Watching those seeking high-ranking jobs in the Trump administration appear before U.S. Senate committees last week reminded me of what Adm. Elmo Zumwalt once said of his time serving as chief of naval operations.

“It wasn’t easy to keep hold of your integrity or honor or pride when you worked for Richard Nixon,” Zumwalt, considered a “sailor’s sailor,” said of his stint as CNO in the early 1970s. Zumwalt, the youngest person at the time to serve as the Navy’s top admiral, was tapped for the job in July of 1970 during the early years of President Nixon’s “imperial presidency.”

Zumwalt visited Naval Station Great Lakes a number of times. His last occasion was over the Fourth of July holiday in 1986 when Great Lakes marked its 75th birthday. The highly decorated admiral, who retired in 1974 following a 32-year Navy career spanning three wars and in-between peacetimes, was on hand to review sailors who paraded on Ross Field with time-honored naval pomp.

Zumwalt died in 2000 at age 79. At his funeral, he was eulogized as, “the conscience of the United States Navy.” This is what we need these days if the statements of Cabinet-level candidates in those Senate hearings are to be believed.

Republican senators who were at the hearings in person must have seen more insight into Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Tulsi Gabbard and Kash Patel than us watching far away from the D.C. Beltway. Those GOPsters apparently have chucked their integrity, honor and pride at the door to enter Trumpland.

President Donald Trump, beginning his voyage last month into his second four-year term in the White House, has assembled fulsome hucksters, chiselers and flimflammers, who want to be in charge of some of the most consequential areas of the U.S. government.

They make Richard Nixon’s Cabinet selections tame in comparison. The president’s Republican allies in the Senate seem to be overlooking the ill-qualified individuals who want to, or already have, joined Trump 2.0.

They include tech oligarch Elon Musk — “a perfume Avon used to sell” — the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Rick Bragg has noted. Musk seems to be a minister without a portfolio in charge of some no-goodnik cabal. This as Trump seeks to widen his presidential powers.

Additionally, there is the slew of sweeping executive orders and actions the president has speedily signed off on. Besides the willy-nilly deportation roundups underway, those directives also include freezing trillions of dollars in federal funds already appropriated by Congress; offering confusing unfunded buyouts to federal employees; the imposition of widespread tariffs on our chief trading partners, Canada and Mexico; and retribution to any and all who sparred with the new president over the previous years.

No wonder Lake County Congressman Brad Schneider, of Highland Park, and other Illinois Dems are jumpy. He joined the state’s Democratic congressional delegation last week in issuing a joint statement that members are, “united in condemning the Trump administration’s efforts to steal taxpayer dollars from the hardworking communities we represent to pay for more giveaways to billionaires and the biggest corporations.”

That was before Trump administration officials came to their senses and realized that defunding would impact critical services and hurt many of those who cast ballots for the 47th president in November. Illinoisans, too, would get shortchanged because we pay nearly $6 in taxes for every $1 residents receive in direct support from the federal government.

But the administration isn’t only receiving pushback from political opponents. Rural Voices USA, a nationwide network of farmers and rural community leaders, last week sounded warnings over the “ready-fire-aim” and ill-conceived actions impacting rural communities, many of whose residents backed Trump’s successful presidential return, along with those testy tariffs.

In a statement, the group said the chaos caused by freezing grant funding, “sent shockwaves through rural America and caused significant disruption as everyone from farmers to Meals-on-Wheels, to rural healthcare systems scrambled to unpack what this would mean for them and their neighbors.” As most right-thinking folks know, federal funding supports jobs, innovation and tech projects, infrastructure work and a host of other programs which for some are lifelines.

Polls already are reflecting Americans’ view that they don’t like what is happening in just over two weeks in the new Trump administration. That might be expected considering the close popular vote in the 2024 election.

But since Jan. 20, it has been amateur hour as the president’s minions rush to fulfill his every wish, legal or not.

One attorney friend opined that so far in 2025 it is, “an uncertain, messy time.”

It surely is muddled and addled considering this isn’t the first rodeo for many of Trump’s inner circle. Maybe they will get better over the next 100 days.

It could happen, if Trumpers take a left turn and veer back to semi-normalcy.

Charles Selle is a former News-Sun reporter, political editor and editor.

sellenews@gmail.com X @sellenews