My column for the San Francisco Chronicle on Trump's execrable (yes) cabinet picks

Yuck.

Ranking Trump’s Cabinet picks by their danger to the United States

By Jack Ohman

Nov 21, 2024

President-elect Donald “All the best people” Trump has named four particularly noxious, unqualified individuals to senior positions in his incoming administration. They’re being referred to as the “Objectionable 4,” which is the world’s worst comic book premise ever.

Let’s examine them in order of danger to the United States, and that’s going to be a challenge.

While they’re all spectacularly unqualified and unsuited for any political job above hall monitor, former Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard is the one that should inspire the most anxiety.

Gabbard was named to be the director of national intelligence, the gatekeeper coordinating the 18 intelligence agencies in the government, premier among them the CIA and the National Security Agency.

A former four-term member of Congress from Hawaii and a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army Reserve, the most remarkable thing about Gabbard’s career is its blithering incoherence.

She’s been a Democrat, an Independent, a Republican, a supporter of Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden, an anti-LGBTQ and anti-gay marriage activist, a member of the congressional pro-LGBTQ caucus, a vice chair of the Democratic National Committee, a 2020 Democratic presidential candidate, co-chair of the 2024 Trump campaign, a substitute Fox News host, and a co-sponsor (with Matt Gaetz! Cool!) of a bill to pardon Edward Snowden and of a bill to pardon Julian Assange, and, yes, by now your head should be off its neck from all the spinning.

Oh, and Klansman David Duke, ex-con Steve Bannon, Putin-enabler Tucker Carlson, White Bro Joe Rogan and proto-Nazi Richard Spencer think she’s awesome.

All of this would lead a sane president to block her on his phone, but this “record” led Trump to put her in an incredibly sensitive national security position. Oh, and she has expressed admiration for Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad and thinks that Vladimir Putin is a fun, misunderstood fellow trying to do the right thing in Ukraine. Her 2020 campaign was oddly propped up by lots of Russian bots.

A coincidence, I am sure.

In short, she’s a catastrophic threat to national security.

Next up in the Cabinet freak show is Pete Hegseth, nominated by Trump to be, gulp, secretary of defense.

You know, the guy in charge of the U.S. military? When he’s not settling sexual harassment cases out of court, Mr. Hegseth also enjoys being a weekend Fox News host (do you detect a pattern here?), a former Minnesota National Guard major and Guantánamo Bay guard, a leader of Koch Brothers-funded “veterans” group dedicated to privatizing the Department of Veterans Affairs, a failed Minnesota U.S. Senate candidate, and, most importantly, a longtime Trump toadie. 

Oh, and he has some spectacular white supremacist tattoos that got him removed from a volunteer force of 25,000 troops to protect the Biden inauguration.

Is Don Rumsfeld looking good to you now? After all, there are knowns, and there are known unknowns. Hegseth falls into the latter category.

But wait! There’s more disruption and chaos!

Were you sitting down when you heard that former (because he wanted to skate away from that pesky House Ethics Committee report) Rep. Matt Gaetz had been named Trump’s nominee for attorney general? If not, I hope you have soft carpet and you weren’t carrying a sharp object.

Today, after overwhelming evidence came out that Gaetz had been with multiple underage girls, Gaetz finally withdrew his nomination, thank God.

This nomination was particularly puzzling because Trump could have named any number of confirmable quislings to carry out his stated goal of being above the law, and Gaetz just showed some clumsiness on Trump’s part.

Gaetz, who hasn’t run anything more complex than his cell phone dialing for underage girls, is perhaps the grandest middle finger in American history. But now Trump will have to find another finger to use.

The Gaetz nomination didn’t really push the outer tensile strength of House Speaker Mike Johnson’s evangelical moral standards (remember those, Sodomite San Francisco?). Drugs? Check. Showing colleagues on the House floor his most recent nubile conquests residing on his phone? Check.

Advise and consent of the U.S. Senate? That’s a function of the august upper body, but Gaetz even pushed Maine Sen. Susan Collins to register Deep Concern, along with a few other still-sane GOP senators. He was looking like carbon-black burned-beyond-recognition toast even in the rubber-stamping GOP Senate majority, but now he’s out.

Oooh! Who’s next?

The profoundly paranoid Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who gives the word “skepticism” a new meaning. Got conspiracy? Bobby’s there, whether it’s vaccines, COVID-19 (Plandemic!), the obvious Illuminati at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (emphasis on control, America!) or America’s diet.

Healthy Food Bobby should have bagged the Trump Force One photo op, flashing his Kennedy choppers while about to indulge in Mickey D’s and a sugary Coca-Cola. 

Naw. Self-awareness went out the window with this Camelot chameleon 20 years ago. 

There was a time, in 2008, when RFK Jr. and his pet brain worm were under serious consideration by then President-elect Barack Obama to become the head of the Environmental Protection Agency.  

Someone in Springfield, Ohio, please eat Bobby’s pet. Please. It will pair with the dead baby bears and the severed whale head the scion prefers. 

Putting Kennedy in charge of anything bigger than the footballs at Hyannis Port is a dangerous gamble, a torch-passing to a man who should be sitting quietly doing leatherwork in a calm environment. The only meds he should be in charge of are his own pillbox.

Hey, Swing Voter America! Have those egg prices dropped yet? Did you vote for lunacy?

Did you vote to give Putin the keys to our national security? A pedophile running the Justice Department? A white supremacist running our military? You didn’t? 

Think again.

Jack Ohman is a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist and columnist who also writes at https://substack.com/@jackohman

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Folks, no annotated cartoons this week. Finishing up that freelance project, and going to San Francisco to give a speech. I’ll catch up soon, and I’ll post my local San Francisco cartoons later. Have a great weekend and stay sane. Let me know how you do that, please!—J.