Fox, Henhouse, Etc.

As I have said many times, the primary qualifications for Donald Trump's cabinet is being someone eager to destroy the department one will be overseeing. And so it goes with Trump's latest nominee.

Emily Holden at the Guardian: Trump Selects Former Oil Lobbyist to Oversee Interior Department.

David Bernhardt, a former oil and gas and water lobbyist, will be nominated to run the interior department, Donald Trump tweeted.

Bernhardt was deputy secretary and has been running the department since Ryan Zinke stepped down at the end of the year. Environmental groups have accused him of making regulatory decisions on the country's natural resources to benefit industries, and he has led plans to weaken endangered species protections.

He is expected to continue the Trump administration's priorities to advance oil and gas drilling and mining on or near public land.

Of course he is.

Bernhardt has been acting secretary since Zinke flew the coop, and, in his short tenure, he has already been resoundingly criticized by "environmental groups, tribes, and others for continuing to process paperwork for oil and gas projects while other agencies were closed for routine work during this winter's partial government shutdown." Sure.

Naturally, this is the outgrowth of a conservative agenda at the center of which lies a desire to disempower the federal government. Trump is just less coy about it than most Republican presidents, caring not at all about expending the effort to conceal that destruction and malice are the objectives.

(After all, he's only got so much "executive time" and he can't waste it on pointless niceties. Cough.)

So it's not just his cabinet that gets the "fox guarding the henhouse" treatment. It's literally any position that Trump is tasked with choosing someone to fill.

Victoria Guida and Ben White at Politico: Trump Picks World Bank Skeptic to Lead Institution.

Donald Trump is expected to tap Treasury Department official David Malpass as the U.S. pick to lead the World Bank, according to senior administration officials, a clear sign the administration wants to rein in the international financial institution.

Malpass, Treasury's undersecretary for international affairs, has said global organizations like the World Bank "have grown larger and more intrusive" and "the challenge of refocusing them has become urgent and more difficult."

...The U.S. has historically been allowed to choose the head of the World Bank, although that dynamic has more recently faced pushback from other nations. Nominating someone who has been so openly critical of the bank could intensify that resistance.

Trump is a global menace. And it's an embarrassment to this nation that we continue to allow him to occupy the Oval Office, to say nothing of the fact that he's destroying the country a little bit more with every day that he's allowed to loiter there.