Trump cabinet

Donald Trump’s ascension to his second presidency comes with a new cadre of followers and sidekicks, in the form of a cabinet built almost entirely from fresh faces. This is not a president interested in continuity, which he signaled early on, stating on social media that Nikki Haley and Mike Pompeo — his erstwhile United Nations ambassador and secretary of state — would have no place in his second administration. The first name wasn’t a surprise, given the obvious tension he had with the woman who was his last challenger in the primary. The second was because Pompeo had been a dutiful supporter of Trump while in office, wrote a book defending their shared record on foreign policy and rejected the opportunity to run himself.

On March 24, 2020, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya co-published an article in the Wall Street Journal, “Is The Coronavirus As Deadly As They Say?” He argued that Covid lockdowns and quarantines had no grounding in scientific fact. That was a rare opinion in those isolated days. Anyone who spoke out against lockdowns, mask mandates, booster shots for toddlers, school closures, business shutdowns and any number of other injustices large and small that stemmed from Covid panic feels vindication today, as Bhattacharya, a sensible, mild-mannered scientist whom former National Institutes of Health head Francis Collins publicly smeared as a “fringe epidemiologist” is about, barring some sort of confirmation calamity, to take Collins’s job.