Solon - Athenian statesman, law maker, poetDeliberate as a verb means to consider choices and examine evidence. But deliberate also means to act with intent. The latter definition characterizes Donald Trumps choices of Cabinet members. This year it is a clown car, not a group of solons. - GWC
Donald Trump’s Cabinet of Wonders | The New YorkerBy David Remnick
***Meanwhile, the President-elect convened his loyalists at Mar-a-Lago, where they went about putting together a White House staff and a Cabinet. Historically, this is a deliberative process that can, even with the noblest intentions, go horribly wrong. In “The Best and the Brightest,” David Halberstam wrote about an American tradition of mandarins in Washington as
an aristocracy come to power, convinced of its own disinterested quality, believing itself above both petty partisan interest and material greed. The suggestion that this also meant the holding and wielding of power was judged offensive by these same people, who preferred to view their role as service.
Halberstam’s larger subject was the aristocracy of Robert McNamara, Dean Rusk, McGeorge Bundy, and all the other exceptional men of the Ivy League and corporate boardrooms who helped guide the country into the Vietnam War.
At least as a matter of rhetoric, Trump is uninterested in conventional notions of expertise (which smacks of élitism). Nor is he focussed on assembling a council of constructive disagreement, a team of rivals (which smacks of disloyalty). As his personnel choices rolled out in recent days, it became clear that they pointed wholly to his long-held priorities—and they are not the common good. The nominations of Matt Gaetz as Attorney General, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., as Secretary of Health and Human Services, Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense, and Tulsi Gabbard as the director of National Intelligence are the residue of Trump’s resentments and his thirst for retribution.
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