This is an adapted excerpt from the May 29 episode of “The Briefing with Jen Psaki.”
For years, Donald Trump has bragged that he only hires the “best people.” But almost six months into his second term, many members of his administration are proving they just aren’t up for the job.
Take former WWE executive Linda McMahon, whom Trump inexplicably put in charge of the Department of Education. On Tuesday, during a Senate hearing, Republican senators did their level best to lob McMahon softball questions to make it look like she knows what she’s doing.
Republican Sen. Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma tried to tee up an easy one, asking the secretary, “What was we ranked nationally in math and reading in 1979?” McMahon responded that the U.S. was “very, very low on the totem pole.” Mullin then had to inform her that we were actually ranked No. 1 in 1979.
Republican senators and Trump’s education secretary spectacularly failed a math and reading quiz of their own making.
In McMahon’s (limited) defense, Mullin’s question was garbled nonsense. I mean, setting aside the strange verb conjugation of “what was we ranked,” he asked how the U.S. ranked “nationally” when he apparently meant “globally.” So clearly neither of these people is getting an A in reading comprehension or grammar.
But what about math? After Republican Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana said the U.S. spends $1.5 billion a year on federal grants for disadvantaged students, the senator claimed that the numbers added up to be “over a trillion dollars” over 10 years.
After McMahon failed to correct the senator’s estimation, Democratic Sen. Jack Reed of Rhode Island had to jump in to educate the pair, pointing out that $1.5 billion multiplied by 10 is not “over a trillion dollars” but actually $15 billion.
Republican senators and Trump’s education secretary failed spectacularly at a math and reading quiz of their own making, while they complained about America falling behind in math and reading.
Unfortunately, McMahon is not the only one of Trump’s “best people” making embarrassing mistakes. This week, David Richardson, the acting chief of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, told staff he had not been aware the country has a hurricane season, four sources familiar with the situation told Reuters.
The Trump administration has said those comments were meant as a joke, but that was definitely not clear to the people in the room. FEMA is now heading into a new hurricane season with a staff that’s been gutted by Trump’s cuts, and the agency’s staff is reportedly worried about Richardson’s lack of experience.
Maybe Richardson should have Googled his job first to see what it entails. After all, that’s what Trump’s equally unqualified Social Security commissioner reportedly did.
Honestly, a little Googling might serve some of them well. Take Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who, last month, released his much-anticipated “The MAHA Report: Make Our Children Healthy Again.” We soon learned that the report was riddled with errors and cited at least seven studies that do not exist.
Kennedy then updated his report in an effort to fix those mistakes, but, as it turns out, they actually added more errors to that revised version. The secretary has now somehow managed to screw up the same report twice.
So things aren’t going great at FEMA, or Social Security, or HHS. But surely the Department of Homeland Security is running like a Swiss watch.
Last week, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem sent out a press release that claimed Immigration and Customs Enforcement had arrested an “Illegal Alien who Threatened to Assassinate President Donald J. Trump.” It included an image of a threatening handwritten letter that Noem claimed had been sent by an undocumented immigrant in Milwaukee named Ramon Morales Reyes.
But it turns out local law enforcement officials do not think Morales Reyes sent that letter. In fact, they think that he was being set up. As The New York Times reports, “Not long after the announcement, the government’s story began to look shaky. … And as detectives in Wisconsin began looking deeper, they came to believe Reyes had been framed.”








