President Donald Trump’s open hostility to the functioning of federal government has been painfully obvious for months.
Trump appointed the fossil-fuel industry’s favorite, Scott Pruitt, to run the Environmental Protection Agency, which Pruitt sued 14 times as attorney general of Oklahoma. Trump picked Rick Perry to head the Department of Energy, an agency Perry pledged to eliminate but couldn’t remember the name of in his infamous 2011 presidential debate debacle.
And Trump named Betsy DeVos as his education secretary, despite her career spent bankrolling efforts to privatize the public school system she never attended.
The list goes on. Most recently, Trump’s nominee to run the EPA’s chemical safety division was forced to withdraw when his track record as a researcher-for-hire for pesticide and flame-retardant manufacturers proved too toxic for even some Senate Republicans.