We rely on experts. Trump fears them and keeps them out of government | Opinion

No matter where we go in our daily lives and with whom we interact, we expect expertise to rule the relationship. It may be a trip to the dry cleaners, a visit to a restaurant or an appointment at the doctor’s office. We presume that those offering services or providing care know what they are doing. They are trained and experienced in their respective specialty.

When it comes to the highest levels of our government in President Donald Trump’s second term, any claim of expertise is highly overrated. Trump’s appointments require two important qualifications, and neither is expertise. He demands extreme loyalty to him instead of the Constitution. But he also talks regularly about how an appointment of his came out of central casting. The performance of a Fox TV host now merits an appointment to a key federal post. This reality TV president’s limited capacity for acuity can process only simple performance, with intellectual capacity hardly considered.

Trump’s reliance on Fox News, which he seems to use as his human resource department, is mind-boggling. He has appointed at least 23 former Fox News staff to high-level posts in his administration, and most lack significant expertise related to their assignment.

Trump himself has modeled this disdain for expertise. Just think back to the end of Trump’s first term when the COVID pandemic hit, and he suggested injecting disinfectants to kill COVID. And now his second administration is loaded to the gills with Cabinet officers and staff who assumed their positions knowing very little about what they are supposedly in charge of administering.

Right out of the chute, National Security Director Mike Waltz proved that his significant military service and his Fox News gig were not enough to prevent him from pulling off one of the biggest and most dangerous bonehead moves yet, when he included the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, in a Signal chat room discussing confidential military plans. Trump canned Waltz for the mishap, but it served as a precedent for what would follow, given the shallow depth of expertise of his appointments.

Republicans in Congress did not raise even a whimper of disapproval as Trump loaded up key Cabinet positions with candidates who couldn’t find their way to first base. Trump’s first administration was staffed by some who brought moral and political guardrails to his visceral and vindictive moves. Now, all bets are off, and he has found the perfect set of compliant yes-men and -women, who, like Trump, seem stripped of any deep knowledge of their areas of responsibility. And a Republican Congress, afraid to cross the MAGA line, cooperates.

Take Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, who came from Fox News. Hegseth has little or no administrative experience, but he now runs a department responsible for 3.4 million employees, including active-duty military around the globe. Like Trump, he seems focused mainly on revenge, in his case getting back at military brass above him when he was a grunt in Iraq and Afghanistan. Even his Bronze Star, which he was awarded for his service in Iraq, does not qualify as experience required for running the largest organization in the nation.

Some of Trump’s staff appointments sound like they belong in The Onion or Andy Borowitz’s fake news of the day, but unfortunately, there is nothing fake about Trump appointing a real estate developer, Steve Witkoff, as an envoy to Gaza, Ukraine and the Middle East. This is the guy who claimed Russian President Vladimir Putin is “not a bad guy” in an interview by Trump’s media pimp, Tucker Carlson. What Witkoff knows about the intricate histories of these hot spots you could put in a thimble, with room to spare.

Then there’s Secretary of Education Linda McMahon, who famously thought AI was a steak sauce. Her major claim to fame is serving as CEO of World Wrestling Entertainment, which may be the greatest example of the gulf between his appointments and the expertise required to oversee Cabinet departments. McMahon served one year on the Connecticut Board of Education, but her very limited exposure to the administration of elementary and secondary education makes her clueless in the complex disassembling of the department, retaining some functions in Washington and sending others to the states.

Meanwhile, Trump will get great seats at his favorite “sport.”

How about Kash Patel, the conspiracy theorist and now the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation? “The Daily Show” gave Patel the distinction of being the least qualified of all of Trump’s appointments, but that’s a competition with a photo finish of Trump’s dis-appointments. Patel’s main qualification for such a key appointment is his belief that the 2020 election was rigged. That will get anyone a plum appointment in Trump’s field of vision.

With Patel heading the FBI and Pam Bondi as the new attorney general, the FBI shut down several counterintelligence operations and limited the scope of the Foreign Influence Task Force, a unit that investigated foreign influence on U.S. politics, according to CyberScoop. Given Putin’s history of interfering with American elections, that’s a gift to Trump’s pal Putin, and who knows what impact cutting back on counterintelligence will have on Ukraine’s defense against Russia, since it depends on U.S. intelligence to fight off Putin.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is a perfect example of the acorn falling far away from the old oak tree. I interviewed Kennedy years ago, before that worm infected his brain. At the time, he was an environmentalist writing about the cleanup of the Hudson River. Now, as secretary of Health and Human Services, he muddies the water of vaccine science and scares the wits out of parents depending on the federal government to keep us safe from diseases like measles. Not much of a surprise given his years as a trial lawyer making millions suing vaccine manufacturers.

With no medical credentials whatsoever, Kennedy’s latest move to fire all 17 members of the panel of vaccine advisers is yet another example of the hostility toward expertise endemic in the Trump administration. He also proved himself to be a liar before Congress when he disavowed any plan to shake up vaccine science.

It’s not just the lack of expertise that is frightening about Trump’s crew of misfits that now run the federal government. It’s their willingness to follow Trump’s attempt to blow up our constitutional government and replace it with a Trump autocracy fueled by retaliation against those who applied the laws of the land to his criminal behavior.

With a Congress controlled by Republicans unwilling to challenge this abuse of presidential power, the only remaining obstacle to Trump’s singular control of the federal government is the judiciary. With a bare Supreme Court majority willing in some cases to exercise checks on Trump’s rampage across the federal government — and in some cases not — it is no exaggeration to say that American democracy is hanging on by a thread.

It’s a thread that must be strengthened in the 2026 midterm elections.