The Washington Post has an interesting—if vastly depressing—piece about how Education Secretary Betsy DeVos is a "survivor" at Camp Runamuck largely because she doesn't know anything about education except how to turn a shady buck on it and why that's OK because the president* knows even less and doesn't give damn anyway. So much winning.

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos remains so disliked in certain circles that her very name is a punchline. She mostly lands in the news for the wrong reasons, such as being forced last month to defend budget cuts for the Special Olympics before angry lawmakers. President Trump has privately complained about her, insulting her intelligence on several occasions, according to a former senior administration official who worked closely with Trump and another senior official who is still at the White House.

Yet the president shows no signs of asking her to resign, reflecting in part his lack of interest in the issue of education and the department responsible for it. And DeVos has no interest in departing. Advisers say she is excited by the tasks ahead. After two years of mostly undoing the work of her predecessors, she has shifted to advancing her own agenda.

Public service can be so ennobling. She also has a plan to loot the tax code to enrich her pals in the charter school industry and starve public education in the process. Nobody in the administration* thinks it has a snowball's chance in hell of becoming actual policy—thank god for small favors—but that's OK because Jesus.

And DeVos, who is deeply religious, scores points for the president with evangelical Christians, an important part of his base that has stuck by Trump even as unseemly details of his personal life have spilled out. “He has staffed his administration and surrounded himself with people who have deep roots and street cred in the faith community. Betsy would be at or near the top of that list,” said Ralph Reed, founder of the Faith and Freedom Coalition and a longtime evangelical leader.

Also, a longtime bagman and grifter, but, you know, Jesus.

When asked about the teacher shortage by local reporters, the secretary replied that teachers need more autonomy and more opportunities for advancement, and she said schools should think “outside the box.” She did not offer ideas for attracting more teachers to the rural district. “If you’re focused on doing the right thing for students,” she said, “solutions are going to follow.” Asked later about her response, Nathan Bailey, her chief of staff, said it’s not her role to offer specifics.“The job of the secretary of education is not to ‘solve’ every problem in education,” he said in an email. “She often doesn’t opine from on high on how to solve local problems. She thinks everyone should come together in the community to solve problems.”

This is the way things run in our government these days. Get hired because you're politically palatable even if you don't know fck-all about the elements of your job. Keep your head down. Maintain your political value with essential voters and propose doomed solutions that, if they ever were implemented, would destroy something you're supposed to protect anyway. The worst part is that this is as good as it gets.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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