Cabinet of the Absurd
Name That Brown Nose
The most unqualified Cabinet in American history assembled on April 29 to heap the sort of praise usually spewed only in Pyongyang on their very-stable-genius generalissimo.
A couple of the slobbering officials often in the news have monikers that seem to have stuck (asterisk-ed), but see if you can do better than the ones below. Send us suggestions. The prize: We’ll hire you a lawyer if you get sent to El Salvador.
Barbie Bondi*
The Attorney General, whose distinguished resume includes letting Jeffrey Epstein off the hook when she was Florida’s chief legal officer, is almost 60 but still goes for the retro-doll look. That makes it especially hard to take the distinguished graduate of Stetson School of Law, ranked 99th out of 100 law schools, too seriously. Her role is mostly performative and perfunctory: For example, the onetime lobbyist for Qatar ignored legal and ethical issues and blessed “Trump’s acceptance of a luxury Boeing 747-8 plane upgraded to serve as Air Force One donated by the Qatari royal family,” as Glenn Thrush of The New York Times wrote Monday.Bend-Over Bessent
The Treasury Secretary is actually highly qualified, which makes his pandering even more revolting. He did reportedly have a hissy fit and called out Elon Musk right outside the Oval Office for persuading the President to appoint a DOGE stooge to run the IRS. Bessent eventually triumphed. So that’s a ribbon in his Southern bonnet, but….Tou-louse Rubio
Size does matter in the White House: Why else would Trump claim to be 6’3” when he’s rapidly squashing down from maybe 6’2”? But the President’s diminutive, 2016 GOP primary rival is fast-becoming his MiniMe.Juice Hegseth
The former Fox News weekend host and wasted “warrior” hound dog now commanding the defense of America says he’s off the sauce. A lot of people would raise a glass if he were off the job. Isn’t there a less critical place for him in the Administration? Maybe RFK Jr., another push-up freak, could turn him into a healthcare commando and have him run a Special Ops squad that knocks off Big Pharma execs, a la Luigi “Pretty Boy” Mangione. That might play well with everyone in America who has ever had anything more serious than the sniffles and tried to get their health insurance to pay for it.Lutnick the Stupnik
Howard Lutnick made a fortune as head of financial firm Cantor Fitzgerald, which was decimated by the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center, but he has long been derided and despised on the Street. As Commerce Secretary, he is now free to spread his inanities across America. Maybe one reason there were so many other dim bulbs flickering at the Cabinet table is that Lutnick, co-chair of Trump’s Transition Committee, had a hand in hiring them.The ICE Queen*
Former South Dakota Governor and storied pooch dispatcher Kristi Noem must have loved dress-up games as a kid. The married mother of three, now a grandmother reportedly playing hide-the-.357 Magnum with the too-toxic-for-Trump political operative Corey Lewandowski, likes to prance around in a flak jacket and brandish an assault weapon — comically — while rounding up other people’s children. It’s a tight race with Princeton grad Juice Hegseth and Lutnick the Stupnik in the running, but Noem might be the dumbest member of the Cabinet: As Governor, she once signed off on a drug awareness campaign whose tagline was: “Meth: We’re on it.”Homan the Barbarian
Not a Cabinet member but Tom Homan, Noem’s deportation enforcer, deserves a shout-out. As mentioned here before, Tom’s a dees-and-dontzer with all the charm of a barroom bully (he didn’t get that vein-y schnoz drinking milk). Big Tom is also Roman Catholic and, so he says, a frequent Mass-goer. As one of his first acts, Pope Leo XIV should send a message to pious goons like Homan and Catholic convert JD Vance, whom the Pontiff reportedly rebuked when he was a cardinal: Start acting like Christians.RFKookie
Unlike other members of the Cabinet, health czar Robert F. Kennedy Jr. isn’t a simpering Trump toad, but he shares one overarching trait with his boss: He is a dangerous egotist who is incapable of admitting that he’s wrong. RFK is a lot of things: traitor to his family legacy, reckless embracer of falsehoods, dead-bear jokester, and, as he revealed in a post on X last Sunday, an enthusiast of the rare aquatic pastime unsynchronized septic swimming.Tulsi Gabbardirovich
Perhaps the weirdest occupant of a seat at the Cabinet table was the conspiracy theorist, cult follower, onetime Bernie Sanders supporter, Bashear al Assad apologist, faux Pacific Islander, and quasi-pacifistic Reserve Army light-bird colonel Tulsi Gabbard. As the Director of National Intelligence, Gabbard is supposed to oversee eighteen agencies protecting the country from insidious foreign actors. That’s an odd job to give a bootlicker of Russian tyrant Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin.A-1 McMoron
Linda McMahon, the Education Secretary whose job is to dismantle the Education Department, isn’t really that dense even if she recently and repeatedly referred to artificial intelligence as “A-1” instead of AI. She was the brains behind World Wrestling Entertainment, the spectacle-on-steroids she built with husband Vince before assuming the persona of a respectable, wealthy Connecticut matron. A-1 is a major Trump donor and along with Lutnick the Stupnik headed the President’s Transition Committee. She has zero education credentials, but it’s understandable that she snagged any job she could in Washington: Linda has a mess at home (more on that soon).Achtung! Miller
Stephen Miller also isn’t in the Cabinet — yet — but the White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy is said to have his eye on the National Security Adviser prize. Miller, whose forbears immigrated from what is now Belarus in the early 1900s, is a viciously anti-immigrant White supremacist and propagandist with the lean-coyote look of Joseph Goebbels, the mouthpiece of the Third Reich. If the Trump Second Reich has a face of evil, it’s Miller’s mug.The Sperm Whale
Elon Musk, who isn’t a Cabinet member but was running the country as DOGE dictator until the Sun God thought he was rocketing too high, is not a subtle man. As Edward Luce wrote in The Financial Times, when it was Musk’s turn to fawn, he said: “I think this could be the greatest administration since the founding of the country.” (Barf!) Thankfully, the not-so-stable genius who has driven Tesla into a wall of shame, is back working in the EV’s Texas repair shop and trying to impregnate Austin.