It would not, of course, have mattered who President-elect Donald Trump chose to lead his cabinet departments. If the man himself is detestable to his critics, so to his opponents must be anybody — by definition — who agrees to work for him, no matter how well qualified.

Thus there is no ‘let’s give it a chance to work,’ from America’s left-wing commentariat. (Nor from Canada’s; the often prescient Andrew Coyne seems to have lost his mind on this one.)

Nor would the Trump people have expected anything else, that anybody would give the new team a break.

That said, for impregnable, unresearched ignorance Whoopie Goldberg’s claim that Secretary of Defense pick Pete Hegseth ‘knows nothing about the military’ didn’t even rise to my low level of expectation of The View. The be-medalled Hegseth was a junior officer in the 101^st Airborne, served in both Iraq and Afghanistan and remains a major in the reserve to this day. He's been in uniform for 20 years.

A lot more than 'nothing' then, is that resume. Heavens, you can run for vice-president with less. Does The View not have producers?

Granted, one doesn’t have to believe that major to Defense Secretary is all in a day’s promotion. It is unusual.

On the other hand, the geniuses that Trump’s cabinet will replace were kind of hackers, weren’t they?

Under their approved-by-the-left tutelage, the US lost control of its southern border such that millions of illegal aliens entered the country — nobody really knows how many, but ten million is reckoned to be a low-end guess. (In the process, the system lost 300,000 children who entered the US, for whom the possible fates are sex trafficking and forced labour.)

The US military was subjected to a political purge. Meritocracy was demoted. And in much the same way as the Canadian Armed Forces has been obliged to become a vehicle for the social engineering fancies of the Trudeau Liberals, so arms of the US military have been used to promote progressive causes du jour. In one celebrated case, the DoD decided to showcase drag queens, thinking it would encourage recruiting.

Whatever one thinks about drag, it’s seldom the chance to dress up as a girl that makes a man want to join the navy.

And there is the US national debt. As of last month, it exceeded $35 trillion, up from $26 trillion at the end of the Trump presidency. As Petar Pejovic said on Hannaford two days ago, this now has the potential to be a problem against which the wise investor should consider taking cover.

Meanwhile, we have wars in the Middle East and in Ukraine, which almost certainly would not have started under a more assertive US government.

These are the achievements of the people liked by the well-coiffed and amply-remunerated experts occupying the pulpits of the left wing media.

Were they all fools on the Biden team?

No. Or at least, not necessarily. Opening the southern border for example, was an intentional act, not neglect.

So not fools. People who chose not to honour their constitutional oath to defend the United States of America?

But what these officials had in common with each other and with opinion hosts in MSNBC, CNN ABC and the rest, was that they bought into the Democrat vision of the USA, as a nation that needed to be torn apart and reconstructed on neo-Marxist lines as something else, (and especially as something whose demographics could be expected to reliably return future Democratic majorities.)

This is not something the American people just voted for.

So, we shall have to see how Trump’s people do. However, of one thing we can be sure. At least they intend to protect the republic.

That is, they mean to clean things up. And as no member of cabinet can do it all himself, they will find other people who think as they do and want what US voters elected Trump to provide, to clean house for them. To return for a moment to the matter of Pete Hegseth, one doesn’t need to be a high-end business leader to make a simple decision like, ‘enough with the things that don’t promote military honour’ and then give the order.

Indeed, high-end business leaders don’t always get it right, anyway…

So yes, you can bet there are lists of people being composed now, who will not be part of the new administration.

And the search for new talent is ramped up. Trump’s biggest problem during his first administration was people who claimed to be working for his objectives, but weren’t.

That will not happen again. It’s easy to see that Tom Homan for example, the Trump pick to police the borders, believes in the job. How Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy will work together remains to be seen — two bulls in one corral comes to mind — but anything they achieve on rationalizing US government spending will be more than the Biden team ever did: Because, the Biden team weren’t even trying.

So, Tulsi Gabbard, Matt Gaetz, RFK Junior, Kristi Noem, Marco Rubio… and the rest… good luck.

For you know, sometimes, it just takes one person to make the right decision, once. As in, 'Fix the border.' 'Start drilling.' 'Get rid of DEI in the army.' Then follow up to make sure it's done,

This is a negative example, but consider the words of former Canadian prime minister Pierre Trudeau. In 1970, columnist Lubor Zink quoted him: "One has to be in the wheelhouse to see what shifts are taking place . . . the observer . . . on the deck . . . sees the horizon much in the same direction and doesn't realize it but perhaps he will find himself disembarking at a different island than the one he thought he was sailing for."

A touch of the wheel... In Canada, that didn't do us any good. But today in Trump's America? There are some good people in the wheelhouses.

My only fear on their behalf is exaggerated expectations. 'Trump will Fix It' is a good enough election slogan.

For a better hope of fixing anything, they shouldn't forget in Whom their money says they Trust.

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