The Best People

April 22, 2019
The Trump Administration is wallowing in the swamp instead of draining it, according to this partisan exposé. Yahoo News correspondent Nazaryan decries the corruption, incompetence, and misrule of President Trump’s cabinet-level appointments, calling them a “low-class orgy of first-class kleptocrats.” Much of the book rehashes their venality: Cabinet secretaries Tom Price (Health), Ryan Zinke (Interior), and Steve Mnuchin (Treasury) spent hundreds of thousands of dollars of taxpayer money for dubious junkets on private jets and military aircraft; HUD chief Ben Carson dropped $31,000 on office furniture; EPA administrator Scott Pruitt overspent lavishly on bodyguards and armored SUVs, then had government employees help him with personal errands. Nazaryan’s graver argument is that the administration has crippled government agencies by undermining bureau experts, staffing them with ex-lobbyists and subordinating them to industries they oversee, all to advance the Republican deregulatory agenda. In keeping with the overall outraged tone, he treats every axed regulation as equally problematic without considering their relative importance or the controversies surrounding them; this is more a blanket condemnation than a nuanced consideration of each case. Readers seeking a substantive politicohistorical analysis of the administration’s effects might prefer Michael Lewis’s The Fifth Risk, but furious left-leaning readers seeking Trump-related schadenfreude will thrill to this takedown.

May 1, 2019
A disheartening portrait of the alternately incompetent and corrupt Cabinet of the current administration. In his scathing critique, Yahoo News national affairs correspondent Nazaryan (co-author: Children of the Dream: Why School Integration Works, 2019, etc.) shows clearly how Donald Trump, with his "intentionally nonlinear presidency," established a Cabinet consisting of crucially inexperienced individuals in public service, each remarkably unqualified to assume key pivotal decision-making roles in politics. In an assembly both "overwhelmingly male, and overwhelmingly old," each member was lauded for their elite status and financial worth and, to the author, "wealth that was tacky and vulgar, wealth desperate for recognition, wealth that could only have been an insult to the average citizens whose tribune Trump vowed to be in Washington." Nazaryan provides glaring examples of the rampant conflicts of interests and ethical red flags by meticulously detailing the head-scratching nomination hearings of Betsy DeVos, a fundamentalist conservative Christian with a skewed view of an education official's priorities; Steve Mnuchin, secretary of the Treasury, who filed false financial asset disclosures upon his appointment; Rick Perry, the Department of Energy secretary who was blatantly unsure of what his position actually governed; wealthy investor-cum-commerce secretary Wilbur Ross; and Department of Housing and Urban Development nominee Ben Carson, who lacked any governmental or federal agency experience whatsoever. While this type of bureaucratic runaway train is not news to political watchdogs, the author manages to put a fresh spin on a dire situation with snarky humor and wince-inducing facts, though his intense contempt at times borders on unnecessary mudslinging. While he also identifies countless other impurities infiltrating the political stream--Priebus, Pruitt, Spicer, Bannon et al.--thankfully, he balances these out by documenting how imprudence and circumstance caught up to the pack and an incremental exodus ensued. Many others surprisingly remain in power, and Nazaryan is pleased to call out the remaining political "backbenchers of public and private life" whose tenures continue to crumble beneath the weight of unmet expectations. A dizzying, tragicomic crash course in contemporary political incapacities.

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