Trump’s 2.0 Team: A Pop Quiz
A few questions to help sort the merely bad picks from the outrageously terrible ones.
DONALD TRUMP IS MAKING HISTORY with how quickly he is assembling a team to bring about his dark vision for America. It is a dizzying array of TV personalities, wealthy hangers-on, bigots, lunatics, and sycophants unlike anything that anybody has ever seen before, to put it in Trumpian terms. The once and future president is, as David Remnick of the New Yorker put it, “uninterested in conventional notions of expertise.” There are so many truly bad picks that it’s hard to keep track. Perhaps this quiz will help. Answers appear at the end.
1. Whom did John Bolton, Trump’s onetime national security advisor, deem to be “the worst nomination for a cabinet position in American history”?
A. Tulsi Gabbard (Director of National Intelligence)
B. Matt Gaetz (Attorney General)
C. Elise Stefanik (U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations)
D. Pete Hegseth (Secretary of Defense)
2. What did Robert F. Kennedy Jr. describe as “like, just poison,” days before Trump tapped him to be the nation’s highest health official?
A. The juice that dripped down from the whale head he chainsawed from a carcass and strapped to the roof of his vehicle for a five-hour drive
B. Vaccines to protect children against diseases including polio and measles
C. The food served on his benefactor’s private jet, Trump Force One
D. The use of fluoride in drinking water
3. What arguments did Timothy Parlatore, attorney for Pete Hegseth, Trump’s choice for Secretary of Defense, offer in response to allegations that his client sexually assaulted a woman in 2017?
A. “She was the aggressor. . . . She took advantage of him. She led him. . . . She was sober. He was drunk.”
B. The rape kit that showed Hegseth’s semen in this woman’s body “produced no evidence that the sexual contact was nonconsensual.”
C. Hegseth only paid the woman a monetary settlement because Fox News “was not going to just sit and wait a couple of years to see what the court said — they were going to fire him. So, of course, we entered into mediation.”
D. The woman’s public accusation “opens her up to a lawsuit for defamation” as well as possibly for extortion if she “decides to out herself and try to pull some Christine Blasey Ford kind of crap.”
E. All of the above.
4. Match the nominee (position) with the qualification:
A. Elon Musk (co-head of the proposed Department of Government Efficiency)
B. Mehmet Oz (Administrator for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services)
C. Linda McMahon (Secretary of the Department of Education)
D. Sebastian Gorka (senior director for counterterrorism)
E. Janette Nesheiwat (Surgeon General)
F. Marco Rubio (Secretary of State)
1. Raving rightwing extremist
2. Fox News medical contributor
3. Won nine Daytime Emmy Awards
4. Is willing to be constantly humiliated
5. Was chief executive of World Wrestling Entertainment
6. Is the richest and second-most-self-interested person on Earth
5. Which of the following is not a true statement about South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem, Trump’s pick to become the next Secretary of Homeland Security?
A. She took her family’s dog, a 14-month-old wire-haired pointer named Cricket, to a gravel pit, where she shot and killed it because it had “shown aggressive behavior,” then wrote about it in her memoir, saying “I loved that dog.”
B. She falsely claimed in that same memoir to have met with world leaders including North Korean Leader Kim Jong-un, of whom she said, “I’m sure he underestimated me, having no clue about my experience staring down little tyrants (I’d been a children’s pastor after all).”
C. She let thousands of people in her state die needless deaths because of her rejection of simple public health measures to control the spread of COVID-19.
D. She has no experience in federal homeland security policy and during her time in Congress never served on the House Committee on Homeland Security.
6. Why did Matt Gaetz withdraw from contention for Attorney General?
A. Not enough orgies
B. He realized that he was never going to be confirmed, after Trump told him so
C. He was paving the way for another extremist ideologue who will do whatever Trump wants
D. The Deep State
7. Match the quotation with the nominee (position):
A. “There is no climate crisis, and we’re not in the midst of an energy transition either.”
B. “There’s really no such thing as a Palestinian.”
C. “I’m straight-up just saying that we should not have women in combat roles. It . . . has made fighting more complicated.”
D. “There are regulations that the left wing of this country have been advocating through regulatory power that ends up causing businesses to go in the wrong direction.”
1. Fox News host Pete Hegseth (Secretary of Defense)
2. Former Congressman Lee Zeldin (Administrator, Environmental Protection Agency)
3. Fracking company exec Chris Wright (Secretary of Energy)
4. Former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee (U.S. Ambassador to Israel)
8. Which of the following did Trump not say in a statement announcing his pick of former reality TV star, Wisconsin congressman, and Fox News commentator Sean Duffy to be his Secretary of Transportation?
A. He will “fulfill our Mission of ushering in The Golden Age of Travel, focusing on Safety, Efficiency, and Innovation. Importantly, he will greatly elevate the Travel Experience for all Americans!”
B. He’ll “continue my tradition of random capitalization.”
C. He’s “the husband of a wonderful woman, Rachel Campos-Duffy, a STAR on Fox News.”
D. He will “make our skies safe again by eliminating DEI [diversity, equity and inclusion] for pilots and air traffic controllers.”
9. Which of these four Trump picks told the biggest lie?
A. Steven Cheung, set to become White House communications director, when asked about his boss’s comment at a rally just before the election that he wouldn’t mind if an assassin had to shoot through the press corps to get to him, claimed Trump was suggesting that the media should also be surrounded by bulletproof glass. “There can be no other interpretation of what was said,” Cheung insisted. “He was actually looking out for their welfare, far more than his own!”
B. Todd Blanche, Trump’s pick as Deputy Attorney General, in his role as Trump’s personal criminal defense attorney, defending Trump against the felony charges for which he was convicted in the Manhattan hush-money-payment case: “President Trump is innocent. President Trump did not commit any crimes. The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office should never have brought this case.”
C. Tom Homan, Acting Director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) during Trump’s first term and his designated “border czar” for the second, arguing in his 2020 memoir that a “zero tolerance” approach that included the separation of families was the morally right thing to do: “How many women were saved from exploitation? How many kids were not abused or killed by coyotes? How many bad guys did we prevent from entering our communities? We’ll never know the exact number, but we made a difference.”
D. Tulsi Gabbard, whom Trump wants as his Director of National Intelligence, placing blame for Russia’s attack on Ukraine on Biden and NATO: “This war and suffering could have easily been avoided if Biden Admin/NATO had simply acknowledged Russia’s legitimate security concerns regarding Ukraine’s becoming a member of NATO, which would mean US/NATO forces right on Russia’s border.”
10. Which Trump pick (position) has promoted the book The Camp of the Saints, a white-nationalistic screed about how immigrant invaders are overwhelming Western civilization?
A. Stephen Miller (Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy and Homeland Security Adviser)
B. Tulsi Gabbard (Director of National Intelligence)
C. Elise Stefanik (U.N. Ambassador)
D. Pete Hegseth (Secretary of Defense)
E. Tom Homan (“Border Czar”)
F. Sebastian Gorka (Senior Director for Counterterrorism)
Answers
1: B. Bolton made this statement on Meet the Press Now on November 13. Later that same day, on NewsNation’s The Hill, he elaborated: “Up until a few hours ago, I would have said that [Tulsi Gabbard] was the worst cabinet appointment in recent American history. Of course, Gaetz took the lead on that score,” although he has since withdrawn from consideration. The competition for Trump’s worst pick appears to be ongoing.
2: C. “You’re either given KFC or Big Macs,” Kennedy groused on a podcast about the food on the plane. “That’s when you’re lucky, and then the rest of the stuff I consider kind of inedible.” After Trump announced his pick, RFK posed for a photo on the plane with a Big Mac set before him on the table.
3: E. Also, as reported in Breitbart, Parlatore “suspects someone in the Trump transition team may have leaked the allegations to stir the pot and sink [Hegseth’s] nomination.”
4: A6, B3, C5, D1, E2, F4
5: A. Noem actually wrote, “I hated that dog.” To read up on Noem’s qualifications for the job, or lack thereof, check out this Bulwark article from last week.
6: All of these reasons and more!
8: B. Although he might, given that Subservience to Trump is Duffy’s Only Discernible Qualification for the job.
9. A four-way tie: Cheung, Blanche, Homan, and Gabbard.
10. A. It’s Miller. But isn’t it interesting that there are many other plausible alternatives? Gabbard accused the Democratic party, to which she once belonged, of “anti-white racism.” Stefanik has echoed the white supremacist “great replacement” theory. Hegseth sports what are allegedly white supremacist tattoos. Homan spoke at a 2022 conference organized by white supremacist Nick Fuentes. And Gorka has been linked to antisemitic Hungarian extremists.
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