During her confirmation hearings, Trump’s Secretary of Education demonstrated that she didn’t have a basic understanding of the raging debate going on in the field about whether to test students for proficiency or growth.
Trump’s Energy Secretary, Rick Perry, entered his job without knowing that one of his primary responsibilities in the position would be oversight of the country’s nuclear arsenal.
Recently Martin Longman noted a Government Accountability Office report that accused Ben Carson, Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, of being a criminal. Longman went on to summarize some of the legal and ethical complaints leveled against members of Trump’s cabinet.
But the examples above don’t go to legality or ethics, they go to knowledge versus ignorance, with the latter winning out among Trump’s cabinet. Once again, Ben Carson is the poster child. Take a look at what happened when Representative Katie Porter asked him about the disparate number of REO‘s in FHA loans as opposed to GSE‘s. That might sound like a lot of acronym gobbledygook to the rest of us, but they are all basic features that should be elementary for a HUD secretary.
I asked @SecretaryCarson about REOs – a basic term related to foreclosure – at a hearing today. He thought I was referring to a chocolate sandwich cookie. No, really. pic.twitter.com/cYekJAkRag
— Rep. Katie Porter (@RepKatiePorter) May 21, 2019
That is major face-plant material. It is even worse than the ignorance on display from DeVos and Perry because it comes three years into Carson’s time on the job. To paraphrase a famous Bushism, “is our cabinet learning?”
Longman is right to document the ways in which Trump’s cabinet is the worst in history when it comes to criminality and ethics. But they are clearly the most ignorant as well.
I won’t be telling you anything you don’t already know when I summarize by saying that this country has an ignorant, narcissistic bully as president who has assembled the most ethically challenged and ignorant cabinet in history. The only bright side is that, if we survive, there is nowhere to go but up!
