Donald Trump’s nominees for cabinet positions come in four categories: moderately qualified, unqualified, highly unqualified, and dangerously unqualified.
Yesterday, Matt Gaetz, a member of Category 4, ended eight days of turmoil by “withdrawing” from consideration as Donald Trump’s Attorney General nominee.
If I were a betting person, I would put all I own on his not walking the plank voluntarily.
The Senate was never going to confirm him, the allegations of sexual criminal behavior were going to be published — that will probably happen, anyway — and we’re left to wonder the level of Donald Trump’s hubris that would bring him to nominate someone so fatally flawed in the first place as the nation’s chief prosecutor.
Wherever he is, Kevin McCarthy is sporting a great big smile. It was Gaetz who engineered McCarthy’s ouster as Speaker of the House.
Yesterday evening, just hours after Gaetz was out, Master-of-the-quick-draw Donald Trump nominated Pam Bondi as his latest pick for AG. Bondi was Florida’s Attorney General from 2011 to 2019. A true Trump loyalist, she has none of the Gaetz baggage and actually knows what the job of attorney general entails. Moreover, she has the most important qualification for the job — she is a 2020 election denier and was right from the start of the “stop the steal” movement. Bondi bonded with Trump so much that she became his defense counsel during his second Senate impeachment trial.
Trump’s AG in his first term, Bill Barr, testified before the Congressional Committee investigating the insurrection of the 6th of January. He testified that he told Trump over and over again that he’d lost, and, like a game of whack-a-mole, Trump kept coming up with new conspiracy theories, each of which Barr debunked for the clueless leader. To his credit, that was Barr’s job as U.S. Attorney General. With Bondi, Trump will no longer have that guardrail when the inevitable moment of ethical concern arises.
She’ll probably glide into confirmation, which might have been Trump’s intent all along.
My other nominees for Dangerously Unqualified are Tulsi Gabbard as Director of National Intelligence, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. as Secretary of Health and Human Services, and Kristi Noem, Governor of South Dakota, as Secretary of Homeland Security.
If Trump somehow succeeds in avoiding confirmation hearings and slides his nominees in through recess appointments, it would be nice to know something about them, wouldn’t it? Something more than media varnish?
So, today, let’s examine South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem.
Noem, 52, served two terms in the South Dakota Legislature, rising to the post of assistant majority leader. In 2010, she narrowly defeated four-term incumbent Rep. Stephanie Herseth Sandlin to win the one and only South Dakota seat in the U.S. House of Representatives. In 2018, she ran for Governor, won, and suddenly found herself in charge of 13,000 state employees. Since then, she has been an ardent member of Donald Trump’s MAGA cult.
At the NRA’s annual meeting last year in Indianapolis, Noem, to the delight of the gun-totin’ crowd, shared this nugget about her one-year-old grandchild, Addie: “She already has a shotgun and she already has a rifle and she’s got a little pony named Sparkles, too.”
Knowing what Noem did to her 14-month-old wirehaired Pointer, Cricket, for “misbehaving,” I hope Addie doesn’t one day decide to put some high speed lead between the eyes of Sparkles if he “misbehaves.”
Cricket, a pheasant hunter, was apparently difficult to train. He was good at catching pheasants, but even better at catching a neighbor’s chickens. Noem says he killed a few one afternoon after pheasant hunting. So, she walked him over to a gravel pit and shot him in the head.
She also owned what she called a “nasty and mean” male goat. So, right after sending Cricket to the big kennel in the sky, she grabbed the goat, dragged it to the same gravel pit, stood it beside Cricket’s carcass, and shot it too. But because the goat jumped at the moment of execution and did not immediately die, she went back to her truck, reloaded, and finished the job properly.
Noem proudly confesses all of this in the memoir she published when she was auditioning to be Trump’s pick for vice president. She titled the memoir No Going Back: The Truth on What’s Wrong with Politics and How We Move America Forward. Why do politicians always write long titles? It’s like they’re pretending to be academics.
In her long-title memoir, Noem explained she included the double-killing gravel pit episode to illustrate her willingness, in politics as well as in South Dakota life, to do anything “difficult, messy and ugly” if it simply needs to be done.
The Cricket and goat affair is illuminating when one considers what Donald Trump now wants her to do — become Secretary of Homeland Security (DHS).
With more than 260,000 employees, the Department of Homeland Security was created after 9/11 by combining 22 federal agencies into one cabinet level office. DHS responsibilities are weighty and numerous:
- Border security: Protecting the U.S. borders from illegal people, weapons, drugs, and contraband;
- Immigration: Administering the immigration system of the United States;
- Cybersecurity: Protecting cyberspace, which is essential for national security, economic vitality, and daily life;
- Emergency response: Responding to natural and manmade disasters;
- Antiterrorism: Working to prevent terrorism;
- Election security: Ensuring a secure electoral process;
- Economic security: Working with the private sector and international partners to secure global trade and travel systems;
- Human trafficking: Combating human trafficking, which is a form of modern-day slavery that involves the exploitation of children and adults; and,
- Transportation security: Ensuring the security of transportation.
With the exception of being Governor of an expansive, sparsely populated, midwestern U.S. state which is home to less than a million people, 13,000 of whom are state employees, Kristi Noem has no security experience. Her principal qualification seems to be Trump’s endorsement of her as, “very strong on Border Security.”
In 2018 (the year Noem became Governor), according to the American Immigration Council, South Dakota was home to 35,175 immigrants (foreign-born individuals) comprising 4 percent of the population. More than a third of them were naturalized citizens. Another 5,256 immigrants were eligible to become naturalized citizens the following year. South Dakota’s immigrant population has roughly a similar level of educational attainment as native born citizens.
All of which shows there is no migrant crisis in South Dakota. Consequently, Noem has no experience defending “border security.”
In her memoir, the stories of Cricket and the goat are true, and she’ll be asked about it in her senate confirmation hearing, presuming there is one. What was not true was her claim to have canceled a meeting with French President Emmanuel Macron and actually meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. These “minor errors,” according to her publisher, will also come up if Senators get the chance to grill her.
In their political memoirs, politicians don’t seem able to resist the urge to gild the lily.
Regardless of her poetic license, if she is confirmed, this is a person who will have the massive task of overseeing the security of America. It is a profoundly demanding job for which she is utterly unprepared.