Threat of 'terrible things' covered up by fancy dress party in Trump's Cabinet: report

An obsession with dressing up among Donald Trump’s most senior Cabinet members is reminiscent of a 6-year-old kid desperate to be a spy, an Atlantic columnist wrote Saturday.

And it’s covering up a grossly disturbing ineptitude for their jobs, she added.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem — dubbed “ICE Barbie” — has been seen in firefighting gear, bulletproof ICE vests, cowboy hats and shouldering rifles.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth posts pictures of himself deadlifting and doing push-ups in the snow with troops. Dan Bongino, the deputy director of the FBI, spars on wrestling mats

Trump’s “underlings perform near-daily tone poems to a certain type of MAGA masculinity, publicly pantomiming their professional responsibilities,” wrote Ashley Parker.

And it’s all in a desperate attempt to catch their boss's attention and persuade the public they’re doing a job that they're actually unqualified to do, she added.

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The dress-up parties are even get push back from conservatives. Right-wing radio host Erick Erickson told the Atlantic that Trump is an “image guy” who wants to surround himself with people out of“central casting.”

But, he said, it “distracts the voters from: Is stuff actually going well behind the scenes?”

“It’s like hiring the guy who plays a doctor on Grey’s Anatomy. You don’t actually want that guy to do your heart surgery. He’s an actor. You hire the people who sound competent because they use the polysyllabic words. But can they actually do the job?”

The message comes from Trump himself who, during his most recent campaign, posed as a McDonald worker and as a garbage truck driver. Much of his business persona was sold to the public in his role as high-flying mogul on The Apprentice.

The same trick has been adopted by his underlings who “sometimes give the impression that they view government work more as a game than as true public service,” wrote Parker.

“It looks like a lot of them are sort of showing up at a government costume party in which they get to wear the costume of being the secretary of defense or the costume of being the director of national intelligence, but they don’t have the qualification for those roles,” Rhode Island Democrat Senator Sheldon Whitehouse told the Atlantic.

“Part of it is they know the point of entry to the costume party is you have to suck up ferociously to Trump every minute, and to get on his radar, images help. He likes the fake macho imagery, and so that’s just part of the deal.”

But he warned,”If you’re not a serious person, and you’re in a serious job, there’s this enormous gap of competence through which terrible things can happen.”