Nearly eight years ago, Donald Trump nominated Republican Rep. Tom Marino of Pennsylvania to lead the Office of National Drug Control Policy — a position best known to the public as the nation’s “drug czar.” That did not turn out well.
Following explosive reporting from The Washington Post, which found that the GOP congressman championed legislation that hindered federal agents from going after the Big Pharma firms that flooded the country with addictive opioids, Marino’s nomination collapsed and he withdrew from consideration.
Eight years later, the president has a new drug czar in mind, who’s notable for different kinds of reasons. The Washington Post reported:
President Donald Trump said on Friday that he intends to nominate Sara A. Carter, a Fox News contributor, to serve as director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy. “From Afghanistan to our Border, Sarah’s relentless pursuit of Justice, especially in tackling the Fentanyl and Opioid Crisis, has exposed terrorists, drug lords, and sex traffickers,” Trump wrote on his social media platform, Truth Social, misspelling her first name.
One of the reasons the Carter nomination stood out is the growing list of Fox News personalities who’ve landed powerful positions on Team Trump. In January, The New York Times published a tally and found 19 “former Fox News hosts, commentators, on-air medical experts, producers and other personnel” who’d landed jobs in the Republican administration. Soon after, Media Matters published a revised total, putting the new number at 20. (The list did not include Attorney General Pam Bondi, who briefly moonlit as a guest host of a Fox News program while she was serving as Florida’s chief law enforcement official.)
As March got underway, the president also appointed Fox News personalities Laura Ingraham and Maria Bartiromo to the Kennedy Center board, and as March neared its end, Trump added yet another Fox News contributor to his White House operation, tapping Carter to serve as the drug czar.
But complicating matters is the nominee’s resume. As a Stat News report explained, “Carter’s selection comes as a surprise: Her background is not in drug policy, public health, or law enforcement, and she has never served in government.”
Or put another way, Carter will be an amateur, joining Trump’s team of amateurs. It is not exactly a secret that the incumbent president sees governing expertise and policymaking experience as qualities to be avoided. Indeed, during the Republican’s first term, those with expertise and experience tended to be the people who discouraged the president — the first chief executive in American history to reach the Oval Office without any experience in public office at any level — from taking steps he was eager to take. As a result, Trump appears to have gone out of his way to lean into his preference for amateurs in a second term, choosing inexperienced and unqualified loyalists for much of the White House Cabinet. Those who celebrate rookies in positions of influence have reason to celebrate. Those who value qualifications have reason to worry.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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