Is this supposed to make us angry?

In fact, it's something WE should have done. At least as it pertains to Wilbur Ross.

China said on Friday that it has imposed counter-sanctions on United States individuals including former US Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross in response to recent US sanctions on Chinese officials in Hong Kong.

[...]

It was the second time this year that China has imposed sanctions on officials who served under former US President Donald Trump, who adopted a tough line on Beijing and confronted it over trade, business practices, human rights and other issues.

[...]

China also imposed unspecified “reciprocal counter-sanctions” on current and former representatives of a range of organisations, including the Congressional-Executive Commission on China and the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission.

Other institutions named included the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs, the International Republican Institute, Human Rights Watch, and the Washington-based Hong Kong Democracy Council (HKDC).

[...]

White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki told a regular news briefing that the US was “undeterred” by China’s move [...] .

  alJazeera

No doubt.

“These actions are the latest examples of how Beijing punishes private citizens, companies and civil society organisations as a way to send political signals,” Psaki said.

Isn't that why everybody imposes sanctions?

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Drain the swamp, install a sewer - Part whatever

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Three sadsacks begging for a picture caption

Deputy Dawg,  Woody Woodpecker and Hillbilly Bear

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Maybe they're all morons

A new White House-backed ad campaign aims to encourage people who are unemployed or unhappy in their jobs or careers to “find something new.”

The opening ad in the “Find Something New” campaign beginning Tuesday features ordinary people sharing their stories. A companion website provides links to training and other resources. The initiative was swiftly criticized on social media, with some suggesting the effort is insensitive during a pandemic and the widespread unemployment it has caused. Others criticized the involvement of Ivanka Trump, President Donald Trump’s daughter and White House adviser.

  AP

Didn't George W Bush offer the same advice to people, only with the addition of "go back to college"? Hell, it might have been Obama.

The campaign is a product of the American Workforce Policy Advisory Board, which Trump created in 2018. The board is co-chaired by Ivanka Trump and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross.

There's your problem, right there.

“There has never been a more critical time for Americans of all ages and backgrounds to be aware of the multiple pathways to career success and gain the vocational training and skills they need to fill jobs in a changing economy,” said Ivanka Trump, who graduated from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School.

Ivanka, darling. The changing economy is changing to one of health service/restaurant jobs - the two areas most dangerous to be working in right now.

The initial 30-second spot features ordinary people talking about their experiences with career challenges and transitions. Among them are a fitness instructor who completed an apprenticeship program and became a welder after her gym went under, and a man who lost his job twice in one year, took online certification courses and now works as a tech consultant.

“I got laid off twice, but you got to keep going,” the man says, adding later on in the ad: “I’m now a consultant in the tech space.”

My god, could the ad be any more depressing?

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE:

Just as we've been saying

He owns stock.

While Dr. Anthony Fauci has urged caution in using hydroxychloroquine, some doctors are prescribing it to patients who have the virus despite the fact it has never been tested for it.

[...]

President Trump made a rare appearance in the Situation Room on Sunday as his pandemic task force was meeting, determined to talk about the anti-malaria medicine that he has aggressively promoted lately as a treatment for the coronavirus.

[...]

Day after day, the salesman turned president has encouraged coronavirus patients to try hydroxychloroquine with all of the enthusiasm of a real estate developer. The passing reference he makes to the possible dangers is usually overwhelmed by the full-throated endorsement. “What do you have to lose?” he asked five times on Sunday.

[...]

Bolstered by his trade adviser, a television doctor, Larry Ellison of Oracle and Rudolph W. Giuliani, a former New York mayor, Mr. Trump has seized on the drug as a miracle cure for the virus that has killed thousands and paralyzed American life.

[...]

If hydroxychloroquine becomes an accepted treatment, several pharmaceutical companies stand to profit, including shareholders and senior executives with connections to the president. Mr. Trump himself has a small personal financial interest in Sanofi, the French drugmaker that makes Plaquenil, the brand-name version of hydroxychloroquine.

[...]

Sanofi’s largest shareholders include Fisher Asset Management, the investment company run by Ken Fisher, a major donor to Republicans, including Mr. Trump. A spokesman for Mr. Fisher declined to comment.

Another investor in both Sanofi and Mylan, another pharmaceutical firm, is Invesco, the fund previously run by Wilbur Ross, the commerce secretary. Mr. Ross said in a statement Monday that he “was not aware that Invesco has any investments in companies producing” the drug, “nor do I have any involvement in the decision to explore this as a treatment.”

As of last year, Mr. Trump reported that his three family trusts each had investments in a Dodge & Cox mutual fund, whose largest holding was in Sanofi.

[...]

Several generic drugmakers are gearing up to produce hydroxychloroquine pills, including Amneal Pharmaceuticals, whose co-founder Chirag Patel is a member of Trump National Golf Course Bedminster in New Jersey.

[...]

Amneal announced last month that it would increase production of the drug and donate millions of pills to New York and other states.

  NYT

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE:

Jesus, these people

Such caring.

There's a vote for germ warfare. Perhaps makes some Chinese wonder if it's already been deployed.

Census rigging hearing

Nice try, Wilbur.

Because your favorite president can't admit a mistake

Deputy Dawg was in the Sharpie scandal even though he was out of the country.

The Secretary of Commerce [Wilbur Ross] threatened to fire top employees at NOAA on Friday after the agency’s Birmingham office contradicted President Trump’s claim that Hurricane Dorian might hit Alabama, according to three people familiar with the discussion.

That threat led to an unusual, unsigned statement later that Friday by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration disavowing the office’s own position that Alabama was not at risk. The reversal caused widespread anger within the agency and drew criticism from the scientific community that NOAA, a division of the Commerce Department, had been bent to political purposes.

[...]

Mr. Ross phoned Neil Jacobs, the acting administrator of NOAA, from Greece where the secretary was traveling for meetings and instructed Dr. Jacobs to fix the agency’s perceived contradiction of the president.

  NYT

Did Deputy Dawg get a phone call from Old Lardass?

Dr. Jacobs objected to the demand and was told that the political staff at NOAA would be fired if the situation was not fixed, according to the three individuals, who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the episode. Unlike career government employees, political staff are appointed by the administration. They usually include a handful of top officials, such as Dr. Jacobs, and their aides.

Sadly, Dr. Jacobs didn't have the moral courage to refuse to debase himself.

[A] senior administration official who asked not to be identified when discussing internal deliberations said that the Birmingham office had been wrong and that NOAA had simply done the responsible thing and corrected the record.

That official suggested the Twitter post by the Birmingham forecasters had been motivated by a desire to embarrass the president more than concern for the safety of people in Alabama. The official provided no evidence to support that conclusion.

Another staffer thrown under the bus.

On Monday, Craig N. McLean, NOAA’s acting chief scientist, sent an email to staff members notifying the agency that he was looking into “potential violations” in the agency’s decision to ultimately back Mr. Trump’s statements rather than those of its own scientists. He called the agency’s action “a danger to public health and safety.”

At least somebody's got some integrity. He'll get fired, of course.

On Monday, the National Weather Service director, Louis W. Uccellini, got a standing ovation from [attendees at a weather industry conference in Huntsville, Alabama,] when he praised the work of the Birmingham office and said staff members there had acted “with one thing in mind, public safety” when they contradicted Mr. Trump’s claim that Alabama was at risk.

Courage is contagious.

Cue nasty tweets about the courageous scientists and the New York Times.

And impeach the motherfucker.

UPDATE:



There was no degrading to be done.  Wilbur Ross was already as low as a person can possibly get.

UPDATE:  Email letter from McLean

Excerpt:

As I'm sure you also know, there was a complex issue involving the President commenting on the path of the hurricane. The NWS Forecaster(s) corrected any public misunderstanding in an expert and timely way, as they should. There followed, last Friday, an unsigned press release from "NOAA" that inappropriately and incorrectly contradicted the NWS forecaster. My understanding is that this intervention to contradict the forecaster was not based on science but on external factors including reputation and appearance, or simply put, political. Our NOAA Scientific Integrity Policy and Code of Scientific Conduct make clear that all NOAA employees shall approach all scientific activities with honesty, objectively, and completely, without allegiance to individuals, organizations, or ideology. The content of this press release is very concerning as it compromises the ability of NOAA to convey life-saving information necessary to avoid substantial and specific danger to public health and safety. If the public cannot trust our information, or we debase our forecaster's warnings and products, that specific danger arises. 

 [...] 

In my role as Assistant Administrator for Research, and as I continue to administratively serve as Acting Chief Scientist, I am pursuing the potential violations of our NOAA Administrative Order on Scientific Integrity. Thankfully, we have such policies that are independently cited as among the best in the federal community, if not the best. Your NOAA and OAR management and leadership team believes in these policies and principles. I have a responsibility to pursue these truths. I will.

 

Deputy Dawg can't stay awake

Politico article.

But wait...

I thought he was going to delay the census if they didn't do what he wants.

Yesterday:



Today:

Do you trust Wilbur Ross?

Define "shared".
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

He wants MORE immigrants

This from ultra-right Breitbart:

President Donald Trump said Wednesday that American businesses needed more immigration to help grow their businesses in a revitalized economy.

“Well, we’re going going [sic] to have a lot of people coming into the country, we want a lot of people coming in and we need it, it’s not a question of do we want it,” the president said, in response to a question from reporters at the end of a White House meeting of his American Workforce Policy Advisory Board.

[...]

“We’re going to let a lot of people come in because we need workers. They have to have workers,” Trump said, citing current low unemployment statistics in the United States. “In one way, I love it. But in another way, I don’t want to make it hard for you to get those companies rolling with really great people.”

Trump added that the workforce policy advisory board would also help provide opportunities for American workers in American companies.

“Our great workers. Nobody has workers like we do,” he said at the beginning of the meeting.

The board is co-chaired by Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross and Ivanka Trump and includes Apple CEO Tim Cook, Lockheed Martin CEO Marillyn Hewson, Siemens CEO Barbara Humpton, IBM CEO Virginia Rometty, and Home Depot CEO Craig Menear.

[...]

Since taking office, Trump has repeatedly cited the booming economy as a reason to allow more legal immigration into the country, despite his promise to help create more jobs and wage growth for the American worker.

“Companies are roaring back into our country, and now we want people to come in,” Trump said last week at the Conservative Political Action Conference. “We need workers to come in, but they’ve got to come in legally, and they’ve got to come in through merit, merit, merit.”

  Breitbart

And no brown-skins, please. 

Companies are not roaring back into our country, and I don't imagine this will help his ratings or stop his heartland supporters from crying about immigrants taking all our jobs.  "The economy" may be doing well, but they're not.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

You can always count on Breitbart

The government's top ethics watchdog disclosed Tuesday that it had refused to certify a financial disclosure report from Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross.

In a filing, the Office of Government Ethics said it wouldn't certify the 2018 annual filing by Ross because he didn't divest stock in a bank despite stating otherwise. The move could have legal ramifications for Ross and add to pressure for a federal probe.

[...]

A federal ethics agreement required that Ross divest stock worth between $1,000 and $15,000 in BankUnited by the end of May 2017, or within 90 days of the Senate confirming him to the Commerce post. He previously reported selling the stock twice, first in May 2017 and again in August 2018 as part of an annual disclosure required by OGE.

However, Ross didn't sell the stock in the agreed upon time period in 2017 and then made the two filings indicating he did, the Center for Public Integrity first reported in December 2018. The nonprofit, which obtained the OGE documents, claimed Ross's failure to sell the stock was "the latest in a series of inaccurate statements and omissions in Ross' personal financial statements."

OGE guidelines allow the Justice Department to impose civil fines or take criminal action in cases where an individual "knowingly" files false information.

  CNBC

What do you think? A warning maybe?

Ross said the "100 shares were worth approximately $3,700, an amount that federal regulations deem de minimis and below the threshold of a possible conflict of interest. Therefore, even if a BankUnited matter had come before the Department while I owned the shares — and I have not been made aware of any such matter — I would not have been disqualified from working on it.

[...]

"I previously reported selling the shares on May 31, 2017 based on a mistaken belief that the agent executed my sell order on that date."

You know, Ross is old, and sleeps a lot. I can believe he didn't have a clue about a lot of things. Not so sure his money was one of those things.

via Gfycat

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

No big deal, says Velvet Slippers Guy

So let's have a look at an interesting chart provided by Paul Krugman:



Job! Jobs! Jobs!

The best people

Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross says he does not understand why federal employees who are furloughed or have been working without pay during the partial government shutdown would need assistance from food banks.

[...]

“Because, as I mentioned before, the obligations that they would undertake, say borrowing from a bank or a credit union are in effect federally guaranteed.”

[...]

“Put it in perspective, you’re talking about 800,000 workers, and while I feel sorry for the individuals that have hardship cases, 800,000 workers if they never got their pay, which is not the case they will eventually get it, but if they never got it, you’re talking about a third of a percent on our GDP,” he said of the affected federal employees. “So, it’s not like it’s a gigantic number overall.”

  Roll Call

Ross has got to go.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE:




Sad to say I don't even know if that's a joke.  Because he does seem quite fond of velvet slippers.

Dear God, it's NOT a joke!

UPDATE:  There goes another one:




And...why is anyone asking for Lara Trump's statement?

President Donald Trump’s daughter-in-law Lara Trump had this to say to the approximately 800,000 federal employees who aren’t being paid as the historic government shutdown is in its 33rd day:

“It’s not fair to you and we all get that, but this is so much bigger than any one person,” she told Bold TV on Monday when asked what she’d tell these workers.

“It is a little bit of pain, but it’s going to be for the future of our country, and their children and their grandchildren and generations after them will thank them for their sacrifice,” she said. “Right now, I know it’s hard. I know people have families, they have bills to pay, they have mortgages, they have rents that are due.”

She said that the president is “trying to come up with a good solution here,”

  Politico

The best people

U.S. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross twice submitted sworn statements to ethics officials saying he had divested stock that he in fact still owned, a new document obtained by the Center for Public Integrity reveals.

[...]

Ross was supposed to sell his BankUnited, Inc. stock, valued at up to $15,000, within 90 days of his Senate confirmation, according to his federal ethics agreement — in other words, by the end of May 2017.

Ross twice submitted disclosure reports to federal ethics officials saying he had divested the stock — once in a transaction report from May 2017 and another time in his annual financial disclosure from August 2018.

[...]

The disclosure, in a new filing by Ross, represents the latest in a series of inaccurate statements and omissions in Ross’ personal financial statements since President Donald Trump tapped him as Commerce secretary in late 2016.

  Public Integrity

Advice of counsel. I'm sure he'll say he leaves those matters up to his personal broker.

Ross acknowledged he had previously reported selling the stock, and said he had done so “based on a mistaken belief that the agent executed my sell order on that date.”

Of course.

The BankUnited stock comprises a tiny fraction of the wealthy Ross’ assets, but it is the latest example of Ross failing to divest something he said he had sold. He had previously failed to sell his Invesco Ltd. stock, valued at between $10 million and $50 million, until December 2017, even though in November 2017, he had told federal ethics officials he had complied with his ethics agreement and divested everything he had been required to divest.

An honest mistake. Made twice.

Ross had also previously reported late divestitures of stock in Sun Bancorp Inc., the Greenbrier Companies Inc. and Air Lease Corp. In all cases, he said he had been unaware that he had still owned the stock, and moved to divest it when he found out.

Okay, three times.

In July, the acting head of the Office of Government Ethics, David Apol, sent Ross an unusually blistering letter about his disclosure problems. Apol wrote that Ross’ failure to divest assets by the deadline in his federal ethics agreement “created the potential for a serious criminal violation on your part and undermined public confidence.”

Apol urged Ross to devote the resources necessary to ensure that the report he was required to file in August and all future reports “are complete and accurate.”

In response to that letter, Ross issued a statement saying he took his ethics obligations seriously, and his errors had been inadvertent.

Just one more time. Why don't you believe him?

Ethics watchdogs said Ross no longer deserves the benefit of the doubt.

“This is the latest in a series of omissions and claimed mistakes that have begun to add up to something that looks very suspicious,” said Austin Evers, executive director of American Oversight, a nonprofit watchdog group. “Wilbur Ross clearly is not taking his ethics obligations seriously. He’s been warned and at this point he needs a full audit by OGE and probably Congress to make sure he’s not operating with blatant conflict of interest.”

[...]

“There are rules in place,” [Delaney Marsco, ethics counsel for the Campaign Legal Center, a nonprofit watchdog group] said, adding that if he had followed OGE’s instructions to carefully vet his August financial disclosure, he would have realized sooner than October that the stock had not been sold. “It shows a lack of reverence towards the ethics program and a disregard for the rules,” she said.

Just following the example set by his boss.

Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., the ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee, has asked the Department of Justice to investigate. Sen. John Thune, R-S.D., has asked the Commerce Department inspector general to examine whether Ross violated conflict of interest laws.

I'm sure they'll get right on that.

Every time I see a picture of Wilbur Ross, I think of Droopy Dog.




An evil twin of Droopy Dog.

Why do I get the feeling that Wilbur Ross attended some of Jeffrey Epstein's parties?

Meanwhile in the Trump Court

You may have forgotten in all the noise that the administration* was planning to reintroduce a citizenship question on the 2020 Census. The Census is the province of the Department of Commerce, presently under the direction of Secretary Wilbur Ross, a man who once claimed to have misplaced two billion dollars.

A group of state attorneys general found all of this very suspicious and filed a lawsuit. Ross tried to fob the whole thing off on the Department of Justice. Back in July, a federal judge allowed the lawsuit to proceed, and, in doing so, announced that Ross's reasons for including the citizenship question were, at best, at variance with what the judge believed to be the truth.

[...]

In short, two departments of this administration* concocted a bogus story to add a bogus citizenship question to the census for purely political reasons as part of its overall plan to rig the immigration system in profoundly racist ways. And a federal judge caught them—and Ross, as well. Enter Associate Justice Neil Gorsuch.

On Monday, the Supreme Court blocked a deposition that Ross was scheduled to give as part of that lawsuit. (It allowed another deposition to go forward.) But, as Stern explains, Gorsuch wanted to go much further in deference to the current executive branch.

In a partial dissent, Gorsuch, joined by Thomas, wrote that he would have blocked both officials’ depositions, as well as any discovery beyond the record the Commerce Department already compiled.

[...]

Gorsuch conveniently leaves out Furman’s most critical finding: that Ross lied about his reasons for adding the citizenship question. Initially, Ross insisted—under oath before Congress—that he began considering the question in response to the DOJ’s request. A document obtained in discovery, however, reveals that Ross himself pushed the DOJ to submit this request, contradicting his earlier sworn testimony.

[...]

During his decade on the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, Gorsuch built his reputation as a skeptic of the “administrative state,” those executive branch agencies tasked with implementing federal law. He is an outspoken critic of the rule that courts should defer to these agencies’ reasonable interpretations of ambiguous statutes...Apparently not. Instead of sticking to his principles, Gorsuch is running interference for the Trump administration, urging the courts to let the administrative state misapply federal law and then suppress all evidence under the guise of privilege. That’s a disappointing departure from the justice’s legal philosophy—one that seems tailored to let Wilbur Ross sabotage the census in an effort to entrench Republican power for a decade.

Sooner or later, Camp Runamuck will close down for good. But that which the Republicans sold their collective souls to entrench will be with us for years.

  Charles P Pierce

I wish I could be as sure this administration will pass in time.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

So much winning

Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross went on TV in early March to defend the tariffs and proclaimed they would be “no big deal.” The tariffs, he maintained, would have a “broad” but “trivial” impact on prices.

While holding up a can of Campbell’s soup on live television, Secretary Ross asked, if a can of soup goes up by 2.6 pennies worth of steel, “Who in the world is going to be bothered?” Clearly, a lot more than he thought.

Ask any U.S. manufacturer, and they’ll tell you they need access to competitively priced raw materials to stay viable in the U.S. market and their export markets.

[...]

At the time of [the steel and aluminum tariff] announcement earlier this year, the Commerce Department estimated that it would receive 4,500 exclusion requests from the steel tariff and 1,500 from the aluminum tariffs.

Fast forward to today. U.S. manufacturers so far have filed over six times that amount and are still filing. Commerce wildly underestimated the number of exclusion requests they would receive.

[...]

Commerce estimated it would take 24,000 hours of Commerce staff time to process these requests (four hours per request). By our count, and using Commerce’s own calculations of four hours per request, it would take 178,000 hours, which is equivalent to over 50 people working full time for nearly two years. And the requests are still coming in.

  The Hill

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Drain the swamp

It is difficult to imagine the possibility that a man like [Wilbur] Ross, who Forbes estimates is worth some $700 million, might steal a few million from one of his business partners. Unless you have heard enough stories about Ross. Two former WL Ross colleagues remember the commerce secretary taking handfuls of Sweet’N Low packets from a nearby restaurant, so he didn’t have to go out and buy some for himself. One says workers at his house in the Hamptons used to call the office, claiming Ross had not paid them for their work. Another two people said Ross once pledged $1 million to a charity, then never paid. A commerce official called the tales “petty nonsense,” and added that Ross does not put sweetener in his coffee.

[...]

Those who’ve done business with Ross generally tell a consistent story, of a man obsessed with money and untethered to facts. “He’ll push the edge of truthfulness and use whatever power he has to grab assets,” says New York financier Asher Edelman. One of Ross’ former colleagues is more direct: “He’s a pathological liar.”

  Forbes

Is the whole damned administration like this?

There are bigger allegations. Over several months, in speaking with 21 people who know Ross, Forbes uncovered a pattern: Many of those who worked directly with him claim that Ross wrongly siphoned or outright stole a few million here and a few million there, huge amounts for most but not necessarily for the commerce secretary. At least if you consider them individually. But all told, these allegations—which sparked lawsuits, reimbursements and an SEC fine—come to more than $120 million. If even half of the accusations are legitimate, the current United States secretary of commerce could rank among the biggest grifters in American history.

[...]

“The SEC has never initiated any enforcement action against me,” Ross said in a statement, failing to mention the $2.3 million fine it levied against his firm in 2016.

[...]

Donald Trump termed Ross a “legendary Wall Street genius” and named him to his cabinet. “In these particular positions,” Trump explained to a crowd of supporters, “I just don’t want a poor person.”

From Ross’ vantage point, Trump offered the perfect exit. The future cabinet secretary’s private equity funds were underperforming—one on track to lose 26% of its initial value and another two dribbling out mediocre returns—and the accusations were starting to pile up. Roughly two months before the 2016 presidential election, the SEC announced WL Ross was paying a fine and refunding $11.9 million it allegedly skimmed from its investors, including interest.

[...]

[W]hen Ross and his colleagues got certain fees for working on deals, they were supposed to give at least 50% of that money back to investors. But, according to SEC investigators, the firm gave back less than it suggested it would and pocketed the difference, leading the feds to conclude Ross’ firm broke laws that prohibit defrauding and misleading clients.

[...]

In June, two senators and a congressman asked the Securities & Exchange Commission to launch an insider trading investigation of Ross, based on revelations that Ross shorted at least $100,000 in Putin-linked Navigator Holdings, soon after being told about a forthcoming exposé on his connection to the company.

[...]

After assuring senators during his confirmation hearing that he would be overly cautious on ethical matters, Ross spent the majority of his first year in office as a business partner to the Chinese government, while he negotiated U.S.-China trade relations. He also waited to get rid of a stake in a Cypriot bank reportedly tied up in the Robert Mueller investigation. And he took months to divest an interest in a foreign car parts manufacturer whose industry he is now investigating.

Sounds like they didn't look into Ross very closely. What a surprise.

The central matter in all of Ross’ legal issues is his own credibility. “Lying on an ethics disclosure form, to Congressional and Senate committees, and falsely reporting compliance with an ethics plan, is neither ‘commonplace’ nor part of the accepted rough-and-tumble world of politics,” David Storper, Ross’ former right-hand man, argued in a court filing. “They are just lies.” Adds another onetime colleague: “This is a public servant who can’t tell the truth.”

Sounds par for the course in the Trump administration, led from the top.

There's much, much more in this Forbes article. Check it out.

"Nothing but the best people" is never not going to be funny.

  Charles P Pierce

Loyalty only goes one way

Investor Wilbur Ross was brought into the administration as one of President Donald Trump’s “killers” – but in recent months, the commerce secretary has been increasingly marginalized, with his agency widely seen in the White House as a mess.

Trump himself has lashed out at Ross in Oval Office meetings, telling the man who once helped bail him out in Atlantic City that he’s “past his prime” and “no longer a killer” and trying to bench him from making trade deals, according to three people familiar with the comments. Despite being one of the administration’s leading protectionist voices early on, Ross was initially left off a May trade delegation to China led by Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin.

  Politico

Wilbur Ross was only given the job because of his past collusion with Trump. What's he done to piss off the mob boss?

Ross is heading back to China in early June in hope of cutting some type of trade deal that delivers on Trump’s campaign promises to extract concessions from Beijing on behalf of American workers.

[...]

“The fact that he is going over to China is a signal that the president has some confidence in him. He likes Ross even if he does not consider him a killer,” said one former administration official. “But it’s also a signal that they are not expecting a whole lot. You would not send him if you were expecting real progress.”

Not if he's going to sleep during meetings.

The president likes him because he sucks up. If he stops doing that, he'll be out on his ear.

Originally, Ross had hoped to play the alpha dog on trade policy. He tried to establish his dominance early on by launching a Commerce Department investigation into the effects of steel and aluminum imports on national security. He even maintained an office in the Eisenhower Executive Office building on the White House grounds, keeping him in close proximity to Trump.

But he has been outmaneuvered by U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer, who was confirmed in May 2017 — the last of Trump’s Cabinet officials to pass through the Senate. Lighthizer quickly morphed into a power player and launched his own investigations into cybertheft and Chinese trade demands.

[...]

One senior administration official noted that Ross remains invaluable to Trump because of his deep familiarity to China given the many deals he conducted in the country as an investor. The two also run in many of the same social circles and still see one another at Mar-a-Lago where Ross remains a member.

[...]

The focus on trade – most recently, imposing tariffs and dealing with the Chinese electronics company ZTE — has put Ross in the middle of the biggest fights dividing Trump’s economic advisers.

[...]

Under Ross’ leadership, the Commerce Department has seen an exodus of five top Republican appointees, leaving the agency in the hands of three Ross loyalists who work on the building’s fifth floor and control most decisions emanating from the building.

These aides are focused on fulfilling Ross’ wishes on trade policy, sometimes to the detriment of the agency’s other wide-ranging responsibilities, which include 12 different bureaus and offices that cover everything from economic analysis to NOAA to minority business development, the U.S. census, and patents.

[...]

“Ross has been involved and then totally uninvolved on trade and the reason is because his whole mode is to tell the president whatever he wants to hear,” said one of the close advisers to the White House. “He is always trying to guess what the president will say. In the beginning, that was easier because the president was more predictable. But Ross did not get the message that Trump now wants to win the Nobel Peace Prize and doesn’t want to launch a trade war.”

Is this the most back-stabbing, chaotic administration in US history?

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.