No Is Not Enough: Resisting Trump's Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need

by Naomi Klein

Trump’s cabinet of billionaires and multimillionaires tells us a great deal about the administration’s underlying goals. ExxonMobil for secretary of state. General Dynamics and Boeing to head the department of defense. And the Goldman Sachs guys for pretty much everything that’s left. The handful of career politicians who have been put in charge of agencies seem to have been selected either because they do not believe in the agency’s core mission, or do not think the agency should exist at all. Steve Bannon, Trump’s apparently sidelined chief strategist, was very open about this when he addressed a conservative audience in February 2017. The goal, he said, was the “deconstruction of the administrative state” (by which he meant the government regulations and agencies tasked with protecting people and their rights). And “if you look at these Cabinet nominees, they were selected for a reason, and that is deconstruction.”