Rare News Desk
Former Texas Gov. Rick Perry is Donald Trump’s choice for secretary of energy, the president-elect’s transition team announced early Wednesday.
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The choice followed Perry’s meeting with the president elect in New York Monday, his second post-election meeting with Trump at Trump Tower.
The choice of Perry for a place in the Trump Cabinet is remarkable from every vantage point.
Perry, in his second presidential campaign, was among Trump’s most vociferous critics, describing Trump in July 2015 as a “cancer on conservatism” and a “barking carnival act” who was “appealing to the worst instincts in the human condition.”
And it was Perry, in his first presidential campaign, who at a Republican presidential debate in November 2011, declared, “It’s three agencies of government when I get there that are gone: commerce, education, and the uh … what’s the third one, there? Let’s see. The third one. I can’t … Oops.”
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It was an indelibly embarrassing moment that served as a death knell for his once-promising presidential campaign, and, it turned out that the third agency he wanted to eliminate but whose name eluded him was the very department that the man who he had warned would lead the GOP the way of the Whig Party has now asked him to lead.
Perry was the first man out of the crowded Republican field last year, and he subsequently endorsed Texas Sen. Ted Cruz for president. But, when Cruz bowed out of the race after Trump beat him in the Indiana primary in May, Perry threw himself behind Trump’s candidacy with his trademark enthusiasm and made it clear he would be delighted to serve in the New Yorker’s administration in whatever capacity Trump, who had suggested during the campaign that Perry should have to take an IQ test to qualify for the debates, would find useful.
Perry campaigned for Trump and, in a page from the Trump reality television playbook, he also did a brief stint on Dancing with the Stars, in which his sheer ebullience compensated for his lack of experience or skills as a dancer, making a winning impression before his early exit from the show.
Perry had also been talked about as a potential secretary of defense, of agriculture and of veterans affairs.
“Rick Perry’s Texas led the nation in job creation, wind energy, natural gas and oil production and electric generation,” Ray Sullivan, a former chief of staff to Perry as governor and spokesman for his first presidential campaign, said Monday night.
“Perry’s balanced regulatory policies reduced toxic air pollutants in Texas, while encouraging job creation,” Sullivan said.
“Overall, Rick Perry’s experience reforming big government agencies, encouraging job creation, championing a diverse and reliable energy portfolio, and serving as an officer in the U.S. military are all stellar qualifications for a U.S. energy secretary.”
Perry also serves on the board of Dallas-based Energy Transfer Partners, a pipeline company headed by Kelcy Warren, the finance chairman of his second presidential campaign. As CEO and chairman of Energy Transfer Partners, Warren has faced criticism over the company’s Dakota Access pipeline project, which has drawn opposition from environmentalists and the Standing Rock Sioux tribe in North Dakota.
The current secretary of energy is Ernest Moniz, a nuclear physicist.
