Nearly eight years ago, Donald Trump nominated Republican Rep. Tom Marino of Pennsylvania to lead the Office of National Drug Control Policy — a position best known to the public as the nation’s “drug czar.” That did not turn out well.

Following explosive reporting from The Washington Post, which found that the GOP congressman championed legislation that hindered federal agents from going after the Big Pharma firms that flooded the country with addictive opioids, Marino’s nomination collapsed and he withdrew from consideration.

Eight years later, the president has a new drug czar in mind, who’s notable for different kinds of reasons. The Washington Post reported:

One of the reasons the Carter nomination stood out is the growing list of Fox News personalities who’ve landed powerful positions on Team Trump. In January, The New York Times published a tally and found 19 “former Fox News hosts, commentators, on-air medical experts, producers and other personnel” who’d landed jobs in the Republican administration. Soon after, Media Matters published a revised totalputting the new number at 20. (The list did not include Attorney General Pam Bondi, who briefly moonlit as a guest host of a Fox News program while she was serving as Florida’s chief law enforcement official.)

As March got underway, the president also appointed Fox News personalities Laura Ingraham and Maria Bartiromo to the Kennedy Center board, and as March neared its end, Trump added yet another Fox News contributor to his White House operation, tapping Carter to serve as the drug czar.

But complicating matters is the nominee’s resume. As a Stat News report explained, “Carter’s selection comes as a surprise: Her background is not in drug policy, public health, or law enforcement, and she has never served in government.”

Or put another way, Carter will be an amateur, joining Trump’s team of amateurs.

It is not exactly a secret that the incumbent president sees governing expertise and policymaking experience as qualities to be avoided. Indeed, during the Republican’s first term, those with expertise and experience tended to be the people who discouraged the president — the first chief executive in American history to reach the Oval Office without any experience in public office at any level — from taking steps he was eager to take.

As a result, Trump appears to have gone out of his way to lean into his preference for amateurs in a second term, choosing inexperienced and unqualified loyalists for much of the White House Cabinet.

Those who celebrate rookies in positions of influence have reason to celebrate. Those who value qualifications have reason to worry.

Steve legs

Steve Benen is a producer for “The Rachel Maddow Show,” the editor of MaddowBlog and an BLN political contributor. He’s also the bestselling author of “Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans’ War on the Recent Past.”

The Wall Street Journal reported that Donald Trump recently spoke to some of the top U.S. automakers, and as part of the private chat, he issued a warning: The president told them not to raise prices in response to the White House’s tariffs policy.

The report, which has not been independently verified by BLN or NBC News, added that the Republican told the executives “that the White House would look unfavorably on such a move, leaving some of them rattled and worried they would face punishment if they increased prices, people with knowledge of the call said.”

Of course, this was more than just the latest example of heavy-handed White House tactics toward ostensible private-sector allies. There was also an unstated subtext to the president’s message to the domestic automakers: Trump seemed to realize that his policy on tariffs would push the manufacturers to raise prices. He apparently hoped to convince them otherwise.

Two days after the Journal’s report reached the public, the president spoke to NBC News about this and other issues, and he denied the accuracy of the account — or at least tried to.

Trump continued, “I couldn’t care less. I hope they raise their prices, because if they do, people are gonna buy American-made cars.”

In context, the Republican was apparently trying to argue that he “hopes” to see foreign auto manufacturers raise prices on their vehicles so that consumers would shift their focus to domestic auto manufacturers.

But it’s not quite that simple. Whether Trump’s tariffs would raise prices on domestic manufacturers — many American cars and trucks are made with parts that are imported from other countries — is a detail the White House does not appear to have grappled with.

What’s more, U.S. manufacturers who sell vehicles abroad will have to contend with a series of reciprocal tariffs imposed by other countries.

With this in mind, if the president assumes that U.S. companies are on board with his approach, there’s evidence to the contrary. In fact, it was just last month when Ford Motor CEO Jim Farley spoke at a conference and said the Trump administration’s trade policies were generating “a lot of chaos“ for the industry.

As part of the same remarks, the Ford executive also warned that some of the White House’s plans for trade tariffs would be “devastating” to auto manufacturers and “blow a hole in the U.S. industry that we’ve never seen.”

It might seem like ancient history, but it was just last year when Trump told voters“When I win, I will immediately bring prices down starting on day one.” This is not a cherry-picked quote that he accidentally blurted out once and then quickly forgot. On the contrary, the then-candidate repeated the line over and over again as Election Day approached, assuring Americans that he’d help lower prices immediately after returning to the White House.

It’s hard not to wonder how voters who believed his promises feel after hearing Trump say he “couldn’t care less” if some automakers raise prices.

Steve legs

Steve Benen is a producer for “The Rachel Maddow Show,” the editor of MaddowBlog and an BLN political contributor. He’s also the bestselling author of “Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans’ War on the Recent Past.”

Over the course of the last decade or so, Donald Trump has demonstrated an affinity for laying rhetorical groundwork for some of his most radical tactics. Ahead of the 2020 election, for example, the president prepared to reject a possible defeat, so he spent months telling the public that the electoral process was illegitimate. Ahead of his many criminal indictments, he similarly invested time and energy into delegitimizing the legal process.

This strategy came to mind anew upon hearing the Republican talk about possibly pursuing a third term in the White House. NBC News reported:

To be sure, the president’s comments on the subject came with some caveats — or at least comments that seemed like caveats. Trump said, for example, that it’s “far too early” to make any decisions about his electoral future. He similarly added that it’s “very early” in his second term.

But those comments didn’t negate the apparent fact that the incumbent, who is prohibited under the U.S. Constitution from seeking a third term — the 22nd Amendment says, “No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice” — is open to the possibility of at least trying to pursue a third term.

In fact, in his interview with NBC News, Trump was hardly subtle. “I’m not joking,” he said, adding that there are “methods” in which he could pursue such a goal.

Hours after the NBC News report reached the public, the president chatted with reporters aboard Air Force One and dodged a series of questions on the topic, though he claimed that “people” have asked him to run for a third term — which he said would be a fourth term “in a way” because his 2020 race was “totally rigged.” (It was not rigged; he lost fair and square, and he’s been lying uncontrollably about this for more than four years.)

If this broader rhetorical push sounds at all familiar, it’s not your imagination. Trump talked about pursuing a third term earlier this month. And last month. And the month before that. And the month before that. In fact, as regular readers might recall, Trump made a series of public comments about a third term during his first term.

What’s more, a variety of White House allies, most notably media personality Steve Bannon, appear to be quite enthusiastic about what they perceive as a possibility — which, again, is not a possibility.

I won’t pretend to know where this is headed or the degree to which the president is prepared to defy constitutional law. But Scott Cummings, a professor of legal ethics at the UCLA School of Law, made a comment on “The Rachel Maddow Show” on Friday that stood out for me.

Commenting on autocracies around the world that have consolidated power, Cummings noted that in none of these countries “do leaders do all the things that Trump is doing, take aim at all of these independent institutions, and then just walk away.” Rather, the professor added, authoritarians take these steps because they intend “to stay in power permanently.”

Steve legs

Steve Benen is a producer for “The Rachel Maddow Show,” the editor of MaddowBlog and an BLN political contributor. He’s also the bestselling author of “Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans’ War on the Recent Past.”