Jon Stewart believes there is something the media may not understand when it comes to Donald Trump and the bizarre choices he’s made for his second-term Cabinet. He thinks the media may be “missing the mark” when it comes to these obviously unqualified nominees.
That’s because, to Trump, there isn’t a “downside” that his Cabinet picks “will not be sufficient stewards of these agencies,” Stewart said on his Weekly Show podcast. Instead, Trump & co. may be attempting to “dismantle” the agencies themselves, The Daily Beast reports.
“When we say, I don’t think that Linda McMahon will be an efficient steward of the Department of Education, it’s like, right, she’s not there to do that,” he said. “She’s there to help like dismantle it in the same way that RFK Jr. is there to dismantle HHS.”
This certainly seems possible in McMahon’s case since she’s the former CEO of World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE). It makes perfect sense because the President-elect has said, almost from the word “go” that he wants to abolish the Department of Education. “One other thing I’ll be doing very early in the administration is closing up the Department of Education in Washington, D.C., and sending all education and education work and needs back to the states,” Trump said in a video last year. “We want them to run the education of our children because they’ll do a much better job of it.”
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So is this a case of death by a thousand small cuts? Or in this case, death by flat-out bludgeoning? Does he really expect all these inept people to destroy the agencies he doesn’t like? I don’t think Trump himself is intelligent enough to figure something like this out, but he surrounds himself with people who are capable of planning these things.
Stewart also pointed out this was a sizable failure on the part of the Democrats who should have reformed massive bureaucracies but didn’t.
“They didn’t do it and they weren’t able to do it efficiently and they weren’t able to do it agilely,” Stewart told his audience.
“These picks are there to do exactly what the Trump voters wanted them to do,” he said in conclusion. “And in a large degree, a lot of Democratic voters have been begging the Democrats to do, which is get out of this status quo, institutional thinking and make government more responsive and agile if you can.”
If there’s anything I know, and I have been writing about politics for a looong time, it’s that the Democrats need to grow a spine. The old “they go low, we go high,” shpiel doesn’t work anymore. Republicans have long pulled dirty tricks to succeed and the Democrats, unfortunately, need to go there.
For the good of the American people, it’s what they need to do.
Featured image via Political Tribune Gallery.
