Cabinet of Deplorables

Speaking at an event on September 9, 2016, Hillary Clinton said:

You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump's supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic -- you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up. He has given voice to their websites that used to only have 11,000 people -- now 11 million. He tweets and retweets their offensive hateful mean-spirited rhetoric. Now, some of those folks -- they are irredeemable, but thankfully they are not America.

The Trump campaign criticized Clinton's remarks at the time, but it has become increasingly clear that Trump has not only "lifted up" the deplorables, he is enlisting them to build the executive branch of the government.

As Dartmouth political scientist Brendan Nyhan commented on Twitter, by day 19 following the election, Trump had appointed:

• A white nationalist as chief strategist
• A top informal adviser who admired Bridgegate
• An attorney general who was too racist for the 1986 senate to appoint as a federal judge
• A national security adviser who is a conspiracy theorist

Subsequent appointments have included a secretary of education who opposes public education, a secretary of housing and urban development who opposes housing anti-discrimination laws, a secretary of commerce on whose watch 12 miners died, and a White House counsel whose work at the Federal Election Commission consisted mostly of  obstructing enforcement of federal election laws.