It’s hard to imagine the start of the Trump administration going any worse: their transition team is in absolute chaos, awash with walking conflicts of interest, and the people they’ve floated as cabinet members are extremists, torture supporters and generally awful people who should be no where near the levers of power.



The New York Times reported on the nightmare that is the Trump transition process on Tuesday, which they described as being “marked by firings, infighting and revelations that American allies were blindly dialing in to Trump Tower to try to reach the soon-to-be-leader of the free world”. The Huffington Post reported that Trump representatives missed meetings with several major federal agencies.

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But it’s the people who are already in place that are arguably worse.

Elizabeth Warren wrote a scathing letter to Trump this week, documenting in stark detail that despite Trump’s pledge to “drain the swamp”, his transition team is filled with lobbyists while special interest representatives are heading up the transition for federal departments they probably wish didn’t exist in the first place.

They include, she wrote, “a former Goldman Sachs executive who is rumored to be a Treasury Secretary pick; a paid consultant for Verizon who is making key decisions on your administration’s Federal Communication Commission; a ‘top lobbyist’ whose firm lobbied on behalf of issues related to the Trans-Pacific Partnership who is shaping your Labor Department; and a climate change-denying, oil industry-paid think tank fellow who is leading your environmental team’s transition.”

Part of this host of ethics quagmires could be that the transition team, such as it is, is reportedly struggling to find qualified people willing to serve the administration. But more pointedly, why would anyone would believe Trump would actually stick to his pledge to “drain the swamp”? He holds no actual positions to hire against and has contradicted himself on virtually ever major issues that exists. He’s not exactly been an ethical beacon his entire life, either.



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Which bring us to the man himself, whose surrogates have said he’s exempt from ethics laws related to his future office and his businesses – which are conflicts of interest disasters at this point. He at first claimed he’d put his businesses into a blind trust, and then said his children would continue to run them. Trump’s transition website is literally promoting his business brands.

On top of all that is Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner, who can’t be appointed by Trump in any official capacity due to anti-nepotism laws but is still up for an informal advisory role. Kushner reportedly ousted Chris Christie as leader of Trump’s transition team last week, partly in retribution for Christie prosecuting Kushner’s father years ago. (Christie himself saw many of his aides found guilty by a jury in the Bridgegate scandal two weeks ago.)



Meanwhile, on the cabinet positions front, it seems every day the Trump team floats an even more horrible name for one position or another. Alabama senator Jeff Sessions, a man with a long-documented history of racism, is being considered for attorney general or secretary of defense. Rudy Giuliani, the former mayor of New York, is angling for secretary of state. Giuliani, who has spent the last six months race-baiting for Trump on various television networks, claimed on ABC a couple months ago that “anything’s legal” during war.

Ted Cruz, a man who advocated for the death penalty while a supreme court clerk years ago, is now being floated as attorney general. The other name coming up for the nation’s top law enforcement position is somehow even more extreme than Cruz: Kris Kobach, an anti-immigration hardliner. Reuters reported that Kobach “said the new administration could push ahead rapidly on construction of a US-Mexico border wall without seeking immediate congressional approval” and that Trump was considering a patently unconstitutional “registry” for Muslim immigrants.

Defense secretary contender Tom Cotton has been going around talking about how waterboarding “isn’t torture” and has wanted war with Iran for years. And Trump’s rumored contender for the CIA, Jose Rodriguez, was not only an architect of the CIA torture program, but destroyed tapes of the CIA actually torturing people against the orders of the justice department during the Bush administration. Because he was not prosecuted at the time for those clear crimes over the past eight years, it seems he’s up for a promotion.

What horrors are in store when Trump finally takes office won’t be known for a couple months. But one thing is clear: it’s hard to imagine a more dangerous team than the one being put together right now.