Compliment Trump, you might end up in his cabinet | The Columnists

The Rear Admiral Ronny L Jackson is highly qualified as a doctor. He served in Iraq as the man in charge of resuscitative medicine for a Surgical Shock Trauma Platoon, he was picked as a White House physician in 2006, and has been working in Pennsylvania Avenue ever since. In 2013, President Obama made him the Physician to the President, a position he retained with the election of Donald Trump in 2016. What the Rear Admiral Ronny L Jackson is not highly qualified for is running the Department for Veteran Affairs.

But Ronny Jackson this week found himself as the nominee to fill the latest vacant position in Trump’s merry-go-round of a cabinet. David Schulkin, the previous Secretary, was fired, as David Graham put it in The Atlantic, “nominally”, because of a summer trip to Europe that Schulkin used taxpayer’s money to take his wife on. He paid the government back, as he said he had always intended to, but the media storm surrounding the issue had put pressure on him.

What others, including David Schulkin himself have said, is that Schulkin was fired as a result of his opposition to the increasing moves to privatise the work of the Veteran Affairs department. Schulkin commented in an op-ed for the New York Times (an op-ed so timely it must have been pre-written in the event of his dismissal) that…