Amateur administration: Why Trump keeps picking increasingly less qualified people for critical government jobs

by Bob Schwartz

Bill Pulte surrounded by homes that are actually spies!

Trump has nominated Bill Pulte to be Director of National Intelligence:

Bill Pulte is the grandson of William J. Pulte, founder of PulteGroup, a residential home construction company. He studied broadcast journalism at Northwestern University. Pulte founded Pulte Capital in 2011, a private equity firm, and founded The Blight Authority, a nonprofit that clears empty homes, in 2015. Amid a leadership dispute, Pulte was named to PulteGroup’s board in 2016, serving for a four-year term.

It isn’t worth discussing whether Bill Pulte is qualified to be DNI. He is not.

What is worth discussing is why Trump wants so many manifestly unqualified people to help him run the country. There are too many unqualified—and sometimes vengeful and wacky—officials to list here.

A few reasons:

Many of the unqualified are rich, which means they can give Trump money and loyalty in exchange for prestigious positions.

      Many of the unqualified are even less smart and knowledgeable than Trump, so he is not threatened by them.

      Some number of Trump hardcore supporters are the sort of regular people who think that if they only had the opportunity, they could do a better and more patriotic job than some of the so-called expert communist enemies of America who once held these positions. They may not ever get nominated, but they can at least see that other unqualified people are getting the chance.