gracchusdixit

As every depressing day goes by, it becomes depressingly more obvious that only four kinds of people are welcome to work in the administration of Donald J. Trump: crooks, creeps, cretins or crackpots. The coterie of people surrounding Trump is unprecedented in our history for their corruption, stupidity, and downright scariness.

Trump’s one-time campaign manager, Paul Manafort, has been indicted for a host of crimes and is under house arrest, with two tracking bracelets strapped to his ankles.  He is  likely to spend the rest of his life in prison.  Far more consequentially, however, the president’s own daughter and son-in-law—“Javanka,” for short—have shamelessly exploited their status as “senior advisers” to extract money and favors from foreign governments, banks, and private equity firms.  Their behavior is worse than unethical.  In any other time, in any other administration, they would already be in handcuffs.

During his time as Trump’s “senior policy adviser,” Steve Bannon was indisputably the creepiest of Trump’s minions.  Lumbering around the West Wing like a prehistoric sloth—unkempt, unshaven and to all appearances unwashed—Bannon cast himself as a latter-day Oswald Spengler, prophesying the doom of Western Civilization, railing against the evils of the “deep state”.  His delusional behavior continues.  Haranguing a recent gathering of the right-wing French political party, Front National, he exhorted the attendees to embrace their racism and xenophobia with pride.  It doesn’t get much creepier than that.

That is, until you consider the case of Stephen Miller, the Joseph Goebbels look-alike who writes Trump’s speeches.  Miller, if you will pardon the expression, is a whack job.   Miller would like to purge our country of those he considers to be insufficiently American, a long list that includes anyone who is black or brown or somewhere in between.  It is Miller who proclaimed that the powers of the president to detain, deport, and demonize immigrants “are very substantial and will not be questioned”.  The irony in this would be farcical if it weren’t so terrifying. Miller is descended from Ashkenazi Jews who fled Eastern Europe to escape virulent anti-Semitism, and yet, by some twisted and creepy logic, he seems to believe that other victims of persecution should now be denied the asylum that was granted to his forebears.

Which brings us to another, truly farcical, irony—that the most cretinous member of the Trump administration is the Secretary of Education.  Betsy Devos has never attended a public school, nor have her children.  She has never taught in any school, either public or private.  She has no professional experience or training in education, let alone a degree.  She can’t recite even the most basic facts regarding the challenges faced by public schools and universities in our country, and every time she is questioned about these issues, she embarrasses herself.  Her plan for revamping public education is to privatize it, a scheme driven entirely by her evangelical religious prejudices.  If it were not for her vast wealth, and her no less vast contributions to Republican politicians, she would have been laughed off the stage long ago.

Betsy Devos is not the only cretin in charge these days.  Let us not forget our Secretary of Energy, Rick Perry, who, when he isn’t wading in his own verbal manure, busies himself square-dancing on television.  It was Perry who once called for the abolition of the very department he now runs, though, to be fair, he couldn’t remember the name of that department at the time.

I will tell you.  It’s three agencies of government, when I get there, that are gone:  Commerce, Education, and the…  What’s the third one there?  The third one, I can’t.  Sorry.  Oops. 

Next to Devos, “Oops” Perry may be the dumbest cabinet officer in the history of the country.

More dangerous than the cretins are the crackpots, because they are not unintelligent or ineffectual. They are simply crazy.  Topping that list is Scott Pruitt, who runs the Environmental Protection Agency.  Pruitt has spent much of his public life denying the reality of climate change and ignoring the scientific evidence that proves it.  Using that denial as a cover, he is now systematically eviscerating the environmental regulations and protections we have spent decades putting in place.

Not far behind Pruitt is the Attorney General of the United States, Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, than whom no greater crackpot exists in the Trump administration.  Sessions is hellbent on “restoring the rule of law,” all the while he does everything possible to undermine it. He has declared war on a crime wave that does not exist.  He has targeted innocent immigrants and their families for deportation.  He has turned the wrath of the federal government against states that try to protect those immigrants, despite a long history defending “states’ rights”.

These categories—crooks and creeps, cretins and crackpots—are by no means mutually exclusive.  Scott Pruitt is both a crackpot and a crook, having accepted bucketloads of money from the fossil fuel industry that he is now supposed to be regulating.  Creeps like Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller are also crackpots, since their views regarding immigration and just about everything else are loony.  The same goes for our cretinous Secretary of Education, Betsy Devos, who is simultaneously dumb and nuts.

It is easy to poke fun at these people and to mock their failings, because they themselves do so much to invite mockery.  But something more serious is at stake.  There is a pattern in all this madness.

Several months ago, I dedicated one of these essays to a book called The Origins of Totalitarianism, written by the political philosopher and journalist Hannah Arendt in 1951.  That book remains to this day the most penetrating and incisive analysis of totalitarian regimes ever published.  In it, Arendt made the following observation:

Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.

That the Trump administration is laden with crooks and creeps, cretins and crackpots, that Trump is systematically expunging people of competence and integrity, is no accident.  It is not the result of Trump’s eccentric personality or chaotic management style.  It is an ominous step on the road toward something far worse.