Trump’s Picks: General John F. Kelly For DHS

Needless to say, this is a huge disappointment for immigration hawks:

“WASHINGTON — President-elect Donald J. Trump has settled on Gen. John F. Kelly, a retired four-star Marine general whose son was killed in combat in Afghanistan, as his choice for secretary of Homeland Security, putting a seasoned commander with personal experience of the costs of war in charge of protecting the nation’s borders.

Blunt-spoken and popular with military personnel, General Kelly, 66, rose to run the United States Southern Command, which put him in charge of the military jail at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and exposed him to immigration, drug trafficking and other cross-border problems over a sprawling area that encompasses 32 countries in the Caribbean, Central America and South America. …”

Here’s the best possible spin on it:

1.) At least it wasn’t Rep. Michael McCaul!

2.) DHS cobbles together various agencies unrelated to immigration. Maybe Kris Kobach will still be Deputy Secretary with authority over immigration while Kelly will focus on all the Muslim terrorist stuff?

3.) Trump is surrounding himself with generals because he wants to subvert our democracy.

4.) We don’t know much about General Kelly’s views on immigration.

My own view is that General Kelly for DHS is just the latest in a series of disappointing Trump Cabinet picks. We have Reince as Chief of Staff. We have a Goldman Sachs Jew for Treasury. We have Betsy DeVos (Education Secretary) and Tom Ricketts (Deputy Secretary of Commerce) who are YUGE Republican donors who are the epitome of the Swamp. We have Nikki Haley as UN ambassador. The rest of the Trump Cabinet (Chao, Price, Ross, Carson, Mattis, etc.) could have been the Mitt Romney Cabinet.

As things stand today, Jeff Sessions at Justice is the odd man in the Trump Cabinet. Trump’s choice of Scott Pruitt for EPA and Linda McMahon for Small Business Administration reinforce the impression that what we are getting is the same old conservatism. Let’s not forget Mike Pence is as vanilla conservative as you can get.

I mean … looking at the Trump Cabinet we already have now, you can almost fill in the blanks. You would put Mitt Romney at the State Department, Sarah Palin as Interior Secretary and Rick Perry at the Veterans Administration. Agriculture, Labor and Energy would also go to conventional Republicans.

Why not nominate Ted Cruz for the Supreme Court? There is nothing else about the Cabinet that resembles the populist nationalism that won Trump the presidency.