View from K Street: A Cabinet of Curiosities

As we and the rest of the world are buffeted by the dizzying shifts and changes that constitute the administration’s rationales for beginning and conducting the war with Iran (not to mention the unforeseen and often catastrophic impact on the economy of countries and lives of people around the world), all of K Street is wondering where the president may be seeking or receiving advice. 

Notorious for rejecting the counsel of “elites,” renowned for dismissing the advice of experienced specialists at the State Department, NSA, DOD, and CIA as “suspect,” contemptuous of Congress, trusting mainly in “his gut”—who could have advised President Trump to assist him from creating the battalion of troubles that beset him? It’s certainly not his Cabinet. 

In past generations, especially in time of war, presidents have sought out and appointed to the Cabinet people of proven character and substance, with independent, often nonpolitical, careers. Their names still resound in our history books and our memories: Seward, Stanton, Chase, Stimson, Hull, Ickes, Robert Jackson, Wallace, Perkins. They served with distinction, their pasts as distinguished as their service. That model is, like so much else in government, “no longer operative.”