rabbit hole. Dhillon also, by the way, has been another rabid election denier, which will put her in good company with her boss, attorney general designee Pam Bondi.

But we’re not through.

There’s RFK Jr., Trump’s pick to lead Health and Human Services, the mission of which is to protect and improve the health and welfare of every American. We already know about Kennedy dumping a dead bear in Central Park and strapping a whale’s head to the roof of his car, but those only make him wacky. His opinions about vaccines make him dangerous, because he blatantly spurns science. The latest outrage, as RFK chooses top aides, is that a chief advisor in the process— a lawyer named Aaron Siri— actually implored the government two years ago to revoke its approval— believe it or not— of the vaccine for polio.

Evidently Siri and RFK aren’t aware that until polio vaccines came along— first the Salk vaccine, an inoculation in the 1950s, then the Sabin vaccine, essentially a dose of infused sugar in the early ‘60s— tens of thousands of Americans and half a million people worldwide were struck every year with polio, which crippled many, paralyzed more, and by destroying the muscles that help us breathe, killed the rest. Maybe they don’t remember because thanks to the vaccines, polio in the U.S. essentially was eradicated. But why worry about the facts? Just last month in a podcast, Kennedy praised his friend: “I love Aaron Siri. There’s nobody who’s been a greater asset to the medical freedom movement than him.”

More keeps coming out too about Pete Hegseth, Trump’s designated secretary of defense. An interview was uncovered from back in June in which he was asked on a TV show about gays serving in the military and his answer was, “It’s just like everything else the Marxists and the leftists have done.” So apparently putting gays in uniform is a Marxist plot. That’s on top of Hegseth’s appearance on a podcast just two days after the election— before Trump tapped him for Defense— in which he insisted that women shouldn’t serve in combat: “I’m straight up just saying we should not have women in combat roles. It hasn’t made us more effective. Hasn’t made us more lethal. Has made fighting more complicated.” But now he’s fighting to lead the military and trying to woo some female senators, so now he’s claiming that his November comments were “misconstrued.” That’s rich. How do you misconstrue, “We should not have women in combat roles?”

We already know that Hegseth has been accused of drunkenness on the job and mismanaging the funds of a veterans organization he was running. And we know that he has been accused of sexual assault. Of course maybe that gave him a lift in Trump’s eyes, but not in his own mother’s, who once sent him an email in which she wrote, “I have no respect for any man that belittles, lies, cheats, sleeps around and uses women for his own power and ego. You are that man.” She now renounces it, but she can’t just close her eyes real tight and make it disappear.

But we’re not through yet.

We might get a man at the top of the FBI who keeps an enemies list. Last time we saw an enemies list, it was Richard Nixon’s. But now, Kash Patel has his, which he even published in his book (complete with a front cover endorsement from Donald Trump), and virtually every name on it is someone who has crossed Trump.

Former Trump defense secretary Mark Esper calls Patel a liar after he put a hostage rescue operation at risk by making up information about the host country’s permission. Former Trump national security advisor John Bolton calls Patel a “threat” to our country and our constitution, predicting that as the director of the FBI, he would be the American equivalent to Joseph Stalin’s bloodthirsty secret police chief in the last century: “He would operate according to Lavrenty Beria’s reported comment to Joseph Stalin: ‘Show me the man, and I’ll show you the crime’.”

We might get a woman at the top of the intelligence community who met with Bashar al-Assad and dismissed conclusions by the first Trump administration that Assad had used chemical weapons against his own people, saying, “I’m skeptical,” then two years later said on MSNBC, “Assad is not the enemy of the United States.” Remember, one of her main jobs would be to decide what to tell the president about overseas threats and what to ignore. For what it’s worth, Russia loves her, which ought to raise hackles on the backs of our necks.

We might get a woman at the top of Homeland Security— which includes FEMA— whose own constituents in South Dakota argue that when almost 20 inches of rain fell over a few days this past summer and they suffered fatal floods, she never ordered evacuations, and held off deploying her own National Guard to prepare for the calamity and even to deal with its aftermath. According to the Sioux Falls Argus-Leader, governor Kristi Noem flew into the state for only a day during the disaster after speaking in Washington DC to the Faith and Freedom Coalition and appearing on Meet the Press, then flew out again to do another speech at a Lincoln Day dinner in Tennessee.

And for the top of the Department of Education, we might get a woman accused of looking the other way as people in her World Wrestling Entertainment company allegedly sexually abused kids. But then again, maybe it doesn’t matter. As Trump told Time Magazine this week, he plans “a virtual closure” of the Department of Education.

But we’re still not through.

We might get a collection of ex-cons speaking for the United States of America. Last week Trump appointed Peter Navarro to be his senior counselor for trade. Navarro served time earlier this year for contempt of court in connection with the January 6th investigation. That would be Trump’s senior counselor.

And he announced his choice as U.S. ambassador to France: Ivanka Trump’s father-in-law Charles Kushner, who served time for witness tampering and tax evasion. But the dirtiest piece of Kushner’s crime was, when his own brother-in-law was preparing to testify against him, he hired a prostitute to lure the brother-in-law to a motel and secretly recorded their sex, then sent the video to the brother-in-law’s wife, who is Kushner’s own sister. Even Chris Christie, who prosecuted the crime as U.S. Attorney, called it “one of the most loathsome, disgusting crimes that I prosecuted.” That would be our ambassador to France.

Really?!? Trump couldn’t come up with someone without a criminal record? Of course he has one himself, so why would he care? Maybe Steve Bannon and Paul Manafort will discard their inmate numbers for a White House pass too.

Some of Trump’s top picks are inexperienced in the missions they would lead. Some are incompetent. Some are conspiracy theorists. Some are accused in sex scandals. Some are ex-cons.

Quite a lineup.

In the confirmation process, this isn’t a case where the Senate ought to show its independence by rejecting one or two of Trump’s most extreme or inappropriate candidates for high-level posts. If these people are unfit, unsuited, or sometimes unhinged, it ought to reject every last one of them.

Over more than five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks including ABC News, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He also co-authored a book about the seminal year for baby boomers, called “1969: Are You Still Listening?” He has covered presidencies, politics, and the U.S. space program at home, and wars, natural disasters, and other crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Nicaragua to Namibia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists, and as a 38-year resident of Colorado, a place in the Denver Press Club Hall of Fame.

You can learn more at GregDobbs.net