Cabinet chaos: Trump's team battles scandal, irrelevance
By JONATHAN LEMIRE
25 minutes ago
NEW YORK (AP) — One Cabinet member was grilled by Congress about alleged misuse of taxpayer funds for private flights. Another faced an extraordinary revolt within his own department amid a swirling ethics scandal. A third has come under scrutiny for her failure to answer basic questions about her job in a nationally televised interview.
And none of them was the one Trump fired.
President Donald Trump’s Cabinet in recent weeks has been enveloped in a cloud of controversy, undermining the administration’s ability to advance its agenda and drawing the ire of a president increasingly willing to cast aside allies and go it alone. Trump’s ouster of Secretary of State Rex Tillerson on Tuesday may have just been the first salvo in a shakeup of a Cabinet that, with few exceptions, has been a team of rivals for bad headlines and largely sidelined by the White House.
“Donald Trump is a lone-wolf president who doesn’t want to co-govern with anybody and doesn’t want anyone else getting the credit,” said presidential historian Douglas Brinkley of Rice University. “For his Cabinet, he brought in a bizarre strand of outsiders and right-wing ideologues. Many are famed conservative or wealthy business people, but that doesn’t mean you understand good governance.”
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https://apnews.com/d738ce8d68534431bf94f54859b388c3/Cabinet-chaos:-Trump's-team-battles-scandal,-irrelevance
