This is the last part of an occasional series examining President Trump’s progress against Candidate Trump’s promises.
The promise: Candidate Trump promises to hire “only the best” to work in his Administration:
“I’m going to surround myself only with the best and most serious people,” he told our Robert Costa in a phone interview at the time. “We want top of the line professionals.” [WaPo]
Results So Far: To use the phrase “utterly dismal” is not to go too far. Names such as Pruitt, Zinke, Wolfe, Price, Sessions, Whitaker, Barr, Ross, Azar, as well as the many worse-than-useless political commissars at NOAA, VOA, and other important government agencies come immediately to mind for their incompetency, their corruption, and the far-right ideologies they either hide behind, or to which they actually adhere. For the latest, go here.
The Bigger Picture: A President is strictly limited in their efficacy by the people they nominate or appoint. A President can have the best or the worst possible policies, but if their people simply can’t do the job through ignorance or incompetence, Presidential goals cannot be accomplished, good or bad.
So this may be the most important job of any President, and President Trump’s failures in this regard will condemn his Administration to a position in the “Worst Five Presidential Administrations” for a long, long time to come.
