President Trump has removed some liabilities from his cabinet, but he could stand to lose a few more.
The January 30 edition of the Morning Jolt looked at Trump’s cabinet and pointed to five figures as particular underperformers or liabilities: then–Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, then–Attorney General Pam Bondi, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer, and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Regarding the attorney general, I wrote, “Every DOJ has problems and controversies; what stands out about Bondi’s tenure is how foreseeable they are, and yet she seems to step into them anyway.”
Noem and Bondi are gone, and for what it is worth, the Guardian reported that Trump has asked his advisers whether Gabbard should be replaced. White House Communications Director Steven Cheung posted on X April 2, “@POTUS has total confidence in @DNIGabbard, and any insinuation otherwise is totally fake news.” That may sound like an irrefutable vote of confidence, but keep in mind, on April 1, Trump told the New York Times, “Attorney General Pam Bondi is a wonderful person, and she is doing a good job.” Perhaps that statement was an April Fools’ Day joke, because Trump announced Bondi’s departure the next day.
Lori Chavez-DeRemer continues to have one troubling allegation after another — the most recent that she “and her former deputy chief of staff sent texts asking employees to bring wine to them during trips for the department. Sometimes the requests came in the middle of the workday.” This would be a much bigger headache for the administration if anyone paid attention to the Department of Labor; luckily for Chavez-DeRemer, few do.
As for Robert F. Kennedy Jr., he may well have an effective communications strategy of regularly getting involved in bizarre stories involving dead animals and their body parts. This may well distract from some of his other controversies. In a hearing last week, Kennedy insisted he had never said:
My space program, my Peace Corps program, is going to be Wellness Farms, rehabilitation facilities that I’m going to start in rural areas all over the country, where people, any American, can go for free any of them who is dependent on drugs either legal drugs or illegal drugs. Psychiatric drugs — which every black kid is now just standard put on Adderall, SSRIs, benzos which are known to induce violence — and those kids are going to have a chance to go somewhere and get re-parented, to live in a community where there’ll be no cell phones, no screens, you’ll actually have to talk to people.
As you can imagine, Alabama Democratic congresswoman Terri Sewell, who is black, was less than enthusiastic about a member of the Kennedy family proposing a vast plan to “re-parent” black children.
Sewell: Have you ever re-parented, or parented, I should say, a black child?
Kennedy: I don’t even know what that phrase means, and I doubt that I —
Sewell: Just a yes or no answer.
Kennedy: I doubt that I said that phrase. No. I’m not going to answer something that I didn’t say.
Sewell: You absolutely said it.
Kennedy: Well, I’d like to hear the recording. So to be clear, it doesn’t make any sense. I don’t even know what it means.
Sewell: I don’t either. That’s why I’m asking.
Later in their tense exchange, Kennedy accused Sewell of “just making stuff up.”
You can watch the video of Kennedy saying it on the Earn Your Leisure podcast June 30, 2024.
The 72-year-old RFK Jr. may well not remember using that phrase, or his proposal for “Wellness Farms.” He could well argue that since he became HHS secretary, his only priority is enacting ideas and programs supported by the president; his old ideas from his presidential campaign have been tossed aside. But Kennedy looks ridiculous, dishonest, or even senile by insisting he never said something that he had said less than two years earlier, that was recorded on video.