Donald J. Trump has declared war … not against an enemy of the nation he was elected to lead, but against anyone who has a lick of knowledge of the myriad issues that need government’s attention.

Consider these choices for key Cabinet posts: Tulsi Gabbard as Director of National Intelligence; Pete Hegseth as defense secretary; Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as Health and Human Services secretary; John Ratcliffe as CIA director; Matt Gaetz as attorney general.

These are some of the serious clunkers Trump has chosen to lead these agencies. He’s tapped some folks with considerable promise. I like Marco Rubio as secretary of state, provided he holds the line on the illegal Ukraine war.

Trump, though, is managing to slap the crap out of all the mid- and lower-level professionals who do the work in the trenches. These folks get their fingernails dirty carrying out public policy. They are not political appointees.

I do not believe Gaetz or Gabbard will pass the confirmation gauntlet in the U.S. Senate. RFK Jr. also looks to be too badly damaged to lead HHS. Hegseth’s claim to fame is as a Fox Propaganda Channel weekend talk-show co-host.

Imagine you’re a highly trained defense analyst. You spend your days crunching numbers and trying to determine the most efficient ways to spend billions of taxpayer dollars to protect Americans from our enemies. Then you have a defense secretary — Pete Hegseth — who has spent much of his career advancing partisan political matters and who has no earthly idea what is happening deep in the bowels of the Pentagon.

Similar analogies can apply to many of the agencies that might be led by an assortment of fruitcakes, blowhards and know-nothings. They all have a single element in common. They are blindly loyal to a president … and not to the Constitution they took an oath to uphold.