Progressive Jews Enter ‘Shadow Cabinet’ Against Trump

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By Daniel J. Solomon February 27, 2017

Taking their cue from the British parliamentary system, 15 American policy experts on the left announced the formation of an informal “shadow cabinet” to counter President Trump’s agenda with arguments and ideas of their own.

Liberal Jews have been prominent in the new group, including Harvard Law professor Larry Tribe as “Attorney General” and U.C. Berkeley professor Robert Reich as labor secretary. Mark Green, New York City’s former public advocate, helped organize the group by working his contacts to assemble the current team.

“Of course President Trump has legal legitimacy due to the Electoral College,” the Shadow Cabinet wrote on Twitter Monday. “But he lacks moral legitimacy when he incessantly distorts, denounces, misdirects, cherry picks, and self-enriches in an almost Orwellian long con. Those engaging in daily disinformation deserve daily responses.”

They added, “we’ll be a comprehensive, one-portal stop of ‘citizen secretaries’—officials and scholars who will comment agency-by-agency not just on small ‘lies’ but especially on false narratives in the service of political ends.”

Im Britain, it’s common practice for the party out of power to designate its own parliamentary members to serve in the Shadow Cabinet, developing competing policies with those being advanced by the majority.

Contact Daniel J. Solomon at solomon@forward.com or on Twitter @DanielJSolomon

Daniel J. Solomon is the former Assistant to the Editor/News Writer at the Forward. Originally from Queens, he attended Harvard as an undergraduate, where he wrote his senior thesis on French-Jewish intellectual history. He is excited to have returned to New York after his time in Massachusetts. Daniel’s passions include folk music, cycling, and pointed argument.

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