Don't Take Us To Narnia

Dear Donald,

I hope you’ve carefully considered the legitimate concerns that people have raised about your appointment of Stephen Bannon as your chief strategist. Today, I want to talk about your cabinet. I had planned to focus today’s letter on education, but I think we should discuss your selection of team members a bit more broadly before you make any rash decisions.

Donald, I’m going to be frank with you: you need cabinet members who will not reinforce negative stereotypes about you. Your opponents have criticized your lack of public policy experience, and have mocked you for being uninformed on important issues. Selection of cabinet members is always a crucial task for new presidents, but never more than now – given your lack of prior experience in government, you are going to need your advisors to help you shape your policies and set the tone for your administration. This is a great opportunity for you to prove your opponents wrong – show them that you are not the unenlightened pretender that they claim you are!

First, you need people who are qualified to hold the positions to which you appoint them. Loyalty to you is NOT enough. If people criticize you for being new to public office, what will they say about your consideration of a city mayor with no discernible foreign policy experience for Secretary of State? Don't open yourself up to accusations of the blind leading the blind - make sure that the people you appoint have the experience and training to do the job. Second, you need to surround yourself with people who represent rational and balanced thinking on key issues. Show the world that you are prepared to be a leader in the age of reason!

Right now, I fear that this is not the direction you’re headed with some of your choices. For example, Ben Carson for Secretary of Education. Look, Donald – I have a LOT more respect for Dr. Carson than many liberals do. I haven’t told you much about myself, but did you know that I’m a doctor? I trained at Johns Hopkins when he was on faculty there – I even got to operate with him once! And he was amazing - he is, as you have said, a brilliant physician. However, this does NOT qualify him to serve as Secretary of Education. The person in this position needs to have intimate knowledge of curriculum development, assessment methodology, educational operations, and program evaluation. There is no reason to believe that any of these are in Dr. Carson’s skill set. But more importantly, Dr. Carson does not exactly embody the kind of rational thought with which you want to align your administration. He is a creationist who believes that the world was literally created in six days. Despite reams of incontrovertible evidence, he denies the existence of evolution. He has even claimed that Joseph built the Egyptian pyramids to store grain, though he has yet to satisfactorily explain how the mummified pharaohs got inside them. Donald, these are fringe beliefs even among Christians, the majority of whom have managed to reconcile religious teachings with advances in science. I completely respect Dr. Carson’s faith, but it has no place in the classroom – not in a society that respects the separation of church and state, and values science and reason.

Another example is Myron Ebell for head of the Environmental Protection Agency (or whatever it is going to become during your presidency). Mr. Ebell is a prominent denier of climate change, and a critic of the Clean Power Plan. Even if you are skeptical of climate change – as I know you are, Donald – you can’t deny that his funding by the coal industry raises questions about the legitimacy of his claims. In science, this is what we call a conflict of interest – and we are required to prominently disclose them in every manuscript and lecture, because they present such great danger of influencing our conclusions. But conflict of interest aside, Mr. Ebell’s assertions about climate change fly in the face of the overwhelming preponderance of scientific evidence on the subject – and isn’t is more far-fetched to believe that all those scientists are part of some vast global conspiracy than it is to simply assume that they’re, you know, RIGHT?

I could go on here, Donald, but I won’t. I have work to do, and I suspect you do too – like finding rational and qualified people to manage your government. I just want to emphasize that your cabinet should not be a secret passage to Narnia. It’s back should not open unexpectedly into a land of myth and mystery, where the most fantastical beliefs are suddenly true (though I will concede that if it had unicorns inside, that would actually be kind of awesome). It should have a nice solid back that adheres to all the known laws of physics, anchoring us firmly in the real world. Building such a cabinet will go a long way towards silencing your naysayers, and earning you the respect of Americans who are intelligent, rational, informed people – a group that I like to think constitutes a majority, on BOTH sides of the aisle.

Warmest wishes,

Jules