Trump Nominee to FEC Tried to Shred Texas Already-Weak Ethics Laws

[TexasTowelie]

Nominating Trey Trainor to the FEC makes sense: Most Trump appointees either hate or are ignorant of the thing they’re expected to oversee.


In yet another case of the cosmic satire in which we live hitting its mark a little too hard on the nose, the Trump administration last week nominated Texas lawyer Trey Trainor to a seat on the Federal Election Commission, an agency that’s supposed to enforce and interpret campaign finance laws. Trainor is notable mainly for his general opposition to campaign finance laws, so his nomination makes sense, in that most of Trump’s appointees so far either hate or are ignorant of the thing they’re expected to oversee.

But Trainor’s nomination also provided an opportunity to make note, once again, of the similarities between Texas’ screwed-up politics and the nation’s increasingly screwed-up politics. If you haven’t heard of Trainor, you’re not alone — he’s well-known around the Capitol, but he’s a behind-the-scenes guy. His name rarely pops up in news stories.

Who then, for our out-of-state friends, is Trainor? Well, on social media, he’s a fairly typical right-winger — the kind of guy who got really mad about the New Black Panther Party pseudo-scandal, who approvingly tweets out articles characterizing Obama as a “race hustler,” Protestantism as “poison” and Islam as a “phony religion” manufactured by the “murderous Mohammed.”



He shares the kind of videos in which, say, a “Wretched old hag harasses Trump supporter on a flight and TOTALLY GETS WHAT’S COMING TO HER!” Perhaps not a great public profile for someone who’s supposed to play a juridical role in ensuring the fairness of American elections. But that’s not why Trainor’s important.



Read more: https://www.texasobserver.org/trump-trey-trainor-fec-nominee/