The Scandal of Trump's Cabinet Picks Isn't Just Their Personal Failings

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

50% : Over the Thanksgiving weekend, Trump named the fathers-in-law of two of his children to senior government positions -- Massad Boulos, the Lebanese-born dad of Tiffany Trump's husband, will be Trump's senior Middle East adviser, and Charles Kushner, Ivanka Trump's father-in-law and a seven-figure Trump donor, will be nominated for Ambassador to France.
46% : Who exactly gets confirmed to what job may not yet be known, but this much looks more clear with each Trump appointment: internal purges, far more than anything overseas, will be the order of the day in Trump 2.0. ♦
38% : Trump, on his way out of office in 2020, pardoned Kushner.
34% : Now, in elevating him to one of America's premier diplomatic postings, Trump has managed to both insult our oldest ally and flout whatever remaining standards there are for holding a senior U.S. position.
31% : The wording of the revenge-minded President-elect's announcement was telling: one of Patel's selling points, Trump said, was his "pivotal role in uncovering the Russia, Russia, Russia hoax."
30% : For the Republican senators who are required to approve nominees for senior posts in the upcoming Administration, extremism in defense of Trump has proven to be no obstacle whatsoever.
20% : It did not get as much attention as it ought to have, but the single most worrisome -- and revealing -- Trump statement of the entire 2024 campaign in my view came in a mid-October interview on Fox News, when Trump said, "We have two enemies -- we have the outside enemy, and then we have the enemy from within.
18% : Today, Wray has more than two years left in his ten-year term -- a tenure that was set up by Congress in the aftermath of Watergate and J. Edgar Hoover's decades-long reign to insulate the bureau from the twin evils of politicized law enforcement and an excessively powerful director -- and yet Trump has not bothered to make his intentions clear: Will he fire Wray outright to make way for Patel?
14% : Less than six hours later, at 6:47 P.M., Trump revealed perhaps his most dangerous decision yet -- a plan to install Kash Patel, an ostentatious Trump loyalist who has explicitly promised to go after Trump's political enemies in the press and in both parties, as the next director of the F.B.I.
14% : Also telling was a key fact that Trump's announcement omitted: there is no actual opening atop the F.B.I. Christopher Wray, the current director, was named to the post by Trump himself, in 2017, after Trump fired the previous F.B.I. director, James Comey, in a failed effort to stop the bureau's investigation into Russia's interference in the 2016 election.
8% : But Wray disappointed Trump by failing to quash the probe, and he has long since been considered a "deep state" enemy of the Trumpists.
5% : Trump himself was already reported to be looking at alternatives, including, perhaps, Ron DeSantis, the Republican governor of Florida, who infuriated Trump by running against him in this year's primaries.

*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.