5 Embarrassing Secrets Hiding In Trump's Cabinet

5

Kellyanne Conway Tried Stand-Up Comedy Once, And It Was Awful

Trump's spokesdemon, Kellyanne Conway, has bounced around Washington for a number of years in various forms, and like a chameleon in a human skin suit, she has been able to mold into new roles to fit her situations. Like how she went from a pollster to a pundit, or how she joined Trump's team after months of questioning his qualifications.

Or the time she pretended she was a stand-up comedian. Thankfully, some unnamed American hero decided to record all 11 cringe-tastic minutes.

This is better than that Romney "47 percent" video.

Back in the '90s, Kellyanne Fitzpatrick (her old name) apparently performed a stand-up set at a charity benefit in a room filled with Washington insiders. To her credit, this appears to be original material, but it's so schlocky that it makes you question if she had ever heard a joke before. This isn't "Hey, it's my first time, give me a break" -- this is "I saw an episode of Jay Leno and this shit looks easy." For example, she explains her leg cast by saying "Well, everyone knew I was gonna be in this comedy show and said break a leg, so I did." Or this zinger: "New survey's out that says 70 percent of men think about sex all the time. The other 30 percent are lying." Hold for applause.

DailyWorldwideNews/Youtube
"Am I right?"
*crickets*
"Sorry, those are just the locusts that are about to fly out of my mouth."

Somehow it gets worse. It's obvious after about eight minutes that this isn't going anywhere, but she pushes through to her closer anyway: a song about the perils of being a female political "pundette," complete with boa scarf and Santa Baby voice. No one laughs except the time traveler who already knows we're all fucked.

4

Sean Spicer Has A Chewing Gum Addiction

By now, you probably know Sean Spicer as Trump's press secretary / alternative fact generator. You've seen him on TV, equally dumbfounded as us as to how he got there, working as Trump's human megaphone.

Susan Walsh, AP
"Yes, James from The Post. Any job openings?"

Fortunately, Smell-O-Vision hasn't been invented yet, because if it had, your living room would smell like a windowless Yankee Candle shop. The dude chews two and a half packs of cinnamon Orbit gum every day before noon. And he swallows them. 35 pieces a day. You can't wrap it in a napkin, or the Bill of Rights, or something else you were about to throw out?

Even though gum doesn't actually stay in your stomach for seven years, Spicer was seemingly worried about it enough to talk to his doctor. The Washingtonian even crunched some fun numbers and found his habit to be a $1,400-a-year expense. (Are we paying for that? Seems like a line item we could cut.) For each of Trump's years, he's looking at 12,000 pieces of gum. (What's that, like 10 car tires?) That's enough calories for Michael Phelps to race for 64 hours straight. I'm gonna come right out and say it: That's too much gum.

Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
"I'd be happy to take your questions *slurp* as soon as I blow this sick bubble."

3

Multiple Cabinet Members Are Registered To Vote In Multiple States

Trump really, really, cares about the whole "losing the popular vote by millions" thing. It's almost as if even though he's the most powerful man on Earth, he still has skin thinner than wet Kleenex. Which is why he has said multiple times in recent TV interviews and on Twitter that he would like to launch a goddamn investigation into the matter. This would be like the kid who beat you by one point in Call Of Duty coming over to your house to make sure you weren't cheating, just in case.

Regardless, the details of how this investigation will play out are unknown, but we sure know the targets. According to Trump's ABC News interview, "You have people that are registered who are dead, who are illegals, who are in two states. You have people registered in two states." And that's bad because, in his words, "they vote twice."

Disregarding the fact that obviously this didn't happen three million times, this is quite a charge coming from the president of the United States. Which makes it all the stranger that he didn't look into his own freakin' cabinet. Since voter records are public, reporters dug around and found multiple registrations for Steven Mnuchin, Trump's pick for Treasury secretary (New York and California), and Steve Bannon, his chief of staff (New York and Florida). Even Tiffany Trump, his daughter, has registrations in New York and Pennsylvania. Somebody better make sure Rick Perry isn't registered on the moon.

CNBC
"There are three other celestial bodies we should look into: Mars, Arcturus of the Spring Triangle asterism, and ... um ..."

2

Ben Carson Keeps Lying About Random Things In His Biographies

Ben Carson was nominated by Trump to be the country's secretary of Housing and Urban Development because ... hmm ...

Reuters/Steve Marcus
Hold on, there's a reason here somewhere.

In any case, Carson has to have at least some integrity to do this job (hopefully). Which makes it all the more baffling that he has a long history of grossly exaggerating his resume. In one of his biographies (called I Totally Saved Those Conjoined Twins, You Guys), he makes a comment about how he was offered a full scholarship at West Point, but turned it down to pursue his dream of doing neurosurgery stuff.

Welp, it turns out that, lo and behold, West Point doesn't offer full rides -- a fact that was left out of the many times Carson repeated the story over the years. When presented with this information, Carson admitted that the offer for the scholarship was more implied and informal -- i.e. it probably didn't happen at all. However, not only is the claim repeated in his other biographies (how many does he need?), but he also kept repeating it as recently as last year, when he said it on Facebook and in a Charlie Rose interview. On top of that, a bunch of other pesky details surrounding his childhood have been found to be a little too perfect to be true. Gee, it's almost like he exaggerated these stories to make them fit better into his personal narrative about Jesus picking him to save those kids or whatever.

1

Linda McMahon Was In Wrestling Stories That Involved Her Being Sexually Assaulted And Put In A Coma

Linda McMahon is best known as the wife of Vince McMahon, the ringleader of WWE, and now she's Donnie's pick for secretary of Small Business. Because nothing says small business and American values like a billion-dollar company that sells a fake product to people who are tricked into thinking it's real.

Oddly, Vince McMahon had a habit of incorporating his family members into wrestling storylines for reasons that evade me. But we're not talking about letting his son take on the Undertaker. For some insane reason, Vince's storylines involved things like his own wife getting pretend sexually assaulted on national TV.

The whole thing is deeply, deeply uncomfortable. And you'd think that when they got to the page in the script where she acts out breathing heavily in panic while he grabs her arm and kisses her without consent, someone would have stepped in and said, "Hey, maybe a scripted sexual assault is a little, y'know, much?"

There's even some other storyline involving her being drugged and wheeled onto the ring in a coma, which must be some kind of metaphor for our political process. But right now I'm way too deep into the plot in which Triple-H has sex with a corpse to care anymore.

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