The Least-Qualified Nominee for High Office Ever

When Donald Trump shocked the world by winning office in 2016, I was still laboring away among the lefties in corporate America and not yet rescued by PJ Media. Thus, I was subjected daily to the bitter inanities of that political persuasion.

Naturally, everything the newly elected president did was the Worst Thing Ever. Then as now, lefties loved to disparage Trump's cabinet picks and other nominees as unqualified and inferior. When he named school choice advocate Betsy DeVos as U.S. Department of Education secretary, for example, my co-workers fumed that under the Trump administration, "experience was clearly not required to hold a high office."

I fantasized daily about leaping atop a desk and rounding on all of them. "You all carry on about Trump's picks not having enough experience for their jobs," I would shout in my fantasy, "and yet every one of you voted for Barack Obama in 2008."

It was true: my left-leaning colleagues were all massive Obama supporters. During the first-term junior senator's 2008 campaign, I would point out that the man had zero executive experience and hadn't run so much as a hot dog stand. They shrugged it off. "It doesn't matter. I know he'll surround himself with smart people," they'd deflect.

We all know how that went. President Obama did indeed surround himself with "smart" people in the sense that he picked a lot of academic eggheads with no private sector experience to staff his administration. He expanded budget-busting entitlements, dis-employed whole sectors, polarized and politicized everything, and did pioneering work in the weaponization of governmental agencies against his political enemies.

But what else did anyone expect from a man of Obama's background? Let's review his oh-so-impressive CV at the time he first applied for the job of Leader of the Free World:

• Two years doing corporate research and at the New York Public Interest Research Group
• Several years as a community organizer with a church-based group, the Developing Communities Project
• "Summer associate" (whatever that is) at the Chicago law firm Sidley Austin
• Twelve years as "senior lecturer" at the University of Chicago Law School (a part-time position)
• Eight years as Illinois State Senator (classified as a “full-time lite” position by the National Conference of State Legislatures)
• Four years as the junior U.S. senator from Illinois, two of which were spent running for president
• Has Ivy League degrees
• Wrote a book about himself
• Gave a really good speech once
• Identifies as black.

That's it. That's all it took to convince my lefty coworkers that Obama was qualified to leverage the mighty leviathan of the U.S. federal apparatus. His executive resume was so thin that at one point, Obama declared that running his own campaign had provided him with executive experience. Talk about on-the-job learning.

Now the lefties and their establishment Republican allies are wailing and gnashing their teeth that Trump AG nominee Matt Gaetz is "unqualified." It's true that the man is relatively young, at 42 years of age. He earned his Juris Doctor from the William & Mary Law School in 2007 and was admitted to the Florida Bar in 2008. He spent several years as an attorney with a Florida law firm before he was elected to serve in the Florida House in 2010. After seven years of service there, he put in seven more years in the U.S. House. Speaker Mike Johnson says he's known as "one of the most intelligent members of Congress.”

Related: Calm Down, Everyone. Matt Gaetz Had a Perfectly Good Reason for Resigning From Congress Immediately.

Perhaps Gaetz's most important experience is as the target of the Biden administration's weaponized DOJ. That department is in desperate need of discipline, cleansing, and reform. Its wanton use of armed raids on the homes of political enemies from pro-life demonstrators to journalists to a past president, its ceaseless quest for dirt on Orange Man Bad, its ludicrous judicial discretionary decisions, and more make it the poster child for a Trumpian reset come January. 

So is Matt Gaetz as deeply experienced and qualified as we generally expect a cabinet-level nominee to be? Not really, but he does have a fairly unique experience set that suits the position nicely at this time. And besides, I'm sure he'll surround himself with the very best people.