December 15, 2016

The Swamp May Be the Swampiest It's Ever Been Under President Trump

http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/news/a51417/donald-trump-swamp/
"His appointees all have been comfortable oligarchs; his Secretary of Labor believes in cheap hiring until he's sure the robots are ready to take the jobs. His Secretary of the Treasury is a foreclosure baron, and his Secretary of Commerce made his boodle running a corporate chop-shop courtesy of this country's ludicrous bankruptcy laws. This, naturally, has led to some interesting speculation as to who's really running the store down at Camp Runamuck while the president-elect is stroking the suckers out in the boondocks. It is being described as a power struggle between the old-school loyalists like Steve Bannon and Establishment infiltrators like obvious anagram Reince Priebus, soon to be the White House chief-of-staff, with Priebus at the moment being said to be winning. (And can we declare a year's moratorium on both the phrase "Team of Rivals" and any analogy involving Game of Thrones? Thank you. Sincerely, America.) Since I don't think Priebus could lead kindergartners across the street, the question I have is who's pulling Priebus' strings. If I had to guess, I'd point to Jim DeMint and his now completely radicalized Heritage Foundation. While Trump's stump rhetoric is wildly dissonant from the recruitment policy that's burped up all of those recruits, one thing all of them—including egregious thooleramawns like Scott Pruitt at EPA and Betsy DeVos at Education—have in common in that they have records and policy positions perfectly in tune with what DeMint and Heritage have been pushing for years. If you're looking for the dark lord behind the events of the next few years, you could do worse than look on Massachusetts Avenue NE in Washington, not too far from both the Capitol and the chambers of the Supreme Court."