One of the most famous catchphrases associated with Donald Trump and his presidential campaigns—along with “Make America Great Again”—is “drain the swamp.” Like MAGA itself, it’s a slogan Trump has lifted from Ronald Reagan, who promised to “drain the swamp of overtaxation, overregulation, and runaway inflation” back in 1982. When Trump uses it, he’s trying to paint a simple, compelling picture: Washington is a morass of corruption, warmongering, and dysfunction, and he’s the bold outsider who’s going to come in and pull the plug. 

This is exactly half true. Politics in Washington really are profoundly corrupt, and Trump is essentially correct when he says that establishment figures like Hillary Clinton and Liz Cheney are warmongers who should never be allowed near power, or that the Pelosis’ stock deals seem shady. The “swamp” is a real thing, and Americans know it, which goes a long way toward explaining Trump’s electoral success. But the idea that Donald Trump is some kind of anti-establishment crusader is ridiculous. Yes, he’ll point out the rot in D.C. when it’s convenient for him. But he has no intention of actually making anything better—and you can tell by the way he’s staffing his own administration right now. 

By this point, we know who the majority of the top figures in Trump’s White House will be, and they’re all horrible. In fact, it seems almost like Trump is deliberately choosing the worst possible people to fill each role. His appointees are not only blatantly unqualified for the jobs he’s giving them, but in many cases they actively oppose the mission of the agencies they’re supposed to run, or they’re openly planning to privatize the functions of government and sell them off. His Cabinet picks are not advocates for ordinary Americans; they’re corporate oligarchs, Christian extremists, miracle-cure peddlers, and miscellaneous crooks and cronies of all stripes. Go down the roster, and you can’t help but come away horrified. As Shakespeare said in The Tempest: Hell is empty, and all the devils are here. 

THE WARMONGERS

One of Trump’s most successful attempts to paint himself as a populist is his rhetoric around war. On the campaign trail, he’s repeatedly—and correctly—called out more established politicians for being too cozy with the military-industrial complex, and for destabilizing the world and making it more violent. In 2016, he said that “it seems like there wasn’t a country in the Middle East Clinton didn’t want to invade”—millions of Libyans would agree!—and pledged that his own foreign policy would be “tempered by realism” in contrast. He broke with GOP orthodoxy, too, calling the war in Iraq a “big, fat mistake” to Jeb Bush’s face, and said the United States had “destabilized the Middle East.” (Although he might have gone further, and said “crime” rather than “mistake.”) In the last election, Trump seized on the Democrats’ unforced error of embracing the Cheneys, and he largely avoided discussing Gaza, allowing Biden and Harris to be stained by their support for Israeli war crimes while he said that he wants to “Get it over with and let’s get back to peace and stop killing people” (although, in characteristic Trump style, he also contradicted himself and said to “let Israel finish the job.”) This approach has fooled a lot of people, including ostensible leftists like Compact magazine’s Christian Parenti, who wrote in 2023 that “Trump’s Real Crime is Opposing Empire.” 

There’s only one problem: Trump’s actions when he holds power don’t match his rhetoric when he’s seeking it. As Elias Khoury showed last year in response to Parenti, Donald Trump is definitely no anti-imperialist. In practice, he did just as much to provoke war and destruction as anyone he criticized. Trump illegally assassinated Iran’s General Qassim Soleimani, dropped the “Mother of All Bombs” on Afghanistan, aided Saudi Arabia’s brutal air assault on Yemen, tore up international arms control agreements, and emboldened Israeli settlers to seize land in the West Bank from Palestinians. He also planned or suggested even worse actions, like invading Venezuela, “bombing the drugs” in Mexico, using a nuclear weapon against North Korea and blaming someone else, or labeling F-22s with Chinese flags and “bomb[ing] the shit” out of Russia. (He is particularly fond of plans that would work in Looney Tunes, but would just lead to nuclear apocalypse in real life.)  On several occasions, he was talked down from starting major wars by more level-headed members of his White House team. The whole idea of Trump as a “peace president,” as he described himself recently, is a ludicrous lie. 

Now, it looks like the second incarnation of the Trump White House will be even more bloodthirsty than the first. For secretary of state, Trump has nominated someone he previously seemed to despise—“Little Marco” Rubio. One of the biggest war hawks in the Senate, Rubio has advocated for direct confrontation with Iran, supported Benjamin Netanyahu’s slaughter of Palestinians to the hilt, advocated for even more hostility towards China, helped Trump implement a more intense blockade on Cuba, and even suggested he’d support a regime change operation in Venezuela like the one Trump proposed in 2017. Rubio is also a vocal admirer of El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele, who describes himself as “the world’s coolest dictator” and has imprisoned more than 1 percent of his country’s population—thousands of whom turned out to be innocent—in a brutal anti-gang crackdown. (Despite all this, the perennially awful Senator John Fetterman (D-PA) has said he “look[s] forward” to voting to confirm Rubio.)

Trump pulled his pick for secretary of defense straight out of the TV. His name is Pete Hegseth, and he’s the former weekend host for the Fox News show Fox & Friends. On the surface, Hegseth is pretty similar to the neocons from Trump’s first administration, though he is a bit more isolationist toward Ukraine and skeptical about NATO. He has pledged to launch a “frontal assault” to reform the Pentagon, but while the Pentagon certainly needs to be reformed, Hegseth isn’t talking about its overgrown budget; all he really means is that he wants to make it less “woke.” He’s also a major advocate for freeing war criminals. While on Fox, one of his causes célèbres was advocating for Trump to pardon Navy SEAL Eddie Gallagher, who was convicted for taking photos with the corpse of a murdered 17-year-old prisoner of war (and accused of multiple other war crimes). 

There are a lot of frightening things about Hegseth. Shortly after the news about his nomination broke, his lawyers confirmed to NPR that he paid a woman not to file a sexual assault lawsuit against him in 2017, and a disturbing police report about the incident in question has since come out. (Sexual abuse allegations are a recurring theme with Team Trump, as we’ll see.) He’s also said he never washes his hands because he doesn’t think germs are real, though he later claimed that was a joke. But from a geopolitical standpoint, the most worrying thing about Hegseth is his Christian fanaticism. He sports multiple tattoos celebrating the Crusades, an infamously violent medieval military campaign meant to ethnically cleanse the Middle East of its Muslim inhabitants. (One of his biceps, for instance, bears the slogan “Deus Vult”— Latin for “God Wills It”—which was a rallying cry for the Crusaders.). Hegseth also appears to be an apocalyptic Christian Zionist, as he has made references to the re-establishment of a Jewish temple on Jerusalem’s Temple Mount—an idea linked to the evangelical belief that the destruction of Islamic holy sites like the Al-Aqsa Mosque is part of biblical prophecy that will bring about the end times and the return of Christ. Not a great guy to have making decisions about military policy, in our opinion.

Hegseth isn’t the only one in Trump’s team who has a rabidly pro-Israel and anti-Palestinian worldview. For his Ambassador to Israel, Trump has tapped Mike Huckabee—the former governor of Arkansas (and author of God, Guns, Grits, and Gravy), who has no diplomatic experience whatsoever. In the past, Huckabee has supported the ethnic cleansing of the West Bank, saying that “There is no such thing as a West Bank. It’s Judea and Samaria,” and even that “there’s really no such thing as a Palestinian,” “no such thing as a settlement,” and “no such thing as an occupation.” Like Hegseth, his foreign policy views are rooted in extreme forms of evangelical Christianity. An actual former U.S. ambassador, Luis G. Moreno, has described Huckabee as a “Full blown (and knowledgeable) fanatic of the End of Times, Apocalypse, Israel’s destruction, etc. A true and utter nut case,” and says that there “Couldn’t be a more dangerous selection.” 

Meanwhile, Trump has picked a House Republican, Representative Elise Stefanik (R-NY), as his ambassador to the United Nations. Her biggest claim to fame is leading last year’s McCarthyite congressional hearings designed to intimidate university presidents into cracking down harder on their students’ pro-Palestine speech. Expect her to block any U.N. resolution that is even mildly critical of Israel, even more than the United States already does.

The more obscure figures aren’t any better. Representative Mike Waltz (R-FL), Trump’s pick for National Security Advisor, is a former advisor to Bush appointees Donald Rumsfeld and Robert Gates. He’s practically a carbon copy of Marco Rubio, though probably even more extreme towards China (calling them an “existential threat” to America and saying we need to “make significant investments in our own readiness” to face China’s military). And for his very first foreign policy appointment, Trump chose Brian Hook, a notorious Iran hawk who served during the Bush administration and later advised Trump to assassinate General Soleimani, to help staff the State Department for him. Hook also spearheaded an initiative that specifically “sought to counter alleged ‘isolationist’ trends in the U.S. foreign policy establishment,” and in his new role as an advisor to Trump, he’s likely responsible for endorsing most of the other picks we’ve just mentioned. 

One person stands out from this parade of killer clowns: Tulsi Gabbard, a military veteran and former Democratic congresswoman from Hawaii who Trump has chosen for the role of Director of National Intelligence. The DNI oversees the CIA, which will be led by Trump’s former DNI John Ratcliffe, a hardcore MAGA loyalist. Gabbard, though, has had quite an odd political transformation. In 2016, she was a supporter of Bernie Sanders and strongly criticized Donald Trump’s foreign policy, calling his assassination of General Soleimani an “illegal and unconstitutional act of war.” Before that, she referred to Trump as “Saudi Arabia’s bitch” for his support of the murderous Gulf regime. But she was also not well-liked among Democrats due to her anti-interventionist stances on Syria and Russia (she once said that Presidents Putin and Zelenskyy “should put geopolitics aside and embrace the spirit of aloha,” which isn't the worst idea), along with her genuinely troublesome past work against LGBTQ rights.

After a longshot bid for the 2020 Democratic nomination, she transformed herself into an unrepentant MAGA cheerleader, taking up a wide variety of right-wing culture war causes and eventually changing her party registration to Republican. Whether she had a genuine change of heart or cynically decided to sell out all her old beliefs is impossible to know for sure. But it’s brought her from a no-name back-bench Democrat to one of the most powerful people in U.S. foreign policy, so it was certainly the right call for her career.

THE OLIGARCHS

When we turn to the domestic front, any idea that Donald Trump has the interests of the general public in mind when he makes his policy decisions becomes even harder to swallow. For instance, consider the newest government agency in town: the Department of Government Efficiency, or “D.O.G.E.” For this insufferable project, which is named after a cryptocurrency that’s itself named after an unfunny meme from more than a decade ago, Trump has selected Elon Musk and his fellow billionaire Vivek Ramaswamy as directors. (Obviously, a department dedicated to “efficiency” needs two leaders, both of them absurdly wealthy.)

The D.O.G.E. is not actually a department in the traditional sense. Rather, it’s a sort of advisory board that will give Trump recommendations for the budget he’ll give to Congress. Musk has arbitrarily decided that the number of federal agencies needs to be shrunk down to 99 from more than 420 (given his history it’s surprising that Elon wouldn’t want 420 agencies), and that the U.S. needs to eliminate $2 trillion—roughly a third of the budget—in annual spending on what he considers “waste.” In a recent op-ed for the Wall Street Journal, he and Ramaswamy say that “mass head-count reductions” of government workers will also be necessary. Since this is a Republican administration, presumably very little of that belt-tightening will touch the military budget, even though the Pentagon has never passed an audit and burns billions of dollars on things like bases in Djibouti and the barely-functional F-35 fighter jet. It also presumably will not involve cuts to the billions of dollars that Musk’s own companies, Tesla and SpaceX, receive in subsidies every year. Instead, the stated goal of eliminating $2 trillion in spending would almost certainly require cuts to social safety net programs like Social Security and Medicare. Musk has already signaled his willingness to cut these programs when he proposed that Senator Rick Scott (R-FL), who’s mostly known for wanting to “sunset” them, should be Senate Majority Leader. Thankfully, congressional Republicans ignored Musk, and the slightly less awful Senator John Thune (R-SD) got the nod instead. (We repeat: slightly.) For his part, Ramaswamy has said veterans’ healthcare programs could be on the chopping block. 

Musk has fully acknowledged that his economic ideas will create “hardship” for many Americans if they’re carried out, but he says it’s a necessary price because we need to “live within our means.” That’s right—the richest man in the world thinks ordinary folks are living too high on the hog, and he’s here to put us in our place. If there’s any good news, it’s that Musk and Ramaswamy’s ridiculous agency doesn’t actually have the power to act on its own. It will be up to Trump and congressional Republicans like Thune to act on their vision and explain to voters why their healthcare and retirement are being taken away.

Trump’s pick for the Department of Education was always going to be bad. In the lead-up to the actual announcement, publications like Newsweek were speculating that it might be someone like Oklahoma education superintendent Ryan Walters, Moms for Liberty cofounder Tiffany Justice, or just Betsy DeVos again. But it’s somehow even weirder, as Trump has nominated Linda McMahon. If McMahon’s name sounds familiar, it’s probably because was a Republican candidate for Senate in 2010 and 2012—although she could never quite seal the deal electorally—and one of the cofounders of World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE), along with her husband Vince McMahon, from whom she’s now separated. Both Vince and Linda have been named in a sexual abuse lawsuit (oh look, there’s that recurring theme again), which alleges they ignored the sexual exploitation of “ring boys” as young as 12 and 13 by a WWE announcer in the 1980s—an accusation they’ve denied. By itself, this murky past makes it troubling that McMahon could now be placed in a position of authority over the nation’s schools and universities, and would be making decisions about things like Title IX protections against abuse and harassment. But she also has very little in the way of actual educational experience, having never worked as a teacher and only served for roughly a year on the Connecticut Board of Education (where she claimed to have a teaching degree but didn’t, explaining herself by saying that “she mistakenly thought her degree was in education because she did a semester of student teaching”).

Still, none of that has stopped her from having strong opinions about education, which she wants to privatize through taxpayer-funded “vouchers” that would encourage parents to “choose” private charter or religious schools. (For a detailed explanation of why that’s an awful idea, check out this Current Affairs article from 2016.) Trump says he wants to end the Department of Education outright, and McMahon is the perfect person to accomplish that task, as she’s both obviously unqualified for her job and ideologically opposed to providing decent public education in the first place. Like Elon Musk, she’s yet another billionaire trying to dismantle basic services that nearly everyone relies on.  

All of the above personnel decisions are being orchestrated by Susie Wiles, Trump’s new Chief of Staff. Notably, she was the first person Trump appointed after his election win on November 5,and she transitioned from his campaign team to her new role just two days later on November 7. The New York Times has just released an in-depth profile of Wiles, and it reveals a long and unsavory track record as a corporate lobbyist. Among other clients, Wiles has worked for the Pebble Partnership, a mining firm that wanted to open an “open-pit copper and gold ore mine” in Alaska that was opposed by Native American groups and eventually blocked by the EPA. Wiles also worked for the tobacco company Swisher, which makes those little 99-cent cigars they sell in gas stations:

Swisher has in recent years been battling the Food and Drug Administration over whether flavored cigars should be banned in an effort to curb consumption of tobacco by minors and young adults. Mr. Trump was opposed to flavored tobacco in the past, but recently vowed on social media to “save Vaping again!”

Ms. Wiles helped Swisher by organizing interest groups and others to oppose a potential ban, according to someone familiar with the matter. She has denied influencing the president-elect on the topic.

Like a lot of things Trump says, the phrase “save Vaping again!” is pretty funny in a vacuum. But it’s also worth remembering that the tobacco and vape industry is incredibly predatory and targets children and racial minorities in a deliberate effort to get them addicted to products that damage and even scar their lungs. The fact that someone like Wiles can transition smoothly into the Trump administration from working to keep health-harming products on the shelves indicates that, just like with Swisher, these new government picks don’t exactly have people’s best interests in mind. 

THE QUACKS

Speaking of people who peddle garbage that damages others’ health, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is Trump’s pick to lead the Department of Health and Human Services. This department oversees the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control, and the National Institutes of Health. Of all of Trump’s picks, Kennedy is potentially the most dangerous to the health and well-being of every American, as he will be in charge of the food and medicine that every one of us uses on a daily basis. We repeat: Kennedy is an absolutely terrible pick for this position, and every health and medical organization in the country should strongly oppose Kennedy’s nomination in the strongest language possible.

If there is a crank medical belief out there, there’s a safe bet Kennedy has promoted it at some point in his lengthy career as a public figure. He is most famous for spouting lies and nonsense about vaccines—and for denying his very public stances against vaccines. During the height of the pandemic, he convinced millions of people that the COVID-19 shot might kill them, and promoted ineffective cures like Ivermectin for the illness instead. Before that, he helped to spread unfounded fears that MMR vaccines cause autism. (In fact, his campaign against the measles vaccine may have directly led to an outbreak in Samoa that killed 83 people.) When asked by podcaster Lex Fridman if there are any “safe and effective” vaccines on the market, Kennedy said “no,” and he has pledged to end vaccine mandates for children. He has even said he opposes vaccines that have eradicated deadly diseases like polio, and he tells alarming anecdotes like this from his personal life:

“I see somebody on a hiking trail carrying a little baby and I say to him, ‘Better not get him vaccinated,’[...] If he hears it from 10 other people, maybe he won’t do it, you know, maybe he will save that child.”

Trump, too, has said he’d be willing to ban vaccines if RFK suggested it—although he doesn’t have the authority to do that unilaterally. What’s particularly disturbing about this is that RFK’s position here is essentially one that is against protecting the lives of infants. Vaccines are one of public health’s greatest achievements, and the World Health Organization notes that over 154 million lives worldwide have been saved by vaccines in the last fifty years—the vast majority of these being the lives of infants and measles vaccine being the top contributor. 

Kennedy has been promoting a campaign to “Make America Healthy Again,” and a few aspects of his crusade even seem like they could be on the right track. For instance, RFK is right that a lot of the processed foods that large corporations make available are full of unhealthy ingredients that are not allowed in other countries. He is also right on the fundamental level that the pharmaceutical industry prioritizes its bottom lines over the health of Americans. But when he was asked directly by Krystal Ball in 2023 whether he would support the nationalization of Big Pharma in order to remove the profit motive from that industry, he was quick to say “no.” The profit motive is “human nature,” he said. Well, so much for getting to root problems. And while RFK is correct that directly advertising prescription drugs on TV isn’t in patients’ best interest, this isn’t exactly the most urgent problem in our healthcare system, where people’s lives are threatened every day by lack of insulin or basic care. (On the issue of actual healthcare, does he support Medicare for All? That’s not politically realistic, he said in the same interview. OK, so that’s a No. Quite odd for a man who wants to Make America Healthy Again.) Anyway, whatever scraps of wisdom RFK has to offer are more than drowned out by the sheer volume of pharmaceutical-grade nonsense he believes, including that Wi-Fi causes cancer, that Americans need to drink bacteria-riddled raw milk, that HIV doesn’t cause AIDS, that antidepressants cause mass shootings, and that Americans are being poisoned by chemtrails. Trump has given RFK the authority to, in his words, “run wild” with public health, and it will more than likely be a nightmare for everyone. Make no mistake: more people will die unnecessarily under Kennedy’s leadership.

Likewise, Dr. Mehmet Oz—who Trump has placed in charge of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services—is an outright quack who should have lost his medical license a long time ago. In the course of his long-running TV show, he’s hawked everything from “miracle” weight-loss methods to colloidal silver and hydroxychloroquine, and attained an estimated net worth of over $100 million in the process. And as Andrew Perez points out for The Lever, “Oz and his wife own up to $550,000 worth of stock in UnitedHealth Group and up to $50,000 in CVS Health, which owns Aetna,” so he has a vested interest in healthcare company profits, in direct conflict with the whole purpose of Medicare itself. Speaking of health insurance, Oz has previously said that uninsured Americans “have no right to health” and pitched governors on the idea that, instead of allowing these peasants to have an actual checkup,  they should be allowed to go to 15-minute screenings “in a festival-like setting.” When he ran for Senate in 2022, he also stated that he is “100% pro-life,” that “life starts at conception,” and that abortion is “murder,” so he’ll be a perfect accomplice for the ongoing Republican effort to eliminate reproductive rights. 

THE CLIMATE VANDALS

This year, the U.S. has been hit with all kinds of climate-related disasters, from deadly waves of extreme heat to wildfires on the West Coast and the hurricanes that have devastated Florida and North Carolina. The phrase “natural” disaster does not really apply, as these incidents are linked directly to the continued burning of fossil fuels; really the news coverage of each one should bear a “brought to you in part by Chevron” label. Despite this, Donald Trump—who has previously called the concept of global warming a Chinese hoax—has chosen to put the interests of oil and gas companies first when making environmental and energy policy, and put everyone else dead last. 

For his Secretary of Energy, Trump has appointed Chris Wright—the CEO of a fracking company called “Liberty Energy,” who declared in 2023 that “There is no climate crisis, and we’re not in the midst of an energy transition either.” Since the news of his appointment broke, the company’s stock price has risen almost 5 percent. Like with Dr. Oz and CVS/Aetna, Wright has a direct financial stake in the profits of an industry that he’s ostensibly supposed to be regulating—an obvious conflict of interest. (Will both of them divest their holdings? Don’t count on it.) 

Trump has also named former New York congressman Lee Zeldin to lead the Environmental Protection Agency. Like Wright, Zeldin has made clear that he does not care an ounce about the climate crisis, and has pledged to roll back anti-pollution and energy efficiency measures put in place during the Biden administration. And finally, we would be remiss not to mention the ascent of North Dakota’s Governor Doug Burgum to the role of Secretary of the Interior. In the past, we’ve found Burgum a fairly harmless and even amusing figure, since his quixotic presidential campaign never quite sparked the wave of “Burgumania” that he was probably hoping for. But he’s a mixed bag, to put it lightly: although Burgum at least admits that climate change is real, he also has close ties to billionaire oil CEO Harold G. Hamm, who has reportedly been working with both Burgum and Trump on the White House transition team. The Union of Concerned Scientists says they’re, well, concerned about his new role, and everyone else should be too. Between Burgum, Zeldin, and Wright, this isn’t just bad climate policy; it’s deliberate climate vandalism. Trump might as well be going around lighting America’s forests on fire with a Zippo himself. 

MISCELLANEOUS DEPRAVITY

For the Federal Communications Commission, Trump has nominated Brendan Carr, who wrote the section on the FCC in the Heritage Foundation’s notorious Project 2025. In the past, Carr has called for social media companies to be blocked from banning content from their platforms unless it is actually illegal—in other words, turning every social media platform into sewers of unrestricted hate speech and false information like Elon Musk’s X. Carr has also threatened to revoke the broadcast licenses of Trump’s critics, including NBC, which he says violated the FCC’s “equal time” requirement by allowing Kamala Harris to appear on Saturday Night Live. (In fact, they offered Trump a spot, too, which he declined.) Trump has made no secret of his desire to prosecute journalists and shut down critical outlets in a second term, and Carr does not seem like he’d be opposed to that idea.

For his Secretary of Veterans Affairs, Trump has nominated former Georgia congressman Doug Collins, who is—to put it politely—not known for his extensive experience with veterans’ issues. During his first term, Trump signed the MISSION Act, which put more veterans’ healthcare into the hands of private companies, which charged more and delivered worse care. Biden reeled back the act somewhat, but Collins seems poised to put more veterans’ care in the hands of for-profit companies, close more facilities, and fire more VA employees.

Tom Homan, the former head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), a Project 2025 co-author, and one of the architects of Trump’s unconscionable family separation policy, is his pick for the unofficial position of “border czar.” Homan seems positively giddy to launch the “biggest deportation force this country has ever seen,” pledging to raid workplaces nationwide—something that would likely crash the entire country’s economy if it were to be carried out, along with the obvious human misery it would inflict on immigrants themselves. When asked about family separation, Homan has said simply that “Families can be deported together,” which some have interpreted to mean that American citizens who are the children of undocumented immigrants may be deported as well.

Finally, South Dakota’s Governor Kristi Noem has been chosen to lead Trump’s Department of Homeland Security. (Hide your dog!) Like Homan, she’ll presumably be all-in on Trump’s mass deportation plan. But DHS handles more than just immigration—it deals with emergency responses, too, and Noem is about the worst person you could put in charge of that. She was famously opposed to wearing masks at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, and sent disaster response money to fight migrants at the border rather than help her own constituents with flood recovery. She has also been banned from tribal lands in her state after accusing Native American tribes, without evidence, of helping drug cartels.

At the last count, more than 76 million Americans voted for Donald Trump to be president. Some of them are probably your friends, relatives, classmates, neighbors, and co-workers. But when you cast an eye over the list of his appointees, you have to wonder: is this truly what they thought they were voting for? A government composed of billionaires and lobbyists, crackpots who think the concept of medical science is suspect, and foreign policy hawks who are just itching to go to war with Iran or China? Tabloid celebrities like Dr. Oz and Linda McMahon being placed in charge of whether you get healthcare and education or not? It seems unlikely. Rather, it seems Trump—who’s built his entire career on lies, scams, and fraud—has scammed the American people again, promising to sweep into Washington and clean it out when really he’s going to do the opposite. In the next four years, it will be crucial to expose the real nature of his government and the people who staff it, and demolish the false image they’ve built. When millions of people realize they’ve been taken for a ride—those who survive, anyway—it may finally create the political movement this country needs to “drain the swamp” for real. We just wish it didn’t have to come to this.