MSNBC’s Maddow: Is Trump Trying to 'Destroy the U.S. Government' with Cabinet Picks?

MSNBC host Rachel Maddow said Thursday on “Deadline” that President-elect Donald Trump is attempting to “destroy the U.S. government” with his picks to fill his administration’s cabinet.

Maddow said, “I think the idea of the authoritarian promise is that everything shrivels in government other than the will of the leader, right? So, you don’t necessarily put a Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in charge of you’re hoping for great things from HHS. Matt Gaetz, he has explicitly proposed abolishing the Justice Department, not specifically abolishing the FBI and the ATF but talking about abolishing the Justice Department.”

She added, “I mean, Tulsi Gabbard as the Director of National Intelligence is, I mean, the idea that Tulsi Gabbard, in a normal circumstance, could get a security clearance to be like a Walmart-style greeter at any U.S. intelligence agency, let alone get past the security barriers, is insane. So, you do that because you want the worst for these agencies, because you want the worst for the U.S. government because you think that the U.S. government is worthless. That’s part of consolidating power, to make the U.S. government nothing other than the leader and people who will do what he says, and they’re not being any repository of expertise, let alone, you know, just general day-to-day know-how anywhere. So it’s a — it’s a sort of, I mean, Steve Bannon used to say, it’s a sort of Leninist project, right? Destroy the state. This is the cabinet that you nominate to, not to run the U.S. government, to do anything, but to destroy the U.S. government. So that the U.S. government can be fundamentally reimagined as something much more like a unitary authoritarian or autocratic, for lack of a better term, system.”

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