Trump's cabinet picks are agents of his contempt, rage and vengeance | Sidney Blumenthal

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

83% : Joe Biden welcomed Trump to the Oval Office on 13 November in a show that the transfer of power was peaceful.
71% : "I would like you to do us a favor," said Trump in what he insisted was a "perfect phone call".
69% : Trump rolled out his team of travesties in the spirit he had promised.
69% : The appointment of Senator Marco Rubio of Florida as secretary of state illustrates the kind of behavior Trump wishes to encourage among Republican senators.
56% : During the 2016 Republican primaries, Rubio derided Trump for his "small hands", a signifier for his genitals.
52% : Trump at last has an in-house lawyer to tell him how to do what he wants.
51% : Trump does not attempt to hide his intention to "dismantle government bureaucracy" and "send shockwaves through the system", as he tweeted in his appointment of "the Great Elon Musk" and Vivek Ramaswamy (no "Great" preceding his name), assigned to rampage through the entire government as a "Department of Government Efficiency".
45% : Carlson and Don Jr persuaded Bobby to drop his third-party candidacy and to endorse Trump.
45% : "On 13 November, Trump named Gaetz attorney general.
44% : Revelations of Hegseth's alleged behavior have not elicited censure from Trump, but expressions of sympathetic support for the would-be #MeToo victim.
44% : "Hegseth appears to Trump as the ideal man to purge the military.
44% : After Trump was elected, the Journal has been stunned by the nominations of Gaetz and RFK Jr.
38% : Before the election, Trump developed two elaborate plans, one if he lost and the other if he won.
38% : Trump seeks to install his cabinet by circumventing the Senate.
37% : And sometimes revenge can be justified," Trump said in June on Dr Phil's Fox News show.
37% : Liberated from accountability, Trump is building his government on revenge.
37% : He handed Trump a list of more than 100 policies he wanted implemented.
36% : Trump was named "Unindicted Co-Conspirator No 1".
34% : In April, Burgum gathered oil and gas executives at Mar-a-Lago, where Trump flagrantly asked for $1bn in campaign contributions in exchange for tax breaks and favorable policies.
32% : On 31 October, at a rally in Glendale, Arizona, Carlson interviewed Trump and asked him pointedly whether he would appoint Bobby.
32% : In naming RFK Jr, Trump is reacting to his conflicts during the Covid-19 pandemic, when he wished to ignore it, dismissed mask-wearing and suggested injecting Clorox.
29% : Trump has been in the business of making enemies of anyone trying to enforce the law.
28% : In March, Trump ousted the chair of the Republican National Committee, Ronna McDaniel, because she would not divert the committee's resources into an election-denial operation and fund his legal expenses.
28% : The greatest influence in public life exercised by Pete Hegseth, a Fox News host and former national guard officer before Trump named him as secretary of defense, was in 2019 when he privately lobbied Trump and publicly advocated on Fox for pardons for three military officers convicted of war crimes, which Trump granted.
28% : Trump complained to his chief of staff Gen John Kelly that he wanted "my generals" to be more like "Hitler's generals".
27% : Trump is also denying the FBI from conducting background checks.
26% : After Trump confided in Reince Priebus, his first chief of staff, that he would pick Gaetz, Priebus concluded: "So, he [Trump] feels like he has gone to hell and back 10 times.
25% : Trump was furious at the exposure of his blackmail.
24% : Trump declared he would be a dictator on "day one".
23% : Trump said to Gen Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, in the presence of secretary of defense Mark Esper, about demonstrators after George Floyd's murder in 2020.
23% : Hegseth would not be the defense secretary to advise Trump against invoking the Insurrection Act to impose martial law as Mike Flynn, his disgraced former national security adviser, suggested to him shortly before January 6.
23% : "Trump has not appointed RFK Jr for his famous name, though he must receive gratification from possessing for himself this piece of the Kennedy legacy, however tarnished.
21% : With them, Trump will tear down any person or institution that tried to restrain his worst impulses or hold him accountable"Shock" suddenly became the most commonly uttered word in habitually nonplussed Washington DC.
19% : Then, Trump named as secretary of energy a fracking equipment company executive, Chris Wright, who has declared: "There is no climate crisis.
18% : Trump recalls that his first impeachment was the result of a whistleblower complaint from an analyst from the office of the director of national intelligence, who filed a memo about a phone call Trump had with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky in which he sought to coerce him into manufacturing political dirt about Biden in exchange for defensive Javelin missiles already approved by the Congress.
17% : Back then, Trump blithely spoke of getting away with shooting someone on Fifth Avenue.
14% : He hated his chief medical adviser, Dr Anthony Fauci, and Coronavirus Response Coordinator Dr Deborah Birx - "all these idiots", said Trump.Trump also fired Dr Rick Bright, the director of the Center for the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority in charge of vaccine development, for refusing to approve the use of hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for Covid-19, which Bright protested was one of several "potentially dangerous drugs promoted by those with political connections".
11% : Trump, the adjudicated rapist, credibly accused by dozens of women of sexual assault, whom sex criminal Jeffrey Epstein called his "closest friend for 10 years", identifies with Matt Gaetz fending off investigations of his alleged sex crimes.
11% : But after Trump was convicted of 34 felonies in New York for paying hush-money to an adult film actorto influence the 2016 election, Rubio leaped to blame Biden falsely for Trump's prosecution.
4% : When Fox News host Sean Hannity followed up, trying to prod Trump into softening his threats, Trump rejected the opportunity.

*Our bias meter rating uses data science including sentiment analysis, machine learning and our proprietary algorithm for determining biases in news articles. Bias scores are on a scale of -100% to 100% with higher negative scores being more liberal and higher positive scores being more conservative, and 0% being neutral. The rating is an independent analysis and is not affiliated nor sponsored by the news source or any other organization.