The Difference In Education Between Trump & Obama’s Cabinets Is Staggering
While there are no educational or professional restrictions barring our citizens from serving the public as part of a presidential administration, traditionally Presidents opt to choose the highest-qualified men and women for important positions, while usually being well-learned themselves. No longer is that the case. Trump and his administration are without a doubt the most wildly unqualified team to ever darken the door of the White House.
It should ring all sorts of alarm bells when you realize that the most educated man on the Trump staff is the sole black man, Dr. Ben Carson, who is a skilled surgeon but whose religious extremism clouds his muddled judgment. Trump himself will be the first president in 25 years to not have a graduate degree of any kind, and his proud ignorance has already become a major source of contention in national security circles.
The rest of his team is largely horrendously unqualified to run the departments they have been given control of.
The new Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos, has billions of dollars but just a bachelor’s degree from Calvin College. The current Secretary of Education, John King Jr., “has a B.A. from Harvard, a master’s degree and doctorate from Columbia, and a law degree from Yale.”
The Department of Energy will now be run by former Texas Governor and Dancing With The Stars washout Rick Perry, who famously couldn’t remember the name of the department he wanted to abolish and will now run. Perry has a bachelor’s degree in Animal Science from Texas A&M and failed his college chemistry courses. He will be replacing Ernest Moniz, who is a Nobel Prize-winning nuclear physicist with a PhD from Stanford University.
Secretary of State John Kerry graduated from Yale with a degree in political science, has a J.D. from Boston College Law School, served in the Vietnam War, and spent two decades in Congress on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He will be replaced by Rex Tillerson, who has a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering from the University of Texas at Austin and was the president of Boy Scouts of America before becoming the CEO of Exxon-Mobil.
Secretary of the Treasury Jack Lew has an A.B. from Harvard College and a J.D. from Georgetown University Law Center and has worked in government since the 1970s as well as in the private sector. He will be replaced by Steve Mnuchin, who received an undergraduate degree from Yale before being handed a cushy job at Goldman Sachs by his father. He then created his own company which kicked 37,000 Americans out of their homes during the Great Recession.
The current head of the Environmental Protection Agency is Gina McCarthy, a longtime environmental administrator with a Master of Science in Environmental Health Engineering and Planning and Policy from Tufts University. She will be replaced by Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt, who has a J.D.but whose only experience with environmental science is suing the government to prevent the implementation of the Clean Air & Water Act.
The current head of the Small Business Administration is Maria Contreras-Sweet, who has a BA from California State University but then made a name for herself founding a commercial bank focusing on small to mid-sized businesses in the Latino community and was the California Secretary of Business, Transportation, and Housing. She will be replaced by Linda McMahon, who has a East Carolina University bachelor’s degree in French and is mostly known for riding the coattails of her wealthy husband while they managed the “small business” known as the World Wide Wrestling Federation. She recieved her cabinet position in exchange for donating $6 million to the Trump campaign.
Trump has staffed his administration with the wealthy and the connected, rewarding megadonors and appointed GOP sycophants to run departments they want to abolish. The smoothness and talent with which our nation was guided over the past eight years has all been taken for granted; now we shall truly see what happens when the captain of the Titanic and all of his mates are drunk at the wheel.
h/t to Shaun King @ NY Daily News
