Trump isn’t so much filling cabinet posts as he is selecting beauty pageant contestants. It’s what he knows.

Donald Trump believes that those who aspire to the most visible spots in his administration should not just be able to do the job, but also look the part.

That’s ironic, isn’t it, because he so thoroughly doesn’t look the part himself. The brassy hair falling down over the jacket collar? The necktie practically reaching his crotch? The mystifying, ludicrous, distracting comb-over? The terrible dye-job? The orange skin? The constant blowfish face? The stupid puppety gestures? The scowls and pouts? He doesn’t look the part. He looks like The Joker.

But that’s not the point, of course. The point is…he should have better criteria.

“He likes people who present themselves very well, and he’s very impressed when somebody has a background of being good on television because he thinks it’s a very important medium for public policy,” said Chris Ruddy, chief executive of Newsmax Media and a longtime friend of Trump. “Don’t forget, he’s a showbiz guy. He was at the pinnacle of showbiz, and he thinks about showbiz. He sees this as a business that relates to the public.”

Well…yes and no. He wasn’t really at “the pinnacle of showbiz” – he was at the pinnacle of getting people to watch a particular “reality” tv show. He appealed to some people’s taste for watching a bully bullying people. That doesn’t necessarily transfer to show business as a whole.

Battling through the GOP primary, Trump frequently made barbed comments about his opponents’ appearances.

Those kind of skin-deep standards helped make Trump a success as a reality-television star and international brand, but his critics say they are worrisome in the Oval Office.

His personnel choices show signs of being “cast for the TV show of his administration,” said Bob Killian, founder of a branding agency based in Chicago. “They are all perfectly coifed people who look like they belong on a set.”

But Trump spokesman Miller insisted that some qualifications do not lend themselves to lines on a résumé: “People who are being selected for these key positions need to be able to hold their own, need to be doers and not wallflowers, and need to convey a clear sense of purpose and commitment.”

But all this holding and doing and commitment isn’t valuable in itself. It depends on the content of what they’re doing. Style matters, but not more than substance.

All of which has led him to some unconventional picks. If confirmed by the Senate, ExxonMobil chief executive Rex Tillerson will become the first secretary of state in modern history to come to the job with no experience in government. Then again, Trump himself has none.

Yes exactly, and that’s a bad thing.

Trump’s closest aides have come to accept that he is likely to rule out candidates if they are not attractive or not do not match his image of the type of person who should hold a certain job.

“That’s the language he speaks. He’s very aesthetic,” said one person familiar with the transition team’s internal deliberations who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “You can come with somebody who is very much qualified for the job, but if they don’t look the part, they’re not going anywhere.”

Several of Trump’s associates said they thought that John R. Bolton’s brush-like mustache was one of the factors that handicapped the bombastic former United Nations ambassador in the sweepstakes for secretary of state.

That’s hilarious. He dislikes Bolton’s mustache, but he likes his own hair??

Oh that whole drain the swamp thing? He didn’t mean it. Or he did, but now he’s bored with it. Or both. It was “cute” but now it’s over – which is just as well, since the swamp is full of mastodons.

Newt Gingrich said Wednesday that Donald Trump’s “drain the swamp” catch phrase was “cute” but that the President-elect now disclaims it.

During an interview with NPR’s “Morning Edition” Wednesday, host Rachel Martin asked if the former House speaker had been “working in the swamp, to use Donald Trump’s language.”

“I’m told he now just disclaims that. He now says it was cute, but he doesn’t want to use it anymore,” Gingrich said, referring to the phrase. “I’d written what I thought was a very cute tweet about ‘the alligators are complaining,’ and somebody wrote back and said they were tired of hearing this stuff.”

We were told during the campaign that there was a lot of bad stuff from Trump’s reality tv show The Apprentice, but also that nobody wanted to make it public because contracts and also because Trump is evil. Now we’re being told it again, with maybe a little bit more detail.

The actor Tom Arnold has claimed to have video of Donald Trump using racist language, obscenities and denigrating his own son in outtakes of The Apprentice.

[That is: using racist language and obscenities, and denigrating his own son]

“I have the outtakes to The Apprentice where he says every bad thing ever, every offensive, racist thing ever. It was him sitting in that chair saying the N-word, saying the C-word, calling his son a retard, just being so mean to his own children,” Arnold told the Seattle-based radio station KIRO.

The actor and comedian said a contact from the reality TV show passed him the material before last month’s election, but he did not release it because of a confidentiality clause and the expectation that Trump would lose.

Well, you know, the Access Hollywood tape didn’t keep him from being elected, so why think this would have? Apparently nothing is enough. Apparently enough people in the right states have no problem with a guy who talks about niggers and cunts and bullies his own children that there is nothing that would turn them off him.

Arnold said that the Sunday before the election Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Hollywood agent asked him to release the material on behalf of Hillary Clinton.

“I get a call from Arnold’s CAA agent, sitting next to Hillary Clinton. They said, ‘I need you to release him saying the N-word.’ I said, ‘Well, now these people – two editors and an associate producer – are scared to death. They’re scared of his people, they’re scared of they’ll never work again, there’s a $5m confidentiality agreement.”

The Guardian points out that the claims haven’t been verified.

The president-elect presented NBC’s The Apprentice from 2004-2015 before running for the White House. Rumours of damaging outtakes surfaced after outtakes from another show, Access Hollywood, leaked in October. They revealed Trump bragging about sexually assaulting women.

Bill Pruitt, a producer on the first two seasons of The Apprentice, tweeted that there were “far worse” behind-the-scenes tapes of Trump on the programme.

As a producer on seasons 1 & 2 of #theapprentice I assure you: when it comes to the #trumptapes there are far worse. #justthebegininng

— Bill Pruitt (@billpruitt) October 8, 2016

Meanwhile we’re stuck with the worst man in the world about to have a lot of executive power.

The actor said he believes the material will emerge publicly in part because Mark Cuban, a tycoon who has clashed with Trump, has offered to employ anyone who releases the tapes.

The actor said he doubted the material would have altered the election outcome. “I think if the people that like him saw him saying the N-word, he’s sitting matter-of-factly in front of, there has to be 30 people there, and he’s matter-of-factly saying all of this stuff. So I think they would have liked him more, the people. For being politically incorrect,” he said.

I think so too. I think there’s no limit. It makes me not like living here.

It takes only seven minutes to turn Alec Baldwin into Donald Trump.

A dusting of Clinique Stay-Matte powder in honey. A hand-stitched wig. Eyebrows glued up into tiny peaks. The rest is left to Alec Baldwin: the puckered lips, a studied lumbering gait and a wariness of humanizing a man he reviles.

The transformation of Mr. Baldwin, an outspoken liberal, into the president-elect, Donald J. Trump, for his running parody on NBC’s “Saturday Night Live,” entails a tangerine hairpiece and a tricky tightrope walk. It means balancing a veteran actor’s determination to subsume his identity into a character, even as, in his offstage life, he is firm in his belief that the man about to take office is a dangerous figure.

The key to a convincing Mr. Trump, the actor said, are “puffs” — his word for the pregnant pauses in the president-elect’s speech. “I see a guy who seems to pause and dig for the more precise and better language he wants to use, and never finds it.”

Haaaaaaaa exactly. He never finds it because he never had it. He knows how to “make deals” but not how to think or be eloquent.

“It’s the same dish — it’s a grilled-cheese sandwich rhetorically over and over again.”

See Trump couldn’t make that joke or that metaphor, because he doesn’t have that kind of intelligence. There are other kinds of intelligence, certainly, but he doesn’t have those either. He has cunning, but that’s all.

…@realDonaldTrump

Release your tax returns and I'll stop.
Ha

— ABFoundation (@ABFalecbaldwin) December 4, 2016

His Trump is as much censure as impersonation. He does not write the sketches. He is paid $1,400 for each appearance on the show, he said.

“I’m not interested much by what’s inside him,” he said, but in how he moves and takes up space. Mr. Baldwin then amplifies the gestures, and distills them. An emphatic wave becomes a goofy “wax-on, wax-off” movement, he said, the simple hand motion reducing a candidate to an essence: pitchman.

There isn’t anything inside him. I’ve seldom seen anyone so empty in my life.

The Trumps still haven’t grasped the basic norm that they’re not supposed to use the presidency as an excellent chance to make money by selling access to their wonderful selves.

Last week, Eric Trump tried auctioning a coffee date with his sister Ivanka to raise money for a children’s hospital. Now, Eric and Donald Trump Jr. are named as part of a nonprofit venture that offered the chance to rub elbows with their father during inauguration weekend and go hunting or fishing with the sons in exchange for $1 million donations that would go to conservation charities.

It’s a wonder they haven’t set up a tent on 57th street selling lemonade and/or a chance to be grabbed by their daddy.

The two previous presidents, Barack Obama and George W. Bush, expressly forbade immediate family members from such fundraising activities to avoid the appearance of selling access.

“We kept it simple. We did not allow the first family to be auctioned off, which is what is happening here,” said Norman Eisen, who served as White House chief ethics counselor as Obama took office in 2009.

Richard Painter, who filled a similar role for Bush, said the White House “strongly discouraged” the president, his family and top aides from fundraising for charities, and avoided altogether charity fundraising that came with any access to those people.

Both said that while there’s nothing explicitly illegal about the charity fundraising, it diverges from the best practices of previous White House administrations.

But the Trumps just don’t have that kind of finely-tuned perception of the sleazy. The sleazy is their oxygen, their soft pillow at night, their warm bath after a walk in the snow.

Painter and Eisen — the former White House counselors, who have been critical of Trump’s business entanglements and failure to publicly address them so far — said part of the problem with these charity fundraisers is that the president-elect has yet to explain which of his family members will be involved in the government and which will stay at the helm of his international business empire.

They praised the Trumps for making quick adjustments after seeing bad press about the fundraising but said that doesn’t eliminate the need for Trump to develop and follow hard-and-fast rules as previous presidents did.

“How many times are they going to have to stub their toe?” Eisen said. “If you continually have to reverse course and improvise, what is the point at which it becomes a sign of recklessness instead of willingness to do good will?”

I know! I know the answer! We’ve passed that point.

Another item to be filed under “Terrifying” –

[Part of me wants to turn my back, ignore the whole thing, maybe revert to being a literature nerd…but the rest of me feels the need to know the truth, if only for planning reasons. Stockpile? Find out the lethal dose of something? These questions don’t answer themselves.]

The White House is struggling to prevent a crippling exodus of foreign policy staffers eager to leave before the arrival of the Trump administration, according to current and former officials.

The top level officials in the National Security Council (NSC) are political appointees who have to submit resignations and leave in a normal transition. The rest of the 400 NSC staff are career civil servants on secondment from other departments. An unusual number of these more junior officials are now looking to depart.

The reasons are obvious. It’s not because it’s Republicans, it’s because it’s people who are programmatically opposed to expertise and knowledge and basic competence. It’s people who skip their security briefings. Not that the Guardian says that; I’m assuming it – but it’s not usual for civil servants to leave when an administration changes, so the explanation has to be something other than “wrong party.” The wild disregard for relevant expertise is the one that jumps out at me. In what part of government do you really not want wild-eyed amateurs in charge? National security.

Many are concerned by a proliferation of reports about the incoming national security adviser, Michael Flynn. On Wednesday the Washington Post reported that Flynn had improperly shared classified information with foreign military officers. On the same day, CNN reported that the former Defense Intelligence Agency chief had this week deleted a tweet he had sent out a few days before the election that linked to a fake news story suggesting Hillary Clinton took part in crimes against children.

Flynn fits the wild-eyed amateur pattern. He’s a military guy, not an intelligence expert, and he’s reckless as fuck. It’s amateurish to put him in that job and he’ll be an amateur in that job.

“Career people are looking get out and go back to their agencies and pressure is being put on them to get them to stay. There is concern there will be a half-empty NSC by the time the new administration arrives, which no one wants,” said one official.

The official added that the “landing team” sent to the NSC – Trump representatives who are supposed to prepare for the handover to Trump appointees – have been focused on issues of process and how the office functions, rather than issues of substance involving an explanation of current national security threats and the state of the world the new administration will inherit.

There it is again – they don’t know the subject and they don’t care that they don’t know the subject. They’re anti-knowledge pro-business hacks, and they don’t belong there.

The Trump transition team in New York did not respond to a request for comment. The current NSC spokesman, Ned Price, said in an email: “The administration has undertaken its national security transition planning with the utmost rigour and seriousness in order to effect the most seamless and responsible transition.”

Price added: “We have been working since this spring to assemble a broad variety of transition material focused on critical national security challenges as well as NSC organizational issues and the NSC-led interagency policy process. The NSC staff also is offering to the incoming team in-person briefings and discussions with current NSC leadership and staff, and is coordinating statutorily required interagency homeland security exercises that will include both incoming and outgoing national security leadership from departments and agencies, as well as senior career public servants who will provide continuity through the transition.”

You know who Trump’s Ned Price will be? Fox News commentator Monica Crowley.

Yes, really.

It is unclear how much contact there is between the embryonic policy teams in New York and the landing teams in Washington, however.

“Most of the folks I have talked to at the three agencies – DoD (Department of Defense), state and White House – claim they have little or no interaction with these teams to date,” Julianne Smith, a former deputy national security adviser to Vice-president Joe Biden, said.

“There are very important substantive handoffs that need to be occurring that are in fact not happening. That is creating added concern about the career civil servants who are in these agencies, wondering what they are in for.”

I think it’s pretty clear what they’re in for. They’re in for being bossed by a group of people who have no clue what they’re doing and don’t care that they have no clue.

Staffers at the State Department are apparently hoping for the best.

Reports from the state department suggest most of its staff are taking a wait-and-see approach to the prospect of having the ExxonMobil oil chief executive, Rex Tillerson, at the helm. On Thursday, most of the Democrats on the House foreign affairs committee wrote to the current secretary of state, John Kerry, offering his staff protection against a “witch-hunt” by the new administration against civil servants who worked on Obama policies Trump wants to reverse. The letter was sent after the energy department refused to hand over to the Trump transition team a list of names of staffers who had worked on climate change.

Drip drip drip, the poison enters and spreads.