Worst in Trump’s Cabinet, Barr none

The results are in, people, and it’s a landslide. Your choice for Worst Trump Cabinet Member is ...

Attorney General William Barr! Barr was cited for multiple nonachievements. There was his misrepresentation of the findings of the Mueller report. And the decision to respond to Robert Mueller’s warning about Russian intervention in American elections by — as one voter put it — “opening investigations into the investigators.”

The bottom line was a quaint conviction that the attorney general is supposed to work for the public, not the president.

“I cannot believe I am stating this, but Jeff Sessions had more respect for the law,” wrote Diana from Centennial.

Second place went to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. “Silence on Ukraine, sycophant to Trump, continues to demoralize the State Department, lack of support for his ambassadors,” wrote Isabelle Stillger, launching off in a very long list of complaints about Pompeo’s failure to ... pretty much everything.

“First in his class at West Point and he ends up polishing Trump’s boots,” added Phyliss Dalmatian.

Still, the results weren’t even close. Besides his dedication to protecting the president from, um, criminal justice, Barr unnerved readers with his war against secularism. “The chief enforcer of the Constitution recently gave a speech decrying those who would interfere with Christian religious control of our government,” noted Sharon from Montana, who predicted Barr “will go down in history as the worst attorney general.”

As usual, we got a lot of complaints about the Worst Cabinet Member contest from people who said it was impossible to pick just one. (“There is a dead heat with all of them tied at the bottom.”)

Nobody, however, claimed there was a problem of shortage of possibilities.

Perpetual contender Betsy DeVos finished third. Readers pointed out that the secretary of education was recently held in contempt of court for refusing to support students victimized by crooked for-profit schools. But the bottom line was that Donald Trump’s top education official doesn’t like public schools. End of story.

On the plus side, DeVos has always gotten a bit of a slide from those who argue she’s too incompetent to be a major threat. There are several Cabineteers in that category. “I’ve been thinking that Ben Carson must be in the Witness Protection Program,” wrote a voter from Nashua, New Hampshire, about our secretary of housing and urban development. “Really, has anyone seen him in the last several months?”

Still, there were a few whimpers about lack of achievement by officials like Elaine Chao, secretary of transportation and wife of Mitch McConnell. “The secretary, who would have never gotten a Cabinet job without her spouse, has made Infrastructure Week into a punch line,” wrote a voter who gets extra credit for bringing infrastructure into the conversation.

The Cabinet members regarded as truly terrible were the noninept ones. “He’s both energetic and fiendishly clever,” complained Edith Frick, casting her vote for Barr. Frick added, however, that if Worst had the “normal meaning of incompetency, clear winner is Ben Carson.”

It’s amazing how familiar you readers are with Trump’s top officials. Especially since they come and go so quickly. William Barr has only been attorney general since February, and you’re thinking about him all the time.