Eleven weeks into Donald Trump’s second term, much of the president’s White House Cabinet is off to a rough start. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Attorney General Pam Bondi and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, among others, quickly became mired in controversies soon after taking office.
But that list is still growing. The Atlantic reported this week:
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum likes chocolate-chip cookies — preferably freshly baked and still warm. This peculiar fact became the talk of the Department of the Interior in recent weeks after his chief of staff, JoDee Hanson, made an unusual request of the political appointees in his office: Learn to regularly bake cookies for Burgum and his guests, using the industrial ovens at the department headquarters.
The Atlantic’s report, which has not been independently verified by MSNBC or NBC News, added that the Cabinet secretary and his team have also “repeatedly made unusual demands,” including instructing political appointees to act as servers for a multi-course meal, dispatching a U.S. Park Police helicopter for his personal transportation and at one point even telling an appointee to remake cookies that failed to meet Burgum’s standards.
As is usually the case, the administration pushed back against the reporting, with an Interior spokesperson describing the claims as “pathetic smears” from “unnamed cowards.” Similarly, a White House spokesperson dismissed concerns and stood behind the secretary.
Time will tell if the allegations amount to anything, though it’s worth pausing to appreciate the familiarity of the circumstances.
In Trump’s first term, much of his Cabinet ran into serious controversies, and in four instances, Cabinet members were even referred to the Justice Department for possible criminal prosecution. Arguably the most controversial member of them all was Trump’s first interior secretary, Ryan Zinke, whose tenure was almost cartoonishly provocative: The Montana Republican came under at least 15 different investigations before resigning under a cloud of controversy. In December 2018, The New York Times published a round-up of Zinke-related probes, and it was a strikingly long list. Media Matters also put together a timeline of the former interior secretary’s “questionable actions and controversies,” and that list was even longer. In one especially memorable story, Zinke, before Montana voters re-elected him to Congress, was even accused of misusing public resources on, of all things, helicopter rides. Eight years later, if The Atlantic’s reporting is correct, another one of Trump’s choices to lead the Interior Department appears to be reading from a similar playbook.
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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