This is Trump's first year in office and already the cracks are showing. This article, which I read in Vanity Fair's print version, was called "Made in the USDA." That subhead was "The folks at the Department of Agriculture laid on a friendly welcome for the trump transition team, but they soon discovered that most of his appointees were stunningly unqualified.* With key USDA programs—from food stamps to meat inspection, to grants and loans for rural development, to school lunches—under siege, Michael Lewis discovers the agency's greatest problem is that even the people it helps most** don't know what it does."
It was shocking, and I don't use that word lightly. The online version of the article, btw, was titled "Inside Trump's Cruel Campaign against the USDA's Scientists," which may give you a better idea. Honestly, it was this first story that made me cry at the breakfast table, reading it aloud to Gerry. Here it is in a nutshell (quotes are directly from the article; brackets are me moving the story along):
Ali Zaidi was five years old when his parents moved him from Pakistan to the United States [northern Pennsylvania], in 1993. [His father was going to go to college; it was, of course, a big change.] … And so the Zaidis left Karachi, a city of more than eight million Muslims, for a rural town of 7,000 Christians. "We went from solidly upper-middle-class to trying to reach into the middle class," recalls Ali."
[Like my son in the mid 90s (I was a single mom), Ali got subsidized school lunches in grammar school. Ali was a good student; he was encouraged at home.]
… In high school he volunteered for America's Promise Alliance, Colin Powell's foundation to help underprivileged children. … [He became politically involved, and campaigned for GW Bush. He went to Harvard (class of 2008) and joined the Young Republicans. He was invited to the board of America's Promise.] … The Iraq War happened. Guantánamo Bay happened. Hostility toward his fellow Muslims found a greater welcome in his party than elsewhere. Yet Ali remained a Republican. Six or seven months after Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast he traveled there, with America's Promise, to help. In New Orleans he saw poverty he'd never imagined.
You see, it's exposure to dire poverty that will change you. Change your politics. This young man heard Sen. Obama speak, joined the campaign, and in 2009 joined the administration in DC, in the Office of Management and Budget, where he was handed the budget for the USDA … and this is the paragraph that made me cry:
A small fraction of its massive annual budget ($164 billion in 2016) was actually spent on farmers, but it financed and managed all these programs in rural America—including the free school lunch for kids living near the poverty line. "I'm sitting there looking at this," said Ali. "The U.S.D.A. had subsidized the apartment my family had lived in. The hospital we used. The fire department. The town's water. The electricity. It had paid for the food I had eaten."
So … the election happened and Trump won. Michael Lewis wrote,
No one showed up that first day after the election, or the next. This was strange: the day after he was elected, Obama had sent his people into the U.S.D.A., as had Bush. At the end of the second day the folks at the Department of Agriculture called the White House to ask what was going on. "The White House said they'd be here Monday," recalled one. On Monday morning they worked themselves up all over again into a welcoming spirit. Again, no one showed. Not that entire week. On November 22, Leftwich made a cameo appearance for about an hour. "We had thought, Rural America is who got Trump elected, so he'll have to make us a priority," said the transition planner, "but then nothing happened."
You see that? "Rural America is who got Trump elected, so he'll have to make us a priority." But no. Trump's only priority is himself. Literally. Fast-forward a little more.
The Department of Agriculture normally closes for business on Inauguration Day. It's the only federal agency with an office building on the National Mall, which, once upon a time, had been the site of an experimental farm. The building is now used as a staging post during the inaugural by the National Guard and Secret Service. Just before the inauguration a Trump representative called the U.S.D.A. and said he wanted the building to remain open, as he was sending 30-something new people in. Why the sudden rush? Why force the government to turn on the lights and staff the cafeteria and go to the rest of the trouble to animate a federal building on a day no one was working? Even getting people into the building would be difficult, with snipers on the roof and the Metro station closed. A member of the Obama transition team wondered how the newcomers could have been vetted so quickly by the Office of Presidential Personnel. Nine months later, Politico published an eye-popping account about these new appointees. Its reporter Jenny Hopkinson obtained the curricula vitae of the new Trump people. Into U.S.D.A. jobs, some of which paid nearly $80,000 a year, the Trump team had inserted a long-haul truck driver, a clerk at AT&T, a gas-company meter reader, a country-club cabana attendant, a Republican National Committee intern, and the owner of a scented-candle company, with skills like "pleasant demeanor" listed on their résumés. "In many cases [the new appointees] demonstrated little to no experience with federal policy, let alone deep roots in agriculture," wrote Hopkinson. "Some of those appointees appear to lack the credentials, such as a college degree, required to qualify for higher government salaries." (Emphases mine.)
The story above was preceded in September (also from Vanity Fair and by Michael Lewis) by one of the most frightening pieces I'd read in a long time. Title? "Why the Scariest Nuclear Threat May Be Coming from Inside the White House." Subhead: "Donald Trump's secretary of energy, Rick Perry, once campaigned to abolish the $30 billion agency that he now runs, which oversees everything from our nuclear arsenal to the electrical grid. The department's budget is now on the chopping block. But does anyone in the White House really understand what the Department of Energy actually does? And what a horrible risk it would be to ignore its extraordinary, life-or-death responsibilities?"
The answer, of course, is no. Trump ran for president for the attention, for the gift to his ego. He know nothing about governing, what that entails. And the only people he could draw to himself were people like him: not particularly bright and not particularly interested in serving the country.
Here's a bit of what scared me:
How to stop a virus, how to take a census, how to determine if some foreign country is seeking to obtain a nuclear weapon or if North Korean missiles can reach Kansas City: these are enduring technical problems. The people appointed by a newly elected president to solve these problems have roughly 75 days to learn from their predecessors. After the inauguration, a lot of deeply knowledgeable people will scatter to the four winds and be forbidden, by federal law, from initiating any contact with their replacements. …
The one concrete action the Trump transition team took before Inauguration Day was to attempt to clear the D.O.E. and other federal agencies of people appointed by Obama. … The C.F.O. of the department at the end of the Obama administration was a mild-mannered civil-servant type named Joe Hezir. He had no particular political identity and was widely thought to have done a good job—and so he half-expected a call from the Trump people asking him to stay on, just to keep the money side of things running smoothly. The call never came. No one even let him know his services were no longer required. Not knowing what else to do, but without anyone to replace him, the C.F.O. of a $30 billion operation just up and left.
This was a loss. A lunch or two with the chief financial officer might have alerted the new administration to some of the terrifying risks they were leaving essentially unmanaged. Roughly half of the D.O.E.'s annual budget is spent on maintaining and guarding our nuclear arsenal, for instance. Two billion of that goes to hunting down weapons-grade plutonium and uranium at loose in the world so that it doesn't fall into the hands of terrorists. In just the past eight years the D.O.E.'s National Nuclear Security Administration has collected enough material to make 160 nuclear bombs.
I could go on, but do you see what I mean? Read the article. Go to this line—"Just give me the top five risks I need to worry about right away. Start at the top."—and tell me how you sleep tonight. (The five: nuclear weapons; North Korea; Iran; the electrical grid; and managing radioactive waste.) Have you even thought about these things? There are things we don't know and things we don't want to know, frankly. But this shouldn't be left up to Trump. He doesn't have the mental capacity. Or the moral capacity.
Surely now you don't wonder why I hold him in such contempt?
*No, reeeeally? Trump has yet to hire someone who isn't incompetent.
** That is—people who likely voted for Trump.
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