In an April 2, 2025 column posted on Substack, liberal economist Robert Reich attacked President Donald Trump's Cabinet as "filled with bottom-feeders, frauds, fanatics, and fools." And author/scholar Warren J. Blumenfeld had an equally scathing critique of Trump's Cabinet picks, describing them as "utterly unqualified" in an LGBTQ Nation column.
Many months later, Austin Sarat — a professor of jurisprudence and political science at Amherst College in Massachusetts — argues that Trump's Cabinet proved to be every bit as bad as Reich and Blumenfeld warned it would be.
"It is already clear that Trump's Cabinet ranks as the worst in American history," Sarat stresses in op-ed published by The Guardian on January 6. "So bad has his Cabinet’s performance been that, with less than 12 months of service, many have faced calls to resign."
The Amherst scholar goes on to cite Trump Cabinet members he considers especially bad, from Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.
"From the start of her service," Sarat observes, "(Noem) seems to have focused as much on the perks of her office as on her performance. For example, after moving into the home of the former Coast Guard commandant, where she lives rent-free, her department spent more than $200m of government funds to buy not one but two luxurious private jets for her travel needs and those of her staff…. Recently, the Republican congressman Don Bacon called Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth an 'amateur person' who has done great damage to the culture of the military in this country."
Sarat continues, "He has driven out senior military leaders, accusing them without evidence of being 'woke'…. Then there is Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, who has led a rollback in funding for critical medical research, including work aimed at finding treatments and cures for the most serious diseases. Kennedy, breaking a promise he made during his confirmation hearings, has brought his anti-vaccine fervor to the department he leads, filling critical positions with people whose views of vaccines turn scientific understandings on their head."
Sarat also attacks U.S. Attorney Pam Bondi for turning the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) into an "instrument of" Trump's "revenge."
"In the past," Sarat writes, "Americans may have been tempted to dismiss the significance of the people whom the president picks for Cabinet posts. But this year, we learned a hard lesson about the damage they could do."
Read Austin Sarat's full op-ed for The Guardian is available at this link.
