'Clock's ticking': Ex-Bush aide says looming Cabinet fight may hobble Trump's agenda
Former George W. Bush administration aide David Frum is horrified by many of Donald Trump's proposed Cabinet picks, including Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) for attorney general and former Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard for director of national intelligence.
And yet, he told MSNBC's Ari Melber on Wednesday, all of this may come back to bite Trump quickly — by setting off a protracted fight in the Senate within his party that could put his administration on a weak footing to get anything accomplished.
"Your view of this?" asked Melber.
"Well, the appointment is certainly alarming," said Frum, a frequent critic of Trump. "It's also kind of ludicrous. Unlike the Tulsi Gabbard one, which is sinister all the way through. Thoroughly untrustworthy person to be director of national intelligence."
"But I want to bring a message to cheer people up a little bit," he continued. "Because one of the things that you would expect of a president with a big agenda is you try to move your — you have very limited time to get a big agenda done. You want to move your people into place as rapidly as possible. So a president with a big agenda, an Obama, a Ronald Reagan, they pick broadly acceptable people. They don't pick some Marxist agitator to be the secretary of the Treasury, they pick Timothy Geithner. They pick respectable people who get through the Senate easily because the clock's ticking. You get people in place and legislate with a finite time that you have, especially with a House majority as tiny as the present one."
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Instead, Frum added, "Donald Trump decided to take minutes off the board and use them to have a huge fight over an attorney general who is loathed within his own party. On a secret ballot among Republicans, Matt Gaetz would not be appointed to anything. They wouldn't let him in the caucus, they wouldn't let him serve lunch. A director of national intelligence, again, who's regarded with extreme mistrust by almost every Republican senator. And a secretary of defense who's kind of a comical — seems to be an entertaining enough presence on television, but to run the most lethal fighting force? It's absurd, it's crazy."
"We are going to spend weeks and weeks, probably, engaged in this battle," he said — cutting into "Donald Trump's time to get anything of substance done."
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