Donald Trump surprised many over the past week with shockingly unqualified individuals being selected to run major facets of the government in his Cabinet. But the crew on “Morning Joe” argued on Friday that’s precisely the point: Trump and his administration don’t want to run the government, “They want to wreck the government.”
“What if the goal isn’t to run it, and the goal is in fact to ruin it? And what this is about is taking the president and his ideological betters at their word,” MSNBC analyst John Heilemann said on the program. “It’s about the thorough deconstruction of the democratic state. They’re trying to wreck the government, not run the government.”
Heilemann then argued that vaccine skeptic Robert F. Kennedy Jr. would actually be Trump’s ideal pick as Health Secretary.
“If that were the goal, Bobby Kennedy might be uniquely qualified to do that in the world of HHS because not only is he not able to run an organization this big, but he’s a paragon of misinformation and disinformation about health, which is another kind of toxicity and poison that he may introduce into the system if he gets this job.”
Dr. Ezekiel J. Emanuel agreed and added that in contrast to Trump’s appointments in his first administration, like former Defense Secretary James Mattis and former AG Bill Barr who pushed back on the president, these picks are all die-hard Trump loyalists.
“I think another way of looking at these appointments is these are not people who are going to resist Trump’s whims and aren’t going to say, ‘No, there is a bright line, these things aren’t Constitutional, these things aren’t legal, I’m not going to do that.’ And I think these are appointments that are going to bend to his will, and that I think is extremely dangerous. It’s up to the Senate.”
Watch the panel discussion in the clip below.
