Meet the worst of Trump’s cabinet

The votes are in, and the winner of the Worst Trump Cabinet Member competition is ... Wilbur Ross!

The Ross victory is a little suspect, since it came right after he gave an interview in which he expressed befuddlement about why furloughed government workers were going to food banks and homeless shelters when they could — you know, just go see their banker and take out a loan.

Do you think he was making a play for first place? Nah, that was just Wilbur being Wilbur, the guy who happily marveled that when Donald Trump visited Saudi Arabia “there was not a single hint of a protester anywhere.” When reminded that the Saudi government has a way of making protesters disappear, Ross admitted “in theory that could be true” but quickly added, “there was certainly no sign of it.”

Coming in a close second was Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen, followed by that perennial favorite, Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos.

Nielsen, who one reader called “the queen of mendacity,” got votes for her work separating thousands of families at the Mexican border. The Trump immigration policies were on so many people’s minds, they put Stephen Miller in fourth place even though he’s not actually in the cabinet.

Miller, a 33-year-old senior adviser to the president, is a longtime enemy of bipartisan immigration reform who’s a chief architect of Trump’s wall-mania.

DeVos, a former Worst Cabinet Member winner, has faded a bit as her ineffectiveness appeared to mitigate some of her bad intentions. Nevertheless, it’s clear our readers have been keeping an eagle eye on what she’s been up to, however fumbling the effort. One voter cited “her disinterest in addressing the national student debt crisis; her support of private institutions’ shady loan practices; her bungling of college campus sex policy; her complete lack of knowledge and interest in classroom achievement.” And that was just the first part of the letter.

Other high-rankers in the Worst contest were Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin. Some readers mentioned Pompeo’s cheerful visit to Saudi Arabia that was highlighted by “his boys-will-be-boys willingness to overlook the savage murder of Saudi Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi.”

Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Ben Carson got quite a few votes despite a certain lack of, um, public presence.

Now Trump has announced that he’s nominating David Bernhardt to be his new secretary of the Interior. Bernhardt is a former oil lobbyist whose biggest interest in public lands appears to involve drilling on them. I’ll bet we hear a lot more of him next time around.

The list goes on and on. There’s hardly a cabinet member who doesn’t seem to be driving readers crazy. Some of them are losing sleep over the fact that Sen. Mitch McConnell’s wife, Elaine Chao, is running the Department of Transportation while her family runs an international shipping company.

Truly, we should give a shoutout to Donald Trump for creating such a memorable bunch of top officials. “I have followed politics a very long time ... and this is the first time I can actually name more than one or two cabinet people from memory, because they are so freaking dangerously bad,” moaned one reader.

Think about it. How many members of the Obama cabinet can you recall?

At least we’re all paying attention.