house design qualifications

so, farron, of course there's more to thisweek than just the gorsuch hearings, and the comey hearings, and the republicans' attemptto take away healthcare from millions and millions of americans. there's still actually an attempt at the administration,at the white house, to i guess arguably run a government, but it looks pretty strange. what's interesting is that nobody in the whitehouse right now, not trump, not the aides or advisors or the staffers, nobody trustsone another right now in that donald trump white house. there was an interesting story that came outfrom politico about a week and a half ago

where they talked about the fact that youhave staffers that are now afraid to even bring in their cell phones to work, becausethey don't want people going though them. they don't want, i guess, sean spicer lookingat them. this was in response ... they wanted to findout who the leakers were. well then this past week, washington postcomes out and says that the white house has decided to install aides, senior trump aides,at all of the cabinet levels of government to act as his, quote, "eyes and ears" withinthose organizations. what they're trying to do ... i don't thinkthis is so much about catching leakers at this point.

this is about making sure that everybody isloyal to donald trump, that they're not saying anything bad about him in the hallway, thatthey're completely loyal. this goes along with the fact that ... again,another story from a couple of weeks ago, they were going through facebook feeds ofpotential employees, people who had applied for jobs in the white house, making sure thatthey had never written anything unpleasant or unflattering about donald trump ... youknow? in case they were somebody from the cruz campaignor the jeb bush campaign, they were weeding those people out if they ever said anythingbad about trump. this is a man so narcissistic that he's cripplingthe government from the inside because they

can't find enough people willing to work forhim who've never criticized him. that's one of the biggest issues that we havefrom inside the actual government, other than obviously being investigated for everythingunder the sun, is the fact that nobody wants to work with this guy. nobody trusts themselves, or trusts him enough,to work for him. he doesn't trust them. look. the best word to describe this is not somethingi can say on the air without being bleeped out, but i think we understand exactly whatkind of situation we're dealing with inside

of trump's white house right now. it is an absolute disaster at every singlelevel. yeah. i think you can say "crap show." the thing to be clear on here is ... and there'sa couple of stories that are involved in this, just this one. the trump administration .... when a new administrationcomes in there's about 4,000 people that need to be staffed up, and hundreds upon hundredsof those are ones that need some type of perfunctory senate approval.

they need to be nominated, and so on. most of the top ... or i should say the cabinetpositions are filled, but in these agencies there is no middle management. there's no upper management that has beenfilled here and some have speculated that this is not just incompetence, but it's alsothere's some design to it. i think it's probably a combination of bothincompetence and design because largely speaking the white house, the trump administration,doesn't want functioning government agencies. steve bannon spoke in front of cpac, i don'tknow, a couple of weeks ago, and said explicitly that ‘our agenda is to deconstruct the administrativestate.’

what you have is sort of like top managementin these agencies, and then just people who are working, just civil servants who comein every day, but no way to communicate between those. then these people ... some of them have beenreferred to as "beachhead appointments." propublica did a great piece on these peoplewho are put in, ostensibly, for temporary positions. we don't know, depending on which agency,who has authority and who doesn't. clearly these are basically people who areput in, like some type of counter-revolutionary guard, to report back to the white house,not just spying on the civil servants who

are there but spying, like you say, on thepeople that trump has appointed to be there to make sure that they're doing their job. now understand just how unqualified thesepeople are to be at these agencies. the only qualification is they have showntheir loyalty to trump. i don't know if you ever saw that movie 'bobroberts' where timothy robins' character is followed around by these somewhat crazed,would-be brown shirts; but that's the type of people that we're talking about who areput into these agencies with no expertise, but rather just an ability to spy on thesepeople. i don't know who they report to back at thewhite house.

maybe it's reince priebus, or maybe one of... uday and qusay, when it comes to one of the trumps. i mean, who knows at this point? but this is what's going on. it's just a bizarre, almost banana-republic-style. we have reports this week: ivanka trump, whoostensibly has no job with the white house, is not only getting an office, not only gettingsecurity clearance, an ability to go in and out of these meetings ... she says that she'snot obligated to follow ethics rules, but trust her that she's going to.

i mean, this is just ... we're watching sortof the pillaging and ... these stories don't get much play, and it'sunderstandable as to why they wouldn't, farron, right? i mean, there's ... the fbi said that they'reinvestigating the president. this destruction of our government ... i mean,if somebody was to step in tomorrow i think we could recover from this. but long-term, this is a real problem. well it really is. what's interesting is that ... obviously,yeah, we have to focus on the big stories,

we have to talk about the investigations,we have to talk about all of the nonsense that's going on with the political appointments,and gorsuch, and everything else. but even if we took away any sense of scandal,any investigation ... suppose trump was operating without any baggage, nothing would still ... imean, you still wouldn't get anything done because they are so incompetent and dysfunctionalin there. i don't even know how to put it, other than... i mean ... but i think that's the point. i think the point here is there's such hostilitytowards government within his administration, and trump himself has these autocratic tendencieswhere believes that what he says should just

happen. whether it's ‘i don't like courts rulingagainst me. i don't know why i've got to go through thesebureaucracies,’ and whatnot, i mean, this guy is an autocrat. so you're right. even if we put aside all these major stories,there would be real problem here. like i say, to a certain extent it's by design. i mean, you don't cut the irs when you knowyou get a return for five or six dollars on every dollar you spend there ...

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