Trump, Conflicting Interests, Somewhat Crazily

WHEN TRUMP BECAME PRESIDENT, he assured us that he would surround himself with the best and the brightest people, would appoint to his cabinet, to agency directorships, and to advisory positions people of the highest quality, integrity, and so forth. Half way through what might mercifully be his first and only term in office, the results, which are what matter, seem to strikingly belie his promise. Belying promises, belying anything, seems to have emerged as the standard method of operation for this president. In almost every instance, the people Trump has placed in positions of responsibility harbor views, attitudes, and histories of behavior directly inimical to their assigned responsibilities. In many instances, he has appointed people who have little or no experience in the area for which their department is responsible. His first Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, came from a corporate executive background, with no experience in international relations, diplomacy, or foreign policy. Under his guidance, the State Department remained bereft of human assets; nearly half of all positions with the department went unfilled, and remain so today. Well over a year into his term, Trump had no ambassador to South Korea, none to Saudi Arabia, and the halls of the State Department building were empty, manned with too few people, with low morale, and a consensus of being neglected and understaffed. Trump appointed a person to head the Environmental Protection Agency who was not only shockingly corrupt, but seemingly unaware that the earth's environment requires protection through reasonable regulation of industrial activity. Trump's Secretary of Education, Betsy Devos, is conspicuous by her preference for private to public education, even though her job requires her to supervise and support public education. Trump prefers that his Attorney General be a person whose philosophy of law is that the government stay out of the business of protecting people's civil and legal rights; except when dealing with the president's. When the Attorney General, Mr. Sessions, recused himself from participating actively in the ongoing investigation of Trump, Trump suddenly seemed to favor an activist Attorney General. The list of highly dubiousTrump appointments is much longer, and cannot be fully enumerated here. Trump was advised to organized and stock an advisory committee on climate change, advice which Trump resisted, since he doesn't believe that climate change exists. Yet, he acceded to pressure, and appointed to chair his advisory panel a person who also does not believe that climate change exists, Princeton professor of atomic physics William Happer. Happer vindicates the oft heard conservative assertion that not all credible scientists believe in climate change. Happer is indisputably credible. He is, however, a conservative politically, a fact which seems mysteriously to blind all its adherents to the reality of the problematic aspects of free market corporate capitalism, such as the injection of billions of tons of carbon in to the atmosphere, which, any high school chemistry student can tell you, traps and absorbs heat far more readily than Earth's natural atmospheric components, nitrogen and oxygen, thus warming the atmosphere, and the planet, full time. Happer, believe it or not, cofounded an organization called the "carbon dioxide support society", or something like that, dedicated to the proposition that since carbon dioxide is natural, not man made, is is therefore helpful and harmless, and as such is being unfairly mocked, denigrated, and demonized by liberal climate change believers, much like the Jews were and in some quarters still are mistreated. Yes, he actually said all that. You could, like Casey Stengal used to say, look it up, but you can't make it up. Happer thus becomes, seemingly, the latest in a long historical list of intellectuals who are just a tad too smart for their own good, or for anybody else's good, by virtue of being totally off his rocker, stark, raving, crazy nuts. That said, perhaps the Trump administration is exactly where he belongs.