Team of Slimeballs

In which we dispassionately weigh two eventful First Hundred Dayses.

Bondi, Trump, Rubio, Hegseth, Musk, Noem. Photo illustration by Valerie Holt.

Stanton, Chase, Lincoln, Welles, Smith, Seward, Blair and Bates. “First Reading Of the Emancipation Proclamation of President Lincoln,” by Francis B. Carpenter, 1864

Hello.

In anticipation of Donald Trump’s first hundredth day, it behooves us to 1) analyze his accomplishments vis a vis other presidents; and, 2) establish, at long last, the meaning of “behooves.”

First things first.

Let us all turn our attention — we are deputized, for the moment, as objective historians dispassionately seeking truth — to Abraham Lincoln’s first hundred days. Like Donald Trump’s, Lincoln’s opening act was also quite eventful! So far, so good. Even Steven, no clear lead.

Lincoln faced the beginning of the Civil War with the fall of Fort Sumter, but Trump also faced severe turmoil, largely in watching as the American economy and the country’s international reputation as a modern, compassionate democracy, swirl right down the shitter. In fairness, both men were at fault — Lincoln for being elected while simultaneously being both morally and strategically opposed to slavery, Trump for being an ignorant, arrogant, bigoted, jingoistic nincompoop. Head to head, Lincoln seems to be inching into the lead. Speaking of behooving, though, it still remains a horse race. (More on this later.)

One can responsibly argue that such comparisons are unfair, because circumstance and protocols of leadership change over time. Perhaps the fairest and most meaningful comparison that can be made between the two men is by comparing the only hundred-day marker that is the same for any two presidents — choosing a cabinet.

Lincoln famously selected a group of formidable men, most of whom had been his political opponents — men of impeccable public character with viewpoints that sometimes quarreled with his own during the rancorous political campaign just concluded. The man who would become his secretary of state, Republican abolitionist William Seward, had been openly condescending to Lincoln during the primary season, making it clear that he considered Lincoln an indecisive wimp on slavery who relied on corny anecdotes of no significance to hide his timidity on that key issue of the day. Things changed after the two men worked together. Because Seward was badly injured in the coordinated assassination conspiracy engineered by John Wilkes Booth, his family did not immediately inform him of Lincoln’s death. In the morning, he looked out his window, saw the flags at half mast, realized what must have happened, and is said to have burst into tears.

Then there was Edwin Stanton, Lincoln’s secretary of war. Stanton was actually a Democrat who strongly supported Lincoln’s main nemesis, John Breckenridge, in the 1860 election. Breckenridge would later join the Confederacy during the war. Stanton is said to have called Lincoln a “gorilla,” and an “imbecile,” and a disgrace to the country. But Lincoln admired Stanton’s mind, and his backbone, and the 16th president was a man who valued dissenting voices, and had the strength of character to feel challenged by, but not threatened by, criticism. Things got better between the two men after they’d worked together. It was Stanton who, beside Lincoln’s deathbed, said sonorously of his boss, “Now he belongs to the ages."

Lincoln made these choices because he knew they were men of good judgment, and good habits, people of unsullied reputation and strength of conviction whom he could rely on for candor, or what we would now call '‘pushback.” Lincoln wanted to be told when he was wrong.

And so forth. The cabinet was messy, uncontrollable, garrulous and hostile to one another. “No President ever had a Cabinet of which the members were so independent, had so large individual followings, and were so inharmonious,” disparagingly wrote New York politician Chauncey Depew, and he was right. Collectively — as historian Doris Kearns Goodwin showed in her magnum opus, “Team of Rivals” — they were also the most brilliant cabinet in American history.

Trump’s strategy in choosing his people was somewhat different. To be fair, like Lincoln he had a coherent philosophy and a system: His sole criterion for each selection — whether or not they’d been adversaries before — seems to have been whether this person would now willingly spit-shine his toilet if he asked them to. “Competence” or “strength of character,” was never an overriding issue. Trump’s very first pick, for attorney general, was Matt Gaetz, a man who stood accused of child sex trafficking and statutory rape and was found to have routinely paid for sex, including with a 17-year-old girl, and to have abused illegal drugs during his time (as it were) “in congress.”

Among the wildly obsequious Trump appointees was Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a wackadoodle quack who is a plague’s best friend, and who said at his swearing in:

“On August 23rd of last year, God … (at this point he extravagantly gestured toward new president, who was beaming his approval) … sent me President Trump. I genuinely believe that you are a pivotal historical figure and you are going to transform this country.” (He was right, it should be noted, about that very last clause.)

To be fair, just like Lincoln, Trump has appointed former critics of his … but only after they had clearly assured him that they are now potential toilet lickers.

Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, who once said then-candidate Donald Trump is a “con artist” who should never get near our nuclear codes, and who unhesitatingly took Ukraine’s side when Russia seized Crimea, now is Trump’s most enthusiastic fawning henchman in handing Ukraine over to the Russians for annihilation. In doing this the new secretary of state is antagonizing and infantilizing Europe in a way that likely has ruptured our lifelong alliance for a generation or more.

Vice President JD Vance, who once called Trump “America’s Hitler” is now serving his president with stunning deference and lack of tact, has just insulted a billion Chinese people by calling them “peasants,”

The new secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, a former pretty-boy right-wing TV personality known mostly for his being a drunk and a repulsive womanizing cad, a man disliked even by his own mother, a man who has already flagrantly compromised national security twice, a man who is so vain and vapid that he is installing a makeup studio in the Pentagon, a man whose only experience in the field of Defense is in responding angrily and lamely to all the aforementioned charges …. actually, there is no appropriate end to this sentence except … “is an asswipe.”

The new Attorney General, Pam Bondi, who indignantly showed up most days at Trump’s trial, calling it a “sham,” is now defining as “domestic terrorists” people who vandalize Teslas, and is heading up the efforts to keep a wrongly deported man in a Salvadoran prison.

The new director of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem, who cannot keep her own handbag secure and who carries $3,000 in cash for use in restaurants, because she apparently thinks restaurants don’t take plastic, has decided (at Trump’s request) to spend $200 million of her department’s budget on an ad campaign thanking Trump for closing the border.

In fairness, not all of Trump’s top appointees got their jobs for being total ass-kissing suckups. Some, like Elon Musk, who never has had to worry about losing a job and now is in charge of firing many tens of thousands of people willy-nilly, got his job at The White House by bribing Trump with more than $250 million.

And so it goes.

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Today’s first Gene Pool Gene Poll:

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Second Gene Pool Gene Poll:

Question: What do you think is the derivation of the word “behooves”?

A: An old English word, “behofian,” meaning "to be of use."

B: A truncation of a word “hoochinoo” from a Tlingit Native America village on Admiralty Island, Alaska, referring to a type of fermented liquor made there since the 1700s, and thought to be so potent it inspired bold thoughts and actions, “behooving” you. In Tlingit it is "xucnu·wú, which mean’s “brown bear’s fort.” The word also expanded more universally to create “hooch.”

C: A reference to larged hooved animals, ungulates such as horses, rhinos, antelopes, oxen, boars, giraffes, etc, which are thought of as powerful forces of nature, and came to be associated with powerful, unavoidable ideas.

D: From the Estonian “hoov,” which means a courtyard or a lawn … and which came to be associated with expanse or comfort, as in the mollifying experience of presenting a needed thought or option.

The true answer is below, which we will give you after you vote, and then look at this picture.

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Answer to the second poll:

It is A. Listen, sometimes the truth is boring.

(All the other choices are based on facts — there is a “hoochinoo” liquor for example — but it has nothing to do with “behooved.”)

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