Q Toon: Trump's DEI Hire

The odd couple of Liberal Leo and MAGA Max return to discuss a Trump cabinet nominee nobody else is drawing cartoons about.

Drawing for the LGBTQ+ press, I feel obliged to highlight President Re-Elect Donald Trump's naming of an out gay man to his cabinet. Scott Bessent stands out from Trump's other appointments not so much because of his sexual orientation, but more because in contrast to the rest of them, he's so normal.

Yes, he's a billionaire, not Mr. John Q. Public. But he's no worm-brain-addled RFK Jr., or Russian asset Tulsi Gabbard, or pardoned blackmailer Charles Kushner, or sexual harasser Pete Hegseth, or snake oil huckster Doc Oz, or fascist weasel Steven Miller. Nor did he shoot his own dog, as Secretary-designate for Homeland Security Kristi Noem did. Or come to Trump's attention via World Wrestling Entertainment, like his choice to head the Department of Education, Linda "But We Asked Our Pederasts to Please Stop" McMahon.

As important as the post of Secretary of the Treasury is — being fifth in the line of presidential succession and all — you might not hear much about him during his time in office, unless he joy rides in an Air Force jet as Trump's last Treasury Secretary was wont to do. (Quick: without looking at the money in your wallet, who has been Treasury Secretary during the Biden years?)

Do I really think that Scott Bessent is a diversity hire? Not really. His financial support of Trump and the MAGA movement would have a lot more to do with his appointment. Trump may want to burn Justice, Defense, Interior, Education, Health and Welfare, and Veterans Affairs to the ground, but he has a vested interest in keeping his Secret Service detail paid so they can afford his hotel room rates. (Didja know that the Secret Service is part of the Treasury Department?*)

To be honest, I suspect that if Bessent leaves the Even More Corrupt Trump Administration early, it will not be because he was the token gay hire. 

But when the Trump tariffs and draconian Muskaswami budget cuts push us into a new recession and eggs are still $4/dozen, somebody is going to have to be the scapegoat, and it's going to be the person who doesn't quite fit in with the rest of the Cabinet of Misfit Toys.

_____________

*Correction: The Secret Service was transferred from the Treasury Department to the newly formed Department of Homeland Security in 2003. The "U.S. Secret Service Mission Improvement and Realignment Act of 2020" would have returned it to the Treasury Department but died in Congress without coming to a vote.

Introducing Albert Fall (Holes and All)

My Saturday History Tours usually display several editorial cartoons; but today, I'm featuring only one.

It was the only cartoon I could find on this topic.

"What's the Idea" by J. N. "Ding" Darling in New York Tribune, Jan. 12, 1922

Today, Warren G. Harding is remembered, first and foremost, for the Teapot Dome scandal, an oil leasing scheme that only blew wide open after President Harding's premature demise. "Ding" Darling's cartoon introduces us to the man who would become the central figure in the scandal, Secretary of the Interior Albert Bacon Fall.

Putting government coal and petroleum resources under the control of Fall's Interior Department was Harding administration policy from the beginning. Harding transferred the Teapot Dome oil field in Wyoming from the purview of the Navy Department (as established during the Taft administration to ensure that the Navy would have sufficient oil reserves for its fleet) to the Interior Department by a little-noticed executive order in June of 1921.

Darling's cartoon, however, is about transferring control of Alaska's natural resources from the Department of Agriculture to the Interior Department, which required congressional action. This is 37 years before Alaska became a state; even more of the territory was under direct federal control as is still the case now. Its governor, at this point Republican Scott C. Bone, was not elected, but a presidential appointee. Neither Bone nor any of his predecessors were actually from Alaska.

Harding was wholeheartedly in favor of opening up Alaskan resources, but as you should be able to tell from Darling's cartoon, Darling's pro-environment sentiments led the Iowa-raised cartoonist to fear the consequences of handing those resources over to predatory interests.

Few in Alaskan business or political leadership shared Darling's trepidation. Wilson-appointed Former Gov. Thomas Riggs (D) wrote a column in the December 18, 1921 New York Times, advocating for local control "without the hampering apron strings of most of the 48 fussy old stepmothers in Washington": 

"I do not know where a constructive enterprise ends and a predatory interest begins, but I sincerely wish that a few more of one or the other were allowed to come into the Territory to open up great mines, build railroads, explore for oil and coal, establish paper plants and pay the taxes."

Sen. Harry S. New (R-IN), Chair of the Senate Committee on Territories, authored a bill on November 8, 1921 to provide for the transfer from Agriculture to Interior of oil and coal mining leases, national forest reservations, ranger stations and lighthouses. Testifying before Senator New's committee, Secretary Fall, previously a Senator from New Mexico, boasted that he had in fact been the one to write New's bill:

"I discussed the matter with the President. His policy toward developing Alaska and my bill for coordination was introduced in accordance with his ideals."

Testifying against the New/Fall bill's provisions to put Alaska's forests under the authority of the Interior Department, Chief U.S. Forester Col. W.B. Greeley argued that no economy would be achieved by such a move. 

Rep. Charles F. Curry (R-CA), Chair of the House Committee on Territories, put forth a House bill similar to Senator New's on December 22. By then, however, New had tabled his Senate bill, reasoning that he, Fall, and President Harding should first visit the Alaskan territory the next summer.

Harding didn't get around to making that visit until July, 1923, and died before making it back to Washington D.C.

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By the way, "Sec. Wallace" in Darling's cartoon is Secretary of Agriculture Henry C. Wallace, the father of Henry A. Wallace, Secretary of Agriculture and Vice President under Franklin Roosevelt, and Progressive Party presidential nominee in 1948.

Q Toon: Conveyor Pete

Congratulations to Pete and Chasten Buttigieg, who announced over the weekend that they have become the proud parents of newborns Penelope Rose and Joseph August Buttigieg.

Photos show each father holding an infant in his arm, so we're pretty sure they didn't pick two names for one child to choose from later. 

Q Toon: Ric's Place

You may never have heard of Richard Grenell, but he has shown up in my cartoons a few times by virtue of his being gay. Religious Right-wingers pressured Mitt Romney to drop him as a foreign policy adviser during Romney's 2012 presidential run. More recently, he has been behind the Trump administration's lip service to LGBTQ issues, at least as far as asking foreign countries to be less homophobic is concerned.

Trump named Grenell as his Ambassador to Germany in September, 2017; he took office the following April. He promptly irked his German hosts by adopting Trump's propensity for Twitter and decidedly undiplomatic language, tweeting in his first day at work a demand for German companies to stop doing business with Iran.

He has weighed in on domestic politics in Germany and elsewhere, praising xenophobic ultra-right-wingers such as Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurtz and Germany's Alternative für Deutschland Party, and criticizing moderates and liberals including German President Angela Merkel.

On February 10, Trump named Grenell as Acting Director of National Intelligence, replacing Acting Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire, who fell afoul of the Corrupt Trump Administration when a subordinate briefed the House Intelligence Committee on Russia's efforts to get Trump reelected. As an "Acting" Director, Grenell bypasses the need for Senate confirmation; he can continue in office until March 11, or, if a permanent Director is nominated before then, until that person takes over.

The Corrupt Trump Administration is riddled with "Acting" officials. Mick Mulvaney has been "Acting" Chief of Staff since January 2, 2019. The Department of Homeland Security has been led by a series of "Acting" Secretaries since April of last year.

Trump has had an acting head of the Small Business Administration for 277 days, which is about one-quarter of his presidency. He’s had one in charge of the Environmental Protection Agency for 234 days, or about 20 percent. The Defense Department has been run by an acting head for 203 days, and the directorate of national intelligence is now at 188 days and counting. Four other Cabinet jobs — attorney general, interior secretary, Veterans Affairs secretary and Health and Human Services secretary — have all had at least 99 days of acting control.

It took seven months for the Senate to confirm Grenell as Ambassador to Germany. Since Trump believes, and the Republican Senate has acquiesced, "I have the right to do whatever I want," don't expect anything to deter Trump from keeping Grenell on as aDNI until the day finally arrives that we become a constitutional republic again.

I only hope I live to see it.

Silence of the Sams

I had planned to save these cartoons for this summer, but after Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Ben Carson's stunning performance in front of Congress this week, now seems to be a good time for Scamback Saturday to remember one of his predecessors at the department.

Samuel Pierce was Secretary of HUD from 1981 to 1989.  Pierce had the distinction of being the only African-American in Ronald Reagan's cabinet, and the only cabinet official to serve in the same post for all eight years of Reagan's presidency.

Several HUD Secretaries have been former mayors or otherwise professionally involved in urban renewal. But like Ben Carson, Pierce had no such experience before Reagan named him to the job. Also like Ben Carson, Pierce was African-American, the Republican euphemism for which is "urban," an area the increasingly exurban and rural Republican Party could hardly care less about. If a Republican president has to have one Black person in the cabinet just for appearances sake, he might as well be Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, even if his field of expertise is brain surgery and he's totally unfamiliar with real estate jargon.

Unlike Carson, however, Sam Pierce at least had ample subcabinet-level experience, starting out in Eisenhower's Department of Labor and later as general counsel to Nixon's Treasury Department. But the tenure of "Silent Sam" at HUD was so low-key that when he and the president who appointed him attended a U.S. Conference of Mayors luncheon, Reagan thought Pierce was one of the mayors.

I'm not kidding.

Chuck Stone, a black editor at the Philadelphia Daily News and longtime acquaintance of Pierce, says the Secretary “has the three B’s Republicans like—brilliance, blackness and blandness. Republicans don’t like audacious blacks.”

It was only after Pierce was gone that an investigation by the U.S. Office of the Independent Counsel uncovered mismanagement and political favoritism in HUD dating from his first days on the job.

UW-Milwaukee Post, July 25, 1989

Despite a pledge during his Senate confirmation hearings to ''sever'' his ties to his former New York law firm, Samuel R. Pierce Jr. regularly did personal favors for his former colleagues and interceded with subordinates in the Department of Housing and Urban Development on their behalf, documents from his office files show.

While there is no indication that the former Secretary broke any law barring conflicts of interest or directed subordinates to act improperly, Representative Tom Lantos, Democrat of California, said the documents raised ''additional questions about Secretary Pierce's management at H.U.D.''  ...

Ethics lawyers at H.U.D. said Mr. Pierce's agreement to sever ties with the firm did not bar him from all dealings with it. And lawyers at the Office of Government Ethics said that to prove a criminal violation against an official like Mr. Pierce, a prosecutor would have to demonstrate that he personally and substantially took part in a matter affecting his former firm. 

Investigators also uncovered several cases in which outside agents managing the foreclosure of properties on behalf of HUD, instead of subtracting their management fees and turning the rest of the proceeds over to HUD, were pocketing the entire proceeds and never filing the paperwork. Contracts went to politically connected landlords and developers, funneling money to the campaigns of a number of politicians.

Drawn for an edition of the Post that wasn't published

As the scandals came to light, Pierce claimed that HUD was too big for him to follow individual programs, and he threw his chief aide, Deborah Gore Dean under the bus. She and others on Pierce's staff would be convicted on various felony charges, but Pierce himself was never charged with any criminal activity.

UW-Parkside Ranger, September 28, 1989

Now, I have to caution that there was never any connection between the shenanigans at HUD and the Iran-Contra scandal.

But one familiar name from the Corrupt Trump Administration pops up in those 30-year-old reports.

As one particular scam involving conversion of some abandoned World War II era internment facilities for Japanese-Americans into apartment dwellings was reported in Newsweek in 1989:

The moving force in the project was Paul Manafort, a Reagan campaign consultant in 1980 who later diversified into lobbying and power brokering. When a friend told him the ancient housing project was for sale, Manafort sounded out Deborah Gore Dean, Pierce's chief aide, and got informal encouragement that he could get a rehabilitation contract. Through another crony, he persuaded New Jersey officials to apply for a grant; with two associates, he formed CFM Development Corp. and bought the project for $4.4 million. HUD promptly approved the project, providing $5 million in construction funds and guaranteeing rent subsidies totaling $31.1 million over 15 years. CFM hired Manafort's firm, Black, Manafort, Stone & Kelly [okay, more than one familiar name there!] to keep the wheels greased at HUD, paying it a consultant's fee of $326,000. The rent subsidies guaranteed an operating profit, but the program offered a second bonanza in the form of $11 million worth of tax credits. ...
Mayor Bruce Peterson of Upper Deerfield Township, N.J., called the project "a horrible waste of the taxpayers' money." It was imposed on the community as a fait accompli, he testified; the housing wasn't needed, the buildings were too old and shabby, the work being done was shoddy and the subsidized rents were way above local standards.

✍

These four cartoons about Samuel Pierce are the most I've ever drawn about any Secretary of HUD. The only other HUD Secretary I've ever cartooned was Jack Kemp, who comes in second place, and only because he's in that second cartoon about Pierce. Which never got published until now, so it shouldn't even count.

UW-Parkside Ranger, November 2, 1989

On the other hand, Kemp did appear in at least one of my cartoons when he was Republican Vice Presidential nominee in 1996. For that matter, I've drawn Carson in at least three cartoons, but as a 2016 presidential candidate.

Since the ratio of verbiage to cartoons in this post is weighted too heavily to the former, here's one of those Carson cartoons.

Stacking the Triskaidekaitis

I first drew about the appointment of Roger Severino to the civil rights office of Health and Human Services last March. Severino, previously a lobbyist for the right-wing Heritage Foundation, has been an agitator against marriage equality and the treating transgender persons with any humanity or respect.

“On the basis of religious teachings, moral reasoning, scientific evidence, and medical experience, many have strong grounds to hold that one’s sex is an immutable characteristic,” Severino and a co-author wrote in a Heritage Foundation report in January 2016. “Many involved in providing medical care and those enrolled in health insurance plans have serious objections to participating in or paying for sex-reassignment surgeries or gender transitions.”

Last week, Severino announced the creation of a "Conscience and Religious Freedom Division" within his office

to ensure that health care providers are allowing workers to opt out of procedures when they have religious or moral objections. The new division would be a third, co-equal branch with the office's existing two divisions that focus on federal civil rights laws and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act.

Severino and his Conscience and Religious Freedom ("Condom" for short) Division will come to the defense of America's beleaguered and persecuted Christian minority, ensuring that Christian health care workers will no longer be forced to violate their fundamental religious beliefs. No more will Baptist podiatrists be transferred to the Abortion Unit. Catholic pharmacists will no longer have to fill morning-after pill prescriptions for divorcees. Pentecostal dishwashers in the hospital cafeteria need not live in fear of transgender visitors asking them for directions to the ladies' room — wait, you say that's not the problem?

But longtime HHS officials say that the existing civil rights office was more than capable of handling these issues and that creating an entire division to focus on religious liberty sends the wrong message.
"This is a classic solution in search of a problem," said one official who's handled civil rights issues at HHS. "And it’s a problem that doesn’t really exist, because hospitals tend to be really compliant on this kind of stuff."
During the Obama administration, evangelical groups had even hailed HHS for its efforts to enforce religious freedom, such as intervening in a lawsuit filed by an anti-abortion nurse against Mount Sinai Health System in New York.

But if you thought my examples were silly, go back and read that excerpt from Severino's Heritage Foundation report again.

"[T]hose enrolled in health insurance plans have serious objections to ... paying for sex-reassignment surgeries or gender transitions"?

If you think about what Severino is saying there, it's that anyone paying for health insurance ought to have the right to object to somebody else's health care.

Just because your faith leads you to abstain from pork doesn't mean you have a right to stop your health insurance company from covering someone else's hospital visit for trichinosis.

You may have a religious commitment to pacifism, but you don't get to sue to get your premiums back if your insurance company pays for a veteran's PTSD treatment.

And if your god tells you to be vigilant against transgender cooties but your insurance company pays for the estrogen treatments of someone on the other side of town, tough. It's none of your damned business.

Meet Mr. Mnuchin

It's time for another installment of Meet Your Cabinet!

Sixth in line in the presidential order of succession is Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin. Mnuchin, 54, followed his father in the mortgage department at Goldman Sachs, becoming a partner there in 1994. He left in 2002, managing hedge funds and heading the residential lender OneWest, as well as founding a film production company, RatPac-Dune Entertainment.

An early supporter of Donald Joffrey Trump's 2016 presidential campaign, Mnuchin accepted Trump's offer to be the national finance chairman of his campaign last April, after Trump had won the New York Republican primary. Up to that point, the Trump campaign had not set up a large-scale fund raising drive; Mnuchin set to work creating and managing one.

In spite of Trump's campaign attacks on the banking industry (an ad charged Goldman Sachs of having "robbed the working class"), Mnuchin joined the Trump administration, along with fellow Goldman Sachs alums Steve Bannon, Gary Cohn, Dina Powell, Eric Ueland, and appointees up and down the Securities and Exchange Commission.

In August, Mnuchin came under scrutiny for his use of government aircraft after his wife, Louise Linton, posted a selfie on Instagram showing her deplaning a government jet in Kentucky in time to see the solar eclipse. Mnuchin denied that the solar eclipse had anything to do with the trip, saying "People in Kentucky took it [the solar eclipse] very seriously. Being a New Yorker, I don't have any interest in watching the eclipse."

An investigation by the Treasury Department's Office of the Inspector General subsequently found that Mnuchin had requested a military jet for his honeymoon travel to Europe in June. The OIG investigation also showed Mnuchin had taken a USAF C-37A to return from New York to Washington on August 15 after flying to New York commercially. Mnuchin's return flight lasted less than an hour and had an operating cost of at least $25,000.

Mnuchin has reimbursed the government for the definitely-non-eclipse-viewing flight, and has defended the honeymoon flight on the grounds that he needed access to secure communications during that trip. But a pattern is emerging of Trump cabinet officials who seem unable to accomplish anything without a five-figure government plane trip involved.

Resign and Replace

Six members of the Presidential Advisory Commission on HIV/AIDS (PACHA) resigned en bloc on June 16 to protest the Trump administration's disregard of their concerns. They announced their resignation in an open letter in Newsweek magazine. (A seventh PACHA member, Dr. Jeffrey Akman, has also resigned, although without public explanation.)

As one of the six, Dr. Michelle Ogle explained to Steve Inskeep on National Public Radio:

OGLE: Since the inauguration, the first thing that happened that was a clue — the Office of National AIDS Policy website was removed. And to our knowledge at this point, that website has not been restored. Also, we've made attempts to communicate with this administration. We sent a letter to Secretary Price and to Mr. Trump to basically let them know what the advisory council does, our goals, how we want to — you know, hope to work with them. And we've just gotten nothing but a very lackluster response from the administration.
INSKEEP: OK. Let's make sure we're clear here. Is it that he doesn't care about the issue or just that he's not listening to your advice?
OGLE: No, he doesn't care about the issue. The budget proposal that he sent forward shows that he doesn't care about the issue. Also, the American Health Care Act, the bill that he's put forward that they celebrated in the Rose Garden with, shows that he doesn't care.

The commission was formed by President Bill Clinton in 1995 and renewed by George W. Bush and HHS Secretary Tommy G. Thompson in July of 2001.  Some 17 or 18 members of the commission remain, and, given the corrupt Trump administration's disinterest, one wonders who, if anyone, will fill the empty chairs now.

Trump couldn't even be bothered to tweet out a 140-characters-or-less congratulatory message for LGBTQ pride month, for crying out loud. He left that apparently onerous duty to daughter Ivanka, who is perhaps the closest thing to an LGBTQ ally in Daddy's administration as there is ever likely to be.

Okay, so it wasn't Jared and Ivanka's wedding planner whom Daddy hired to head Region II of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. It was Eric and Lara Trump's wedding planner whom Daddy hired to head Region II of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

She’s arranged tournaments at Trump golf courses, served as the liaison to the Trump family during his presidential campaign, and even arranged Eric Trump’s wedding.

Now President Trump has appointed longtime loyalist Lynne Patton — who has zero housing experience and claims a law degree the school [Quinnipiac University School of Law] says she never earned — to run the office that oversees federal housing programs in New York.

The sum total of housing or urban development experience in Ms. Patton's résumé is found in her five — count 'em on one hand: five — months as HUD's Director of Public Engagement from January to June, 2017.

But she's black, just like HUD Secretary Ben Carson, the neurosurgeon who by some amazing coincidence also has zero experience in housing or urban development. I don't know if that means that Trump doesn't have any white friends willing to work in the department, or if he thinks that Urban=Black and Those People are all interchangeable anyway.

So that's how I feel about the Trumps. They're all pretty interchangeable.

But I probably need to figure out how I want to draw Eric, and, for that matter, Donald Jr.  As long as the U.S. of A. is a wholly owned subsidiary branch of Trump Enterprises Inc., it makes more sense to be familiar with the people who are really in charge — as opposed to those titular heads of cabinet departments.

Cough And the World Coughs With You

“At what point does America get demeaned? At what point do they start laughing at us as a country? We want fair treatment for its citizens and we want fair treatment for our taxpayers. We don’t want other leaders and other countries laughing at us any more, and they won’t be. They won’t be.” — Trump

Continuing his administration's War on the Environment, Donald Joffrey Trump made it official on Thursday: the United States will withdraw from the Paris Climate Accord in order to keep Pittsburgh's citizens hard at work in the coal mines. Having singlehandedly saved the Clean Coal biz, Mr. Trump can now turn his attention to loosening the regulations that are stifling our very, very fabulous alchemy industry, and rescuing the jobs of all those seamstresses spinning straw into gold.

After an exhaustive examination of every tittle and jot of the Accord, Mr. Trump has discovered that it requires the United States to be the one and only country making the sacrifices necessary to keep this world inhabitable. And he will have none of that. If he has to, Trump will bring those melting glaciers to the negotiating table at Mar-A-Lago himself and hammer out an agreement to make global temperatures even better than they are today.

Plus tax cuts.

I've Got a Little List

Mick Mulvaney, Office of Management and Budget

As someday it may happen that a victim must be found,
    I’ve got a little list – I’ve got a little list
Of societal expenses who might well be underground,
    And who never would be missed – who never would be missed!
There's the students who eat breakfast at their schoolhouse every day —
    And the oldsters who get meals on wheels — what bloody use are they?
All writers and musicians and artists of all kinds —
    All teachers dedicated to expanding little minds —
The veteran, the ranger and the foreign analyst —
    They'd none of 'em be missed — they'd none of 'em be missed!

You may put 'em on the list — you may put 'em on the list;
And they'll none of 'em be missed — they'll none of 'em be missed!

Calumnated Ruins Domino

I started this week with a caricature of Donald Joffrey Trump's head of the Environmental Plunder Administration. Now that the administration has released its budget proposal cutting EPA funding by nearly a third, let's end the week with a Sierraback Saturday retrospective of the Trump gang's model for environmental policy. My cartoons below date from December, 1981 to July, 1984.

"I know Teddy Kennedy had fun at the Democratic convention when he said that I said that trees and vegetation caused 80% of the air pollution in this country. ... Well now, he was a little wrong about what I said. I didn't say 80%. I said 92%—93%, pardon me. And I didn’t say air pollution, I said oxides of nitrogen. Growing and decaying vegetation in this land are responsible for 93% of the oxides of nitrogen. ... If we are totally successful and can eliminate all the manmade oxides of nitrogen, we’ll still have 93% as much as we have in the air today." —Ronald Reagan, Oct. 9, 1980. (The 1979 quotation Kennedy was referring to: "The American Petroleum Institute filed suit against the EPA [and] charged that the agency was suppressing a scientific study for fear it might be misinterpreted... The suppressed study reveals that 80 percent of air pollution comes not from chimneys and auto exhaust pipes, but from plants and trees." —RR)

Republicans have long had a receptive ear for industrialist complaints that any attempt to protect the nation's air, water, forests, and purple mountain majesties are a job-killing, profit-choking nuisance. While Ronald Reagan's first budget cut funding for the EPA by 25%, it is useful to remember that the agency was established by a Republican president.

My cartoon above imagines that president phoning from his beachfront San Clemente estate to complain about Interior Secretary James Watt's plan to to lease a billion acres of offshore oil fields to petroleum interests.

Watt's fire sale of federal lands and waters also benefited the coal industry and suburban sprawl. Meanwhile, Anne Gorsuch, later Burford, his first head of the EPA (as discussed here a few weeks ago, now that her son is poised to claim Merrick Garland's seat on the Supreme Court), was happy to ignore pollution of the nation's air and water in the interest of protecting commercial profit margins. When scandal forced her resignation, the Reagan administration tapped the first administrator of the EPA, William Ruckelshaus, to return to the agency's helm.

Contrary to my cartoon, Ruckelshaus is generally credited with restoring public confidence the EPA, staffing the agency with competent personnel committed to its original mission. In a later interview since removed from the EPA's web page, Ruckelshaus said, "At EPA, you work for a cause that is beyond self-interest and larger than the goals people normally pursue. You're not there for the money, you're there for something beyond yourself."

James Watt's mission to make sure there was no speck of nature left unspoiled when the Lord returned was foiled by his uncanny knack for making inappropriate statements in public. He snarked that there are two kinds of people in this country, "liberals and Americans"; described Native American tribal rights as "socialism"; and banned the Beach Boys from the Washington D.C. Fourth of July celebration because they would "attract the wrong element."

He might have had a point if the Beach Boys had continued making hallucinogenic music in the mold of Smile. As it was, Watt was forced to back down and apologize. Turns out, Reagan liked the Beach Boys.

The last straw was his claim that his sale of more than a billion tons of coal from federal lands in Wyoming was above criticism because on his federal coal commission "I have a black, a woman, two Jews and a cripple. And we have talent."

A friend and colleague of mine at the UW-Parkside Ranger, Rick Luehr, satirized Watt's remark with his Hallowe'en costume that year, donning a wig, blackface, and fake breasts covered by a pair of mogen Davids. The wheelchair was already a part of his daily life.

Aside from providing the template for Donald Trump's Twitter habit, Watt pushed genuinely destructive policies that now find favor in the Very Famous Trump White House. Unlike today, however, Watt faced a Congress willing to push back:

Watt's earlier forays included a declaration that he would open wilderness areas in the West to drillers and miners. Congress put a stop to it: the House voted 350 to 58 to withdraw wilderness lands from mineral development. Fifty-two senators cosponsored similar legislation. Watt also proposed a major dilution of the Endangered Species Act and asked Congress to hold off its review of the law. Congress ignored him and renewed the law without significant weakening amendments.

He was replaced by a long-time friend of the President, jack-of-all-trades William Clark.

Clark's crowning achievement in his two years at Interior was keeping himself out of the headlines. The policies instituted under Watt continued, but without the media-eye-catching bluster and bombast.

Scott Pruittpen

Today's cabinet portrait: Scott Pruitt, Donald Joffrey Trump's head of the Environmental Protection Administration Pre-Apocalypse.