AMERICA FIRST. AMERICA FIRST. AMERICA ÜBER ALLES
Nominee for Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced that he intends to “put the swagger back into the State Department.” But just who swaggers? Bullies and braggarts, for two, plus others who want you to believe there’s more to them than meets the eye when usually there’s less. Look up “swagger” in any dictionary and you’re hard put to find anything positive about swaggering. Here’s definition #1 from Webster’s 11th: “To conduct oneself in an arrogant and superciliously pompous manner; esp: to walk with an air of overbearing self-confidence.”
That having a tone-deaf person take over the State Department actually looks like an improvement over the do-nothing leadership of Rex Tillerson, shows us the depths to which we’ve sunk in the Trump administration.
Of course, Pompeo’s swagger offensive perfectly suits the overall character of the Trump administration, taking its cue from the behavior of the top guy himself, of which there are too many examples to count of macho posturing, and various forms of beating his chest. Even Trump’s energy policy is geared to “energy dominance,” by which he means world energy dominance. (While dragging the country off the cliff of global warming—but hey, Real Men can take the heat!) Domination and crazy-making are the noisiest themes of the Trump presidency.
Swagger apparently works when you’re facing off against fellow swaggerers, such as Pompeo’s secret encounter with Kim Jong-Un (actually, Kim waddles rather than swaggers, but let’s not get too technical). I imagine Pompeo persuaded Kim to at least pretend to de-nuclearize North Korea, by conveying, in so many words, “We can destroy you, and will if you cross us too many times.”
I’m not so sure swagger will play quite as well with our allies, now confronted with the Trump-Pompeo threat of pulling out of the Iran nuclear deal, in addition to imposing trade restrictions and deftly avoiding meaningful sanctions against the state that most effectively sows chaos in Europe and North America (by that I mean Russia, although Trump believes it is California).
So Pompeo will be the chief diplomatic face of the America First foreign policy, and you can see by the bounce in his swagger that he’s coming to it with great enthusiasm, bulking up for whatever opposition may come from the sissy nations of Europe.
Then on the domestic front we have the Swamp Creatures
I couldn’t resist the alliteration of Swaggering Swamp to tie together different outrages perpetrated by the Trump gang. The Trump administration Swamp Creatures are largely a different breed from the outright Swaggerers such as Pompeo (who is also a Swamp Creature, a true double threat). They may swagger in private, but in public they wear the veneer of Serious Public Servants.
Leading the Swampian pack is EPA director Scott Pruitt, who is under twelve separate investigations into ethical and possibly legal wrongdoing. Rather than swaggering, he tries to imitate technocrats in demeanor, without actually knowing much about the science behind the work his agency is supposed to be doing. As Oklahoma Attorney General, Pruitt sued the EPA repeatedly for having the gall to regulate fossil fuel industry’s violations of pollution laws. What is most astonishing about Pruitt is that he is (or poses as) an Evangelical Christian, while at the same time appearing ethically clueless—it seems that he honestly does not perceive he is doing anything wrong. As much as we can characterize his actions as those of a hypocrite, it may be that his inner moral world is so vacant that he’s incapable of hypocrisy. Speaking of hypocrites . . .
Next out of the Swamp is Steven Mnuchin, former predatory financier now Secretary of the Treasury. Like Pruitt, Mnuchin has been under scrutiny for liberal use of government transportation for his personal affairs. Mnuchin’s style is as much smarmy as swampy—Dana Milbank satirized Mnuchin’s toadying relationship to Donald Trump in a Washington Post piece titled, “It’s official: Steven Mnuchin is the greatest sycophant in Cabinet history.” (See Milbank skewers Mnuchin). Mnuchin’s leading contribution to the commonweal was guiding the 2017 tax bill through the Treasury bureaucracy—that’s the bill that gave his Wall Street pals enormous tax breaks, and the rest of us peanuts. Mnuchin often wears a slyly bemused smile to conceal his contempt for all beings who are not rich.
The most blatantly swampy Trump administration official is Mick Mulvaney, White House budget director, who doubles as acting director of the Consumer Protection Bureau in a sick parody of a fox guarding a henhouse. In April, Mulvaney baldly stated in a speech to the American Bankers Association that, when he served in Congress, “If you were a lobbyist who never gave us money, I didn’t talk to you.” Interestingly, a fellow Congressman, Democrat Ro Khanna, gave Mulvaney a tepid defense, saying, “I’ve always found [Mulvaney] to be a person of integrity, but he’s operating in a system . . . where special interests have just run rampant.” The implication is that you have to rate swampiness on a sliding scale—some slide deeper into ethical doo-doo than others. (Khanna himself declines contributions from all PACs, and co-founded a No PAC Caucus in Congress.)
These are three of the most conspicuous Swamp Creatures in Trump’s gang, conspicuous because their titles require that have to stick their heads above the Swamp as part of their jobs of appearing to serve the public—while remaining deeply rooted in the mire. You can count on the existence of plenty of others paddling about at less visible levels.
I somewhat reluctantly add Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross to the stirring panoply of Trump-appointed Swamp Creatures, because it appears Ross actually did things to create value by buying up bankrupt companies and getting them back on their feet before selling them—a financier’s version of house-flipping. He profits, some people get to keep their jobs, a company’s reputation is restored, and the fondly dubbed “King of Bankruptcy” walks away smelling like a Multiflora Rose (this is the invasive species that crowds out native vegetation, but it looks good). Ross got caught up in the “Paradise Papers” scandal when it turned out that he had financial ties to Russian interests that he failed to disclose in his confirmation hearings. Nevertheless, he got Senate confirmation with a 72-27 vote.
Isn’t there a disconnect between Trump’s promises to drain The Swamp, and packing his cabinet with Swamp Creatures?
There may be a so-called “disconnect” in a naive view of How Government Works, lacking the finer distinctions between Swamp Creatures and those who prioritize the public good. Swamp Creatures are those who are on the take from rich lobbyists and wealthy individuals, but who belong to the other party of whoever is accusing them. This holds to a large extent on both sides of the aisle.
There’s no better example on the Democrats’ side than Tim Geithner, named by Obama to be Treasury Secretary to rescue the nation from the 2008 financial crisis. Geithner promptly arranged a $700 billion taxpayer-funded bailout package for investment and commercial banks, wherein none of the actors who had pillaged the public went to jail, allowing AIG, among the several culprits, to dole out $165 million in bonuses to the same employees who had caused AIG’s $170 billion bailout.