An Anti-PC Cabinet
President-elect Donald Trump is assembling a Cabinet designed to govern exactly as he promised he would during the campaign. Naturally, the left is freaking out.
To be fair, Trump is sticking to his guns far better than any Republican in living memory. Indeed, he’s utterly ignored liberal shibboleths in making his picks.
For the record, incoming Environmental Protection Agency chief Scott Pruitt is not a “climatescience denier.” He simply doesn’t accept the pseudo-scientific claims that the only thing that can save the planet is for the United States to de-industrialize even as China builds 40 new coal plants a year (and invests big in “clean coal” technology).
Nor is Attorney General-to-be Jeff Sessions any kind of racist. He got blindsided by such charges during confirmation hearings decades ago, but his public record since then includes successfully prosecuting the Alabama head of the Klan — which set up a civil suit that bankrupted the state branch of that hate group.
Yes, future Labor Secretary Andrew Puzder says massive increases in the minimum wage will kill jobs, pushing employers to replace people with robots. But that’s mainstream economics — not even a uniquely Republican view.
What unites Trump’s picks is that none of them is willing to pretend that Democrats’ talking points actually describe reality. And that defiance perfectly matches Trump’s refusal, all campaign long, to bow before the forces of political correctness.
The head of ExxonMobil as America’s chief dip- lomat? No one seriously doubts that Rex Tillerson is qualified to run the $65 billion State Department: He ran a $370 billion multinational that negotiates with governments of all kinds. And, sorry, it’s only greens and other lefties who think oil companies are uniquely malicious.
Yes, Tillerson will face some questions over his history cutting deals with Russia — but the driving force there is actually doubts about Trump’s own often-expressed intention to try working with Vladimir Putin. We share those doubts — but they have nothing really to do with this nominee.
And if you’re going to try to deal with Moscow, it makes sense to have somebody doing the dealing who has already done it without getting robbed.
The Trump Cabinet will feature almost no Washington insiders — which makes perfect sense for a guy who won by promising to “drain the swamp.”
The hysteria over the presidentelect’s picks comes overwhelmingly from folks who like the swamp just fine as it is.
No less than Bernie Sanders last week pointed to a key Trump strength: He’s “willing to take on everybody.”
“One of the arguments as to why Trump won,” Sanders noted last week on Chris Hayes’ MSNBC show, “is the belief that most or many of his supporters are sexists or racists or homophobes. I happen not to believe that’s the case. I think what he did do is he said, ‘You know what, there’s a lot of pain in this country, people are scared and people are worried.’ People are tired of status quo politics. He broke through that.”
And he’s not stopping after the election, either.