In two hours flat

Written by

Ophelia Benson

in

Sometimes speed is not the goal. Sometimes it’s downright dangerous. That’s why speed limits exist.

Trump is zooming.

President-elect Trump has set a modern record for staffing his government, with 12 Cabinet-level appointments in the 12 days since the election.

That’s five times faster than President Biden made the same number of picks for his administration — and four times faster than Trump’s pick for his first administration, according to calculations for Axios by David Marchick, dean of the Kogod School of Business at American University and an expert on presidential transitions.

And it’s confirmation that he’s a reckless brainless wrecking ball.

Trump either “has the best and most efficient transition ever,” Marchick said, or “is blowing up all norms and making picks on the fly without vetting, research or Senate consultations.”

And it could not be more obvious which explanation is the right one.

Comments

3 responses to “In two hours flat”

  1. Richard Avatar
    Richard

    I don’t understand why US Presidents are so slow in making their appointments. Twelve picks in twelve days is a snail’s pace compared to the speed at which a British government is assembled – as I understand it the Congressional hearings come later. Incoming British Prime Ministers generally install their entire cabinet within a day or at most two.

  2. Mike Haubrich Avatar
    Mike Haubrich

    One of the main differences is that in the parliamentary system, the new prime ministers staff from a Shadow Cabinet and members of the Parliament. We don’t have that framework. New heads of departments are selected from a variety of sources, and while they are often politicians themselves they may also come from other sources such as private industry. So, ideally there is a staff during the campaign before election that works to solicit potential cabinent members before the electon, there is a period of two and a half months between the election of a new president and their inauguration rather then a next day transition following the election of a new Prime Minister.

  3. Sackbut Avatar
    Sackbut

    I came across this column by Robert Tracinski at The Unpopulist.

    Although Americans were warned—including by this publication—that President-elect Donald Trump would staff his administration with loyalists, few expected the shock of his calamitous selections for top positions in his administration. The common theme is that he is constructing a kind of anti-government—not in the sense of being for smaller government, but in the sense of being government’s evil twin. Every appointee is selected as a deliberate negation, even a mockery, of the function of government he or she will be in charge of.

    …

    These individuals are not merely unqualified for their offices. They are disqualified. They are anti-qualified—the antithesis of what the offices call for.

    If Trump gets his way, we will have a defender of war criminals as Secretary of Defense, a Russian lackey as Director of National Intelligence, a criminal running the Department of Justice, and a crank promoter of quack remedies in charge of Health and Human Services.

    This is a negation of government, an act of nihilism directed at the central function of each of our government’s agencies.

    This sets the theme for Trump’s second administration, in which he is clearly setting out to break our whole constitutional order.

    Part of the point of choosing cabinet officers who are outrageously disqualified for their offices is to destroy the appointment system. The president is supposed to nominate the government’s top officers and then wait for their approval by the Senate. Trump is already trying to pressure the Republican Senate to declare a fake recess so he can appoint his officers without any approval process, precisely because he knows many Republican senators will balk at signing off on these nominees.

    This is an attempt to destroy both the independence of the legislative branch and the Advice and Consent Clause of the Constitution in one fell swoop.

    …

    It is a mistake to think that authoritarian leaders want to strengthen government. To the contrary, they want to weaken government’s institutions. They want an unstructured government, one without rules and procedures, so as to leave fewer impediments to their whims. That is the point of Trump’s anti-government: to provide more scope for the exercise of arbitrary and capricious power.

    The whole thing is worth reading.

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