Letters to the Editor: Joe Biden will bring swamp creatures back to Washington. That’s a good thing

To the editor: When Donald Trump ran for president, he promised to “drain the swamp.” I assumed that he meant he did not want anyone with Washington experience who actually knew how the levers of government were supposed to be pulled. (“Biden picks a Goldilocks Cabinet, neither too left or right,” Nov. 24)

While a swamp may not be a place you’d want to live, it is a beautiful, biodiverse piece of nature with thousands of species that have coexisted for many years.

What Trump replaced the swap with turned out to be a toxic waste-dump fire of multimillionaire con men, grifters and incompetents, one of whom couldn’t even name the department he was tapped to lead when he promised as a presidential candidate to get rid of it.

While we may have substantive past policy disagreements with some of President-elect Joe Biden’s picks so far, he has shown the capacity and willingness to bring adults back in the room — people who believe that government shouldn’t be something that you loot, but rather ones who take pride in making it function.

Doug Lenier, Sherman Oaks

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To the editor: Now that we observe, with gratitude, the experienced, intelligent people being named by Biden to his Cabinet, it is worthwhile to recall the two principal qualifications for members of Trump’s Cabinet.

The first was loyalty to Trump, and the second was the intent to weaken or destroy the agencies that they had been appointed to lead. I guess the president’s supporters actually wanted this.

But our country faces serious problems, known to all of us, that only effective government can help to solve.

Thomas Alden, Palm Desert

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To the editor: Biden’s choices for his Cabinet are designed to please Wall Street and the weapons industry. They are people from the same groups that served these interests under President Obama and Hillary Clinton when she was running for president.

Now, it is business as usual, which we would have had with Clinton had she been successful in 2016.

Key groups that supported Biden and the Democrats in 2020 may well jump ship if more neoliberals are appointed to key positions in his administration. Can the Democrats afford to lose the portion of their supporters who are working class or people of color?

We need to remember that Obama deported more than 3 million immigrants during his administration, and he greatly expanded the drone program that killed hundreds of civilians.

Bruce Stenman, Prunedale, Calif.

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To the editor: Biden selects former Federal Reserve Chairwoman Janet Yellen to run the U.S. Treasury Department, the Dow Jones industrial average surpasses 30,000, and Trump takes credit. Go figure.

David Stark, Rancho Palos Verdes