Jon Stewart thinks the media might be “missing the mark” on why Donald Trump has decided to choose the nominees he has to fill up his second-term Cabinet.
For Trump, it’s not a “downside” that his Cabinet picks “will not be sufficient stewards of these agencies,” Stewart said on the latest episode of his Weekly Show podcast. The point is that they are trying to “dismantle” the agencies themselves.
“When we say, I don’t think that Linda McMahon will be an efficient steward of the Department of Education, it’s like, right, she’s not there to do that,” he continued. “She’s there to help like dismantle it in the same way that RFK Jr. is there to dismantle HHS.”
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In the case of McMahon, former CEO of WWE, Trump has explicitly said he wants to kill the department she would run. “One other thing I’ll be doing very early in the administration is closing up the Department of Education in Washington D.C., and sending all education and education work and needs back to the states,” the president-elect said in a video last year. “We want them to run the education of our children because they’ll do a much better job of it.”
Ultimately, Stewart pointed the finger at Democrats for failing to reform the massive bureaucracies. “They didn’t do it and they weren’t able to do it efficiently and they weren’t able to do it agilely,” he said.
“These picks are there to do exactly what the Trump voters wanted them to do,” he concluded. “And in a large degree, a lot of Democratic voters have been begging the Democrats to do, which is get out of this status quo, institutional thinking and make government more responsive and agile if you can.”
