The Awfulest of the Awful.

• Author: Hightower, Jim
• Position: VOX POPULIST

In the contest for "Most Awful Member of Donald Trump's Cabinet," you'd assume that Jeff Sessions, the bigoted, memory-challenged twerp now serving as Attorney General, would be a shoo-in. But others, including Scott Pruitt as head of the anti-EPA and Betsy DeVos as head of the anti-Education Department, have upped their levels of awfulness to put their names in play.

And now suddenly, from out of the deepest, meanest darkness of the Trump regime, two arrogant know-nothings battle it out for the title of awfulest.

The first contender is Dr. Ben Carson. As a government, the Trumpeters are fully embracing the right wing's imperious disdain for poor people, blaming them for creating their own economic distress. This is a convenient ideological fabrication for a government intent on destroying our nation's social safety net.

And who better to mouth this rationalization than Dr. Carson, Trump's Secretary of Housing and Urban Development? Raised in poverty, he became a renowned and very wealthy surgeon. So millions of impoverished Americans should just do what Ben did. Carson recently spoke to this, explaining that poverty is just "a state of mind."

Of course, poverty is actually a state of money. It's also a state of joblessness ... of miserly minimum wages... of not having a home... of being disabled ... of limited education... of a prison record... of divorce... of depression ... and of many other hard-knock realities. Carson offers bootstrap babble and adds that America's economic safety net has made poverty too "cozy" for the poor--all of which is a plutocratic fantasy to make Trump & Company feel righteous about trying to cut off the helping hand.

Indeed, Trump has floated the idea of whacking $6 billion from the very agency Carson heads, including cutting a vital program providing rental vouchers for five million very-low-income Americans. These are not shirkers. Nine out of ten of them are elderly, people with disabilities, veterans, or working poor people with children. Slamming the door in their faces condemns most of them to living on the streets. How does that "Make America Great"?

Trump and Carson are incompetent ideologues who are in way over their heads, operating as if gutting government programs will magically make our country's complex problems go away. They're...