Editor’s Note: A previous version of this opinion piece incorrectly stated that former U.S. Sen. Tom Coburn was chosen to be the director of the Office of Management and Budget. The director is in fact Mick Mulvaney.

Throughout the election, I stressed the importance of objectivity with respect to President Donald Trump and his supporters, owing to the fact that Hillary Clinton was, well, crooked.

His supporters argued that one couldn’t be sure how a Trump presidency would play out and said premature judgments were based on rhetoric, not substance. Although I disagreed with their views and the views of their nominee, I was respectful of his supporters and chose to refrain from the generalized “basket of deplorable” description.

Despite all this, it’s been about a month since Trump was inaugurated, and I’ve seen enough.

Trump’s promise that he would “drain the swamp” of corrupt politicians resonated with his supporters, and I trusted that they would hold him to it. After all, we’re all Americans, and they seemed to truly revile the misconduct in our government. I was optimistic to the point of foolishness, a painful truth that was evident the moment Trump announced his cabinet appointments.

Take, for instance, Jeff Sessions, Trump’s pick for attorney general. Sessions attempted to pass laws in Alabama that would have defunded any school that allowed gay-straight alliances, referring to them as “organizations that promote illegal and sexually-deviant activities that break the sodomy and sexual misconduct laws.”

He fought against the “Violence Against Women Act” and contested laws that would affirm the criminality of spousal rape. During his tenure as a federal district judge in the late 1980s, he maintained that members of the Ku Klux Klan “were OK, until I found out they smoked pot.”

Ken Blackwell, domestic policy adviser, is a senior member of the anti-gay organization Family Research Council. Although national health organizations have concluded that there has been no scientific demonstration of conversion therapy’s efficacy, Blackwell maintains that “gays can be reformed … just like arsonists,” and in 2014, boldly linked the string of mass shootings to the growing acceptance of gay marriage. It’s important to note that, in spite of the rapid shift of public opinion on homosexuality, conversion therapy is still legal in 45 states. 

Blackwell’s shortcomings aren’t limited to bigotry, as he seems to show signs of contempt for the democratic process. The former secretary of state in Ohio was accused of rigging the 2004 election for George Bush, later refusing to appear before Congress when he was called to provide testimony.

Electronic voting machines championed by Blackwell were later found to have had a backdoor that could alter the ballots. Upon further investigation, it was found that Blackwell was a shareholder in the company that made the machines.

Other nominations worth mentioning include Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, former CEO of Exxon; Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, billionaire coal miner who knowingly violated safety regulations that resulted in the deaths of a dozen miners; CIA Director Mike Pompeo, who wants the death penalty for Edward Snowden and promises to expand domestic surveillance; Education Secretary Betsy Devos, heir to the Amway fortune who plans to transfer funding from public to private schools and dreams of using America’s schools to “advance God’s kingdom”; Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, of Goldman Sachs, who has been sued numerous times for illegal and unethical foreclosures, including an attempt to evict a 90-year-old woman because her payment was 27 cents short; and Chief Strategist Steve Bannon, an alt-right propagandist and editor-in-chief of Breitbart News. 

The final appointee I will cover is Scott Pruitt, attorney general of Oklahoma, a notorious climate denier who has been nominated by Trump to head the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). He has filed dozens of lawsuits against the EPA, some currently pending, is a chief opponent of the Clean Power Plan and self-describes as a “leading advocate against the EPA’s activist agenda”.

Pruitt eliminated Oklahoma’s environmental enforcement unit, has challenged regulations on coal plant emissions and studies into the effects of fracking on drinking water. He also publicly declared that his top priority at the EPA would be “regulatory rollback.” This comes as no surprise when one follows the money:

He was the chairman of the Republican Attorneys General Association, which received close to $4 million in donations from the fossil fuel industry, and is the creator of the Rule of Law Defense Fund, a dark money organization that is allowed to receive unlimited, anonymous donations. 

In 2013, billionaire oil tycoon Harold Hamm, who rejected the role of the energy secretary in Trump’s cabinet, contributed $350,000 to Pruitt’s re-election campaign. When questioned on the corrupt nature of his alliances, he mocked, “that’s actually called representative government in my view of the world.”

The danger of this appointee cannot be overstated. According to NASA, the concentration of carbon dioxide is at its highest in 650,000 years, and the average global temperature has increased by nearly 1.7 degrees Celsius.

According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, “climate models project that if global emissions of greenhouse gases continue to grow, summertime temperatures in the United States that ranked among the hottest 5 percent in 1950-1979 will occur at least 70 percent of the time by 2035-2064.”

There is a narrow window of opportunity to mitigate the serious consequences of our inaction, but the Trump administration has chosen to dismiss, deny, and when that wasn’t enough, silence our scientific community.

This land is borrowed from our children, and it’s clear that we, as a nation, apparently intend to suck every last drop of profit from the Earth before we pass it along.

And so I will conclude by saying that all of the evidence suggests that this “trumpster-fire” is a thinly veiled oligarchical takeover from which we may never be able to bounce back. For my readers on the right wing, it’s time to call a spade a spade: Donald Trump is a fraud and a traitor.