Trump revealed by those he picks

The best gauge of a leader’s character, competence and intelligence is the quality of people whom he chooses to surround him and act on his behalf. As proof of that assertion, I offer up the example of Donald J. Trump.

Trump’s nominee to head the Department of Veterans Affairs, Rear Admiral Ronny Jackson, withdrew this week after uniformed, military subordinates told congressional investigators of Jackson being passed out on foreign trips, of prescribing himself drugs, of being “the most unethical person I have ever worked with,” “100 percent bad temper” and “the worst officer I have ever served with,” among other description. That kind of testimony — mostly from active-duty military, against a high-ranking officer — is just extraordinary.

At the EPA, longtime political grifter Scott Pruitt has flung open the doors to the pollution lobby and undermined the role of science. At the Interior Department, Ryan Zinke rules like some tinpot dictator of a Third World country, acting as if rules are for little people and treating himself like British royalty. By Zinke’s orders, a special flag has to be flown above Interior Department buildings when His Royal Highness is in attendance, then lowered when he departs.

My current favorite, though, is Mick Mulvaney, the former South Carolina congressman who now serves as director of the Office of Management and Budget and as interim head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. In that latter role, he addressed some 1,300 bankers and finance-industry executives this week and made some startling confessions.

“We had a hierarchy in my office in Congress,” Mulvaney recalled to an audience of people whom he is supposed to be regulating. “If you’re a lobbyist who never gave us money, I didn’t talk to you. If you’re a lobbyist who gave us money, I might talk to you.”

He then went on to urge the lobbyists to give money to Republican congressmen, and to then use the access that they purchase to demand further deregulation of their industries. In the meantime, Mulvaney told them, he is doing everything in his power as interim director to turn the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau into an agency that protects the poor beleaguered financial industry. Lawsuits are being dropped, enforcement actions are plummeting and rules are being changed as quickly as possible.

For example, Mulvaney told the lobbyists and finance executives that under federal law, the CFPB is required to collect consumer complaints about finance companies and to maintain those complaints on a database. He has no choice but to abide by that law, he told industry lobbyists, but as director he has the power to make that database inaccessible to consumers looking to see which companies have a bad track record.

“I don’t see anything in (the law) that I have to run a Yelp for financial services sponsored by the federal government,” Mulvaney told the crowd. “I don’t see anything in here that says that I have to make all of those public.”

If those kind of comments had been uttered in a private conversation or email that was later leaked to the public under any other administration, Republican or Democrat, they would be controversial and might get a person fired. But in this case, the boldness of making them in public, to an audience of the supposedly regulated, sends a message in its own right: “This isn’t being hidden; we’re doing it and you can’t stop us.”

Not surprisingly, Mulvaney is a strong favorite to replace John Kelly as Trump’s chief of staff.