The Cabinet of Clowns

Susan Estrich on Apr 26, 2025

There is the secretary of defense sharing battle plans with his third wife, a former Fox News producer, on Signal. His top aides have all quit or been fired. The department is leaking like a sieve about its leader. Disarray, they say. He was stunningly unqualified for the job in the first instance (joke of the week: the cardinals should choose the next pope from "Fox and Friends"), and Republican senators knew it, but they didn't dare stand up. And this is what you get. The military deserves better. What more will it take?

And then there's the face of Homeland Security, the woman who couldn't, with a security detail in the restaurant, protect her own handbag. With $3,000 in cash? The internet was alive with rumors about what that was for. But then, this is the woman who dressed in designer fashion complete with a $50,000 Rolex watch for a photo op with prisoners who were brought to El Salvador in clear defiance of a court order and without due process of law. And shot her own puppy.

Speaking of photogenic (dare I ask, is that why they were chosen, this particular trio), the attorney general is turning Justice Department lawyers into pretzels as they try to respond to federal judges who have taken them to task for their double-talk. That is why the Supreme Court had to act at 1 a.m. last Saturday. They were stopping a flight that the lawyer in court refused to acknowledge was happening and actively suggested otherwise. Later, there were pictures of the buses taking immigrants to the airport turning around.

She openly defies the values of the rule of law. Ordered to notify federal agencies that they were not to enforce the president's jihad against Jenner & Block, one of the law firms that is successfully suing Trump, she added an addendum, attacking an "an unelected" judge who "invaded the policy-making and free speech prerogatives of the executive branch." She used similar language in the notice that the judge required her to give in the case of Perkins Coie, the first firm to challenge Trump. "The Executive Branch's position is that Executive Order 14230 is permissible, and that the Court's order was erroneous. The government reserves the right to take all necessary and legal actions in response to the 'dishonest and dangerous' conduct of Perkins Coie LLP, as set forth in Executive Order 14230." The judge in that case compared Bondi's addendum to "a temper tantrum" by administration officials, "worthy of a 3-year-old," not the Justice Department.

Bondi, appearing on Fox News, has accused these "liberal judges" of "trying to protect terrorists over American citizens." These so-called liberal judges include multiple appointees of Republican presidents, beginning with President Ronald Reagan.

Pete Hegseth will be the first to go. He claims the president is standing behind him. The president says he is standing behind him. Why?

As for Homeland Security, the president is losing support even on immigration, which has always been his strong suit. Arresting judges for allowing parties appearing in court to avoid a confrontation with ICE is the latest example of the sort of overreaching that is turning the roundup Trump promised into the cluster calamity it was destined to be.

The country doesn't agree with the attorney general. She is sacrificing her department's integrity and reputation on the altar of Trump. She has shown not one ounce of independence from a president who has done more to violate the Constitution in his first hundred days than any of his predecessors did in their terms (Richard Nixon included).

Trump just talked about Joe Biden weaponizing the Justice Department. Of course, he didn't; if he had, Trump would have been convicted of federal crimes and would not be president. But Trump has done it, entirely, in just 100 days.

The fish rots from the head. The Cabinet of telegenic clowns is a painful reflection of the man at the center of it.

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To find out more about Susan Estrich and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.