Ana Navarro (3:19)
Hey everyone, it's been a chaotic week again. In the news, all sorts of things are happening. But today I want us to spend a little time highlighting what the fuck is going on with Donald Trump's Cabinet. Seriously, what the bleep is happening with these people? It's like secretaries gone rogue. Secretaries gone wild. We're going to have a great show. We're going to talk about it one by one, some of the best or worst moments of some of these secretaries. Because I think it's, you know, it's so much that I kind of feel like the cumulative insanity of it all we are missing. So let's break it down. So listen, I have found it. Cringe, as the young people say, amusing, disgusting, the whole thing. I mean, it's just insane. I can't overuse the word insane when it comes to Trump's misadministration. But this cabinet in particular, it is so different from Trump's cabinet in his first term. I mean, that was bad enough, but at least there were people in that cabinet who were qualified, who had some sort of moral compass. Most of them ended up getting fired, of course, when they didn't do exactly what Trump wanted and they didn't genuflect enough. So Trump term two, he has surrounded himself by, yes, men and women, highly unqualified, some of them highly immoral, doing performance art for him on a daily basis. And I think we should talk about some of them first. Let's start with our dear Secretary of Commerce, the Honorable Howard Lutnick. Okay, so Howard Lutnick is a very wealthy finance guy from New York, been a friend of Trump's for decades from the New York surge circles. But here's the part I want us to focus on so last year, in 2025, late last year, he was on this podcast because it turns out Howard Lutnick and Jeffrey Epstein were next door neighbors for like a decade in New York. One of them lived on 9 North, 9 East 71st Street. The other one lived next door, 11 East 71st Street. Maybe we should start doing tours of New York where we go and see these infamous mansions. Anyways, Howard Lutnick goes on this podcast late last year, and he goes on and on and on for five minutes talking about how he had met Epstein once and how he and his wife had been so disgusted and creeped out and just found him so icky and gross that one time that he had never again been under the same roof with Jeffrey Epstein the rest of his life. Not in financial circles, not philanthropy, not philanthropy, not social. Social circles. That's all it took, one time. And I thought to myself, you know, that's pretty impressive of Howard Lutnick, except that as the new batch of Epstein documents were released in early February, we learned that he was lying. Not only was he lying, at some point the Lutnicks contacted Epstein to ask Epstein for the coordinates of his island, okay, so that they could dock their yacht on that Pedo Island. They took their children, they took their nannies, and they went to lunch there. And they ended up having had much more of a relationship than Howard Lutnick first admitted to. And this is one of these cases where the secretary does protest too much because frankly, if he hadn't gone on that rant trying to be holier than that when it came to Epstein, he wouldn't look as stupid and as much of a bold faced liar and as hypocritical as he does. Once we saw what came out from the Epstein files, this latest batch of the Epstein files, God knows what else might come out if and when we see the remaining files. Okay, so that's Howard Lutnick. Now let's move on to Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noemi. Okay, so I don't know if you guys have heard about this, but she's got this acting senior advisor who's practically her chief of staff. His name is Corey Lewandowski. I actually know him because I worked with him on. He was a CNN contributor for a hot five minutes. We coincided. I didn't like him then, I don't like him now. But it turns out that Kristi Noem apparently likes him a lot. Like a lot. Word on the street is they are having an affair. I think Lewandowski's married. I Don't know about Kristi Noem, but the whole thing is pretty sorted. But here's where it gets even better. Here's where the telenovela takes a curb. Oh, and by the way, he's in some sort of special role, unpaid advisory role that he can only be at for 130 days, which he's well passed. But forget government ethics. Who needs to worry about little things like that when you have important things to worry about, like the secretary's safety blanket. So the story came out that Lewandowski fired a US Coast Guard pilot of a plane after Kristi Noem left her blankie on the plane and it got lost when they moved to a different plane. The best part about this, though, was that apparently they had to rehire the Coast Guard pilot because they had nobody to fly the plane. So that's a problem if you're gonna fire the pilot on the spot, if you're going to go on a crazy tirade and get pissed over your lost security blanket. Which reminds me of that character in Peanuts. Do you all remember there was like the one little boy who always carried his little blankie with him? J.B. linus. Okay, so we've now got Secretary of Homeland Security Linus from the Peanuts comic strip. If you're going to fire your pilot, you better have another pilot, unless you can fly your own plane. Okay, so not to be outdone, we've talked about Lutnik, we've talked about Nome Deportation Barbie, as I like to call her. But not to be outdone, let us now talk about RFK Jr. Oh, yes, RFK Jr. How can we forget him? Just a couple of weeks ago, he was on a podcast with Theo Vaughn talking about the good old days when he used to snort cocaine off toilet seats. Yes, you heard that. But if that wasn't enough, a few days later, he dropped a video on social media where he is shirtless, wearing jeans, doing a full workout with Kid Rock. I think they're like in a sauna or something. And RFK the human, the Health Secretary, is there in his jeans, which I think is weird. For somebody to be working out in jeans and shirtless strikes me as weird. Even more weird is when he goes on to do a cold plunge in the same jeans and shirtless, and he's like on this sauna thing doing a sauna routine with Kid Rock and they're drinking. It is crazy that the Secretary of Health and Human Services would be engaging in this kind of behavior and that nobody would say to him, sir, maybe you shouldn't post this on social media because maybe you don't give people confidence on your advice when it comes to Health and Human Services, and you look ridiculous. I mean, where is his wife? Are there no people around him telling him that this is stupid and inappropriate and cringy and. All right, so now we've talked About Lutnick Noem, RFK Jr. Oh, yes. How could I forget the Lady Macbeth of the entire Cabinet, Pam Bondi. And, you know, I've known Pam Bondi for a long time. I knew her when she was Attorney General of Florida. Folks, I don't recognize this woman who I see doing the performances that she does. They look like high school auditions for Cruella deville when she is in the, you know, testifying in front of the Senate or in front of the House of Representatives. The last one, she was in front of the House of Representatives, but they had her number. She had, you know, her burn book where she comes up with oppo research on each and every Democrat on the committee that she can retort with and humiliate them with. But they knew what they were doing. They'd seen her do this already in front of the Senate. So the act seemed infantile, seemed old, seemed stupid. I thought the worst part of it all, for me, frankly, wasn't her theatrics and her burns and insults. Ad hominem insults, which I think have no place in a place like a congressional hearing, particularly from the Attorney General of the United States. These are positions that are supposed to have gravitas and be serious. And I think they require some level of decorum and respect for the office. But to me, that wasn't the worst part. The worst part about the Pam Bondi testimony was the fact that there were Epstein survivors, women who had been young girls and victimized by Jeffrey Epstein, who were sitting in that hearing, sitting a few rows behind her in that hearing. And they were asked to get up at some point, to stand up and raise their hands if any of them had offered to give testimony, to give their testimony to Department of Justice. And they all said they had all offered. Then they were all asked if the Department of Justice had contacted any of them. And they all, without exemption, said no. None of them had been contacted by Pam Bondi's doj. But the worst part was that Pam Bondi never once turned around to so much as acknowledge their presence, to look them in the eye and apologize. Apologize for what her Department of Justice hasn't done and has done, like, not redact their names, hasn't done. Like, not meet with them, not take them up on their offer to meet with the Department of Justice officials, but also the things that have been done by other Department of Justices, these women have been let down, have been failed, not just by the Trump Department of Justice, but by the Biden Department of Justice and the Bush Department of Justice. W. Bush and the Obama Department of Justice. It was, to me, pretty shocking to see Pam Bondi, who I knew as a regular person, as a nice woman, someone I like to socialize with, somebody that was fun to go have drinks with. We would talk about her. Her dog. We'd talk about our dating lives. We would talk about our lives. She was a nice girl, okay? And to see her turn into this caricature of an evil witch, not even willing to turn around and acknowledge those victims, to look up her nose, look down her nose in disdain and contempt, was just, I think, a particularly. A particular low moment for a Cabinet that's had a low. Low of lows, a high of lows, a lot of lows, let's just say. So when I tell you that it's a particular low moment by the Trump Cabinet, that's a really high bar to cross. But, okay, so we are leaving my former friend Marco Rubio for last. Like with Pam, I've known Marco way before any of this. In fact, I knew Marco for many years, even before knowing Pam Bondi. Marco Rubio and I grew up in South Florida Republican circles, knowing the same people, going to the same political events, volunteering and supporting the same campaigns. His first job out of law school was with my husband. He worked with my husband. My husband helped him get elected, supported him when he was speaker of the House in Florida. So, bottom line, what I'm trying to tell you is Marco and I are the same age, and we've known each other since we were teenagers. I supported him. I thought. I found him to be an inspirational, eloquent figure, young, new blood, so proud of him as a Hispanic. And then he's turned into this. And I just, you know, I just think that time and time again, what we are seeing with this Trump Cabinet is people who, because they are so drunk with power, they are so enamored with the trappings that come with being part of a cabinet. The planes and the titles and the invitations to Mar a Lago and the invitations to the White House state dinners and being around the. In the Cabinet room. It's heady stuff. Power. Being in the circles of power is heady stuff. And the things they have to do in order to stay on Trump's good side in order to stay in those circles of power is frankly sell their souls, become completely different people than they have been, have completely different convictions. If they have any than they held before, if they had any before. I look at Marco in particular, I look at Pam Bondi in particular, I don't recognize these people, these people whose phone I had, who we used to talk to, we used to talk and see each other on a regular basis. They are irrecognizable for me and I hope that people and that we teach our children and that we ourselves have a level of a red line in our internally. We all need to have internal red lines that we are not willing to cross just in order to please a boss, even if that boss is the president. The Marco Rubio and Pam Bondi I knew, happy to say I never knew rfk. I never knew Lutnick or Kristi Noemi. But Marco and the Pam Bondi I know have compromised everything they once stood for. But anyways, Marco was in Europe. He was talking at the Munich Security Conference. He gave a speech very different than what J.D. vance had given the year before when he was there. But you know, it kind of feels like Marco is very hands on and very involved when it comes to the Western hemisphere, Latin America in particular. That's obviously an area of interest for him and one where I think he has been instrumental in getting Trump to bomb boats off the coast of Venezuela to go in and extricate Maduro from the bunker in Caracas. Now they're in the midst of an all out pressure campaign on Cuba, basically cutting off Cuba from all oil supplies. Cuba lost. Cuba had like a preferential deal. Cuba, one of the things that Maduro did was sell oil to his cronies, including the government in the dictatorship. The regime in Cuba that's been cut off now that the US and Rubio are running basically the petroleum agency in Venezuela. They've also threatened Mexico with sanctions if Mexico sells oil to Cuba. So Cuba is very quickly approaching a crisis moment. They are running out of electricity. The country can't run without oil. The country, the cars can't run. Where the cars can't run, there's no tourism, the planes can't land. So they are going through an incredibly tough time and it will be even tougher. I guess the end game is to try to bring this government, this regime to its knees. And have them do what? I don't know, leave. I don't know what the, I don't know what the long term plan is, and I don't know how this is going to play politically. I, you know, I have my questions about this because there's been several waves of Cuban immigration. I'll tell you, my husband's generation, he came when he was a little kid in the 60s. That first wave of Cuban immigrants, they are all for a hardline policy towards Cuba. Cut them off, make them cry uncle, make them give up, have them all leave. But there's been a lot more Cubans and a lot of other waves of Cubans that have come more recently and those people still have family in Cuba. The guy who drives me around in Miami, my Uber driver who I now use whenever I got to go to events and things in Miami, he's got three children in Cuba. And so those kids are now not able to get around. Food prices are far more expensive because of the lack of oil and the transportation costs going up so much. They, they don't have electricity to run appliances in their homes. And that guy's a Trump supporter, the guy I'm telling you about. And so there's a bunch of Cubans in Florida, now an important state politically for Republicans. It's a bunch of more recently arrived Cubans and Cuban Americans, most of them who staunchly supported Donald Trump, that have ties to the island, either economic or family ties to the island, that the wave of Cubans, the hardline old generation OGs who came in the 1960s do not have. So I don't know that this is going to be as good a political play as they think as Trump and Marco think it may be. Not to mention that some of these Cubans who have been longtime residents of Florida are getting deported to places like Sudan and Eswatini, wherever the hell that is. So, yeah, so keep all of this in mind. Pay attention to what's happening. Let's remember Cuba is 90 miles off the coast of Florida. There have been times when there's been very deep crisis in Cuba and it's ended up in flotillas and massive exodus of Cuban immigrants through the Straits of Florida looking for freedom and looking for food. I want freedom for the Cuban people. I don't know what the best way to achieve it is. It's been over 60 years of dictatorship, but things are happening right now because of American foreign policy. And we got to keep, keep an eye on it. We have a summit on March 7, a Latin American leaders summit happening in Miami. And let's all keep an eye on what happens regarding our own hemisphere. So back in January, I had a chance to sit down with Maria Hinojosa. Maria is a journalist, host of the longest running Latino news show in the country, Latino USA it's called and one of the things I really wanted to pick her brain about because I, you know, I like to talk about with, with with a Hispanic about Marco Rubio, a Hispanic that doesn't know him like I do and doesn't have the biases that I do when it came comes to Marco. So we've got that for you right after the break.
