Just How Bad Are Donald Trump's Cabinet Picks?

One of Trump's picks has already dropped out...which will be next to fall?

LEFT: U.S. Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL). Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images. CENTER LEFT: Former U.S. Representative from Hawaii Tulsi Gabbard. Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images. CENTER RIGHT: Pete Hegseth. Photo by Bauzen/GC Images. RIGHT: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images.

If you’re like me, you’ve been watching Donald Trump roll out his MAGA cabinet picks with a weird combination of jaw-dropping shock…and a big helping of “told you so!” vindication.

The left has, of course, for years been largely correct in all our worst fears about Trump, though it is cold comfort when he is allowed to take a wrecking ball to norms and institutions with impunity.

But even though voters did not appear overwhelmingly moved by Democrats’ warnings about Trump as a wannabe dictator this year, his rogue’s gallery of cabinet picks, each more laughably disastrous than the last, provides our first real-world glimpse into just what a menace Trump is likely to be in his second term.  

That he would entrust the nation’s Justice Department to a man credibly accused of paying for sex with minors; that he would entrust the Health and Human Services Department to an anti-vaxxer who has suggested Covid was a “plandemic” unleashed by the U.S. government; that he would entrust Director of National Intelligence to someone who has shown more loyalty to Putin and the Kremlin than our own allies…

These are dangerous cabinet nominees, but not merely because they are wholly unsuited for these positions.

As historian Timothy Snyder put it on MSNBC recently:

“It’s not just that these people are not qualified enough. It’s not just that they’re totally unqualified. It’s that they are anti-qualified. They are qualified to do the opposite of the thing that they are supposed to do.”

And isn’t that the point for Trump? It’s not like this wasn’t predictable. Our own Jay Kuo declared Elon Musk, RFK Jr., and Tulsi Gabbard, all now picked for roles in the next administration, Trump’s “wrecking crew” back on October 31.

Dan Froomkin over at his own Substack, agrees with that framing, putting Trump’s cabinet picks into perspective:

Matt Gaetz, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Pete Hegseth, and Tulsi Gabbard – they are not simply “combative loyalists” or even “firebrands”. They are chaos agents, wildly unqualified, wholly unfit. They are entirely off the scale of previous cabinet appointees. 

Two of them are full-blown conspiracy theorists. None have management experience. Three of them are sexual predators. What they are is intentionally norm-shattering picks intended to destabilize the government and pave the way for Donald Trump to seek retribution against his enemies. They are a wrecking crew.

So what makes them all so monumentally bad? So bad in fact that Matt Gaetz had to withdraw earlier today from contention as Attorney General, even with a 53-47 Republican majority in the U.S. Senate?

In today’s piece, I’ll go through the worst of Trump’s picks and break down what exactly makes them all so deeply problematic, norm-shattering, and, as Snyder aptly put it, so “anti-qualified.”

Matt Gaetz for Attorney General

Matt Gaetz may already be political roadkill, but it’s important to lay out just how bad this choice was.

I’ll give this to Trump: his choice of Gaetz to be Attorney General—the highest law enforcement official in the nation—proved we still have the capacity to be shocked by Trump’s utter contempt for the rule of law.

There is a certain schadenfreude in realizing that Trump actually believes his own deluded claims of an “unprecedented mandate.” By putting Gaetz forward, Trump was giving some serious George W. Bush 2004 "I earned capital in the campaign, political capital, and I intend to spend it” vibes. And we all know how that ended for him (spoiler: not well, not well at all.)

That schadenfreude was amplified this afternoon when we got the news that Gaetz had pulled his nomination after his meetings with Republican Senators…weren’t exactly going great.

Sadly for Gaetz, the momentum was NOT in fact strong. Quite the contrary.

When Trump first put Gaetz forward, we heard skepticism and “concern!” from the usual suspects, namely Republican Senators Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski. But Democrats would need to flip 4 Republican Senators to block a Gaetz nomination. Would two more Republican Senators really oppose one of Trump’s most crucial nominations? 

Sure looked like it.

And per Punchbowl News, Gaetz dropping out is precisely what many Republicans wanted:

“It’s no secret what Senate Republicans think of Gaetz. At this point, GOP senators are hoping Gaetz’s nomination doesn’t even advance far enough that they have to vote on it. There’s a significant number of Republicans who would vote no.”

Due to the whole…paying to have sex with a minor thing:

The former Florida representative and MAGA Republican is surrounded by ongoing investigations from the House Ethics Committee and the Justice Department regarding allegations that he trafficked and had sex with a minor at a sex party in 2017…

It has also been reported that the House Ethics Committee has proof of Gaetz paying over $10,000 to two women between July 2017 and January 2019—women who later served as witnesses in the House and Justice Department probes against Gaetz.

But according to a damning chart obtained by The New York Times, it was hardly just two women who received money from Gaetz.

Titled “VENMO TRANSACTIONS BETWEEN ALL INDIVIDUALS AS OF 09/14/20,” the document uses thumbnail photos of Mr. Gaetz, dozens of women and several other men to show how payments flowed between them. Lines with arrows connect the men and the women, showing, among other things, how much Mr. Gaetz and his associates paid the women.

If there was one bright spot for Gaetz and Trump amid the controversy, it was that the House Ethics Committee declined to release Gaetz’s apparently damning ethics report.

But as former GOP Rep. Adam Kinzinger made plain:

But now that Gaetz is out, who will be the next to fall?

Pete Hegseth for Secretary of Defense

According to The New Republic, “Gaetz is one of three Trump nominees to be accused directly of or accused of enabling sexual assault.” Another is Pete Hegseth, Trump’s choice to head up the Department of Defense.

Known mostly as a weekend Fox News host, Hegseth’s sole qualification for running the Pentagon appears to be that he is a military veteran, having served as an infantry officer in the Army National Guard from 2002 to 2021, including tours in Iraq and Afghanistan.

But perhaps this is more the sort of thing that attracted Trump to Hegseth:

Hegseth has been a fierce opponent of “wokeness” in the military and has suggested banning women from combat roles and firing Joint Chiefs Chair Gen. CQ Brown.

Or this:

Or yet again, perhaps being a sexual predator is a feature for Trump, not a bug:

A woman told Monterey police that Pete Hegseth, President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for Defense secretary, took her phone, blocked her from leaving his hotel room and sexually assaulted her, according to a newly released police report.

On Wednesday evening, the Monterey Police Department released a 22-page report revealing graphic details in the 2017 assault claim filed against Hegseth, which did not result in any charges.

It is an incredibly disturbing report:

And would it surprise you to learn that Hegseth paid the woman off?

Per The Washington Post:

Pete Hegseth, President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for secretary of defense, paid a woman who accused him of sexual assault as part of a nondisclosure agreement, though he maintained that their encounter was consensual…

Hegseth agreed to pay an undisclosed amount to the woman because he feared that revelation of the matter “would result in his immediate termination from Fox,” where he worked as a host, the statement said.

How very on brand for Trump,  who has been accused by many women of sexual assault over the years, including being found liable for sexual abuse against E Jean Carroll by a jury of his peers. Not to mention having been convicted on 34 felony counts related to the payment of hush money to a porn star. Hegseth and Trump are two peas in a pod.

Despite this, the news of Hegseth’s assault history reportedly came as a shock to the Trump transition team. It’s almost as though…these picks aren’t even getting vetted. 

I mean, couldn’t they have done like a google search?

But now Hegseth’s nomination is being met with cautious skepticism by sitting Republicans who wonder if he is the right guy to head up an agency that oversees 3 million service members and more than 700,000 civilian employees. 

Cue the Republican infighting:

One Hegseth ally blamed the surfacing of the sexual misconduct allegation on GOP establishment members who are trying to thwart Hegseth’s nomination. “They’ll try to kill all these nominations before the confirmation vote,” the ally said.

Haven’t we seen this movie before? Your move, Pete… 

And how’s that “mandate” going for you, Donald?

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. for Health and Human Services

The third accused sexual predator put forward by Trump for a major cabinet position is, of course, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who Trump has nominated to be Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS), the federal department that oversees such crucial agencies as the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

Yes, Donald Trump promised to let RFK Jr. “go wild on health” and his nomination of Kennedy to head up HHS is certainly following through on that promise.

For Trump, no doubt the sexual assault allegations against Kennedy must have felt like small potatoes:

Eliza Cooney told Vanity Fair earlier this month that Kennedy forcibly groped her when she was in her 20s and worked for the Kennedy family as a babysitter.

“I have no memory of this incident but I apologize sincerely for anything I ever did that made you feel uncomfortable or anything I did or said that offended you or hurt your feelings,” Kennedy said in the text message to Cooney.

But perhaps moreso than any other Trump cabinet pick, Kennedy embodies Snyder’s framing of these selections as “anti-qualified.” By all accounts, Kennedy’s policies would make Americans sicker.

As ScienceNews lays out in an extensive fact-check, Kennedy is wrong about vaccines:

Kennedy is a dominant force in the anti-vaccine movement (SN: 5/11/21). He told podcaster Lex Fridman in a July 2023 interview, “There’s no vaccine that is, you know, safe and effective.” 

Not true. In terms of effectiveness, the World Health Organization says, “vaccines have saved more human lives than any other medical invention in history” — praise that is backed by ample evidence.

And no, vaccines do not cause autism:

Anti-vaccine advocates including Kennedy continue to push the debunked notion that vaccines cause autism. A paper published in 1998 in the Lancet purported to find a link between the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine and autism. The paper, based on falsified data, was later retracted, but the damage was done, and the idea that vaccines in general could cause autism took off (SN: 5/11/21). 

The science is settled: There is no evidence that suggests vaccines — or any of the ingredients in them – cause autism spectrum disorders.

Kennedy is also wrong about fluoride in our drinking water:

Earlier this month, Kennedy announced his goal of removing fluoride from drinking water. 

A naturally occuring mineral, fluoride has a special superpower: It can rebuild teeth. When acid from bacteria eats away at tooth enamel, fluoride can breach the gap and entice other sturdy minerals such as calcium and phosphate to latch on. This process, called remineralization, keeps cavities at bay. 

That’s why fluoride has been added to water supplies in the United States since the 1940s – a move described in 1999 by the CDC as one of the 10 great public health achievements of the 20th century. 

And about raw milk:

In an Oct. 25 post on X, Kennedy accused the FDA of “aggressive suppression” of a laundry list of substances, one of which was raw milk. 

Raw milk hasn’t been pasteurized, a process that heat-treats food products to kill harmful microbes (SN: 11/18/22). Proponents list a variety of reasons to drink raw milk, including the claim that some bacteria in raw milk could be beneficial for gut health. But those bacteria come from cows or the farm environment, and only microbes that come from people can be an asset to our health. 

Pasteurization to kill the bad stuff is key for food safety, according to both the FDA and CDC. People who drink raw milk could be exposed to foodborne bacteria such as E. coli, Salmonella and Listeria, all of which can cause severe illness. 

Not to mention all of Kennedy’s truly dangerous and anti-semitic comments about the Covid-19 pandemic:

Kennedy’s views on health, in addition to lying far outside the mainstream scientific consensus, have also overlapped with antisemitic rhetoric in the past. Last year he baselessly claimed that COVID had been “ethnically targeted” to avoid “Ashkenazic Jews and Chinese.” During a 2022 anti-vaccine rally, he declared, “Even in Hitler’s Germany, you could cross the Alps into Switzerland, you could hide in the attic like Anne Frank did” — a remark he later apologized for. He also has a history of using the word “holocaust” to refer to vaccine policies.

And just this week, it was reported that back in 2020, Kennedy flirted with the fringe “plandemic” conspiracy theory:

“Many people argue that this pandemic was a ‘plandemic,’ that it was planned from the outset, it’s part of a sinister scheme,” Kennedy said. “I can’t tell you the answer to that. I don’t have enough evidence. A lot of it feels very planned to me. I don’t know. I will tell you this: If you create these mechanisms for control, they become weapons of obedience for authoritarian regimes no matter how beneficial or innocent the people who created them.”

This is the guy we want in charge of vaccine policy for our nation? We already saw how this played out when Kennedy traveled to Samoa in 2019 to advise against the use of vaccines, which led to a deadly measles outbreak there.

As The Washington Post reported:

Health officials around the world are alarmed over the likely impact of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — a longtime vaccine skeptic who was tapped for the health secretary role this week — on global health. Experts from Samoa have been particularly vocal in sounding the alarm, citing the destructive impact of Kennedy’s rhetoric on the tiny Polynesian island nation.

Warning that Kennedy will empower the global anti-vaccine movement and may advocate for reduced funding for international agencies, Aiono Prof Alec Ekeroma, the director general of health for Samoa’s Health Ministry told The Washington Post that Kennedy “will be directly responsible for killing thousands of children around the world by allowing preventable infectious diseases to run rampant.”

With his pick of Kennedy, Trump seems to have inverted the famous motto of health professionals to “First do harm.”

Tulsi Gabbard for Director of National Intelligence

Next to these previous three winners, Tulsi Gabbard is perhaps the most confirmable. But that is certainly a low bar, and there are serious questions about her suitability for the job.

Trump has nominated Gabbard, who is a former Democratic member of the House from Hawaii who served in the Army National Guard, for the position of Director of National Intelligence, a role that literally leads the entire U.S. intelligence apparatus including the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and National Security Agency (NSA.)

What could go wrong?

Gabbard is well known to hold sympathies for Vladimir Putin and Russia, even as she rails against U.S. foreign policy. Remember when Donald Trump sided with Vladimir Putin over U.S. Intelligence agencies on the issue of Russia’s 2016 election interference against Democrats to help Trump get elected? Yeah, well Gabbard is basically that in human form.

And in fact, she was considered a “person of interest” in Russia’s cyber op, as she was DNC vice chair until 2016.

Gabbard has also had a bizarre fascination with Syrian dictator Bashar al Assad, famously declaring him “not the enemy of the United States.”

Then after running for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020, Gabbard abandoned the party and appeared to side with Putin in the wake of his 2022 invasion of Ukraine.  

As The Washington Post recalls:

Just hours after the invasion began on Feb. 24, 2022, Gabbard wrote on the social network then known as Twitter that the “war and suffering” could have been avoided if the Biden administration and its allies had acknowledged “Russia’s legitimate security concerns regarding Ukraine’s becoming a member of NATO.”

The next month, she called for a cease-fire in a video message, citing the alleged presence of 25 or more U.S.-funded “biolabs in Ukraine which if breached would release and spread deadly pathogens” — claims that U.S. officials had denied when they were made days earlier by Russian officials.

And as Democratic Senator Tammy Duckworth made clear:

Think about how our allies would look at a Gabbard confirmation heading up intelligence.

As former GOP Congressman Joe Walsh put it:

And even Trump’s primary rival and former Ambassador to the U.N. Nikki Haley came out swinging against Gabbard’s nomination for DNI:

According to Reuters, the concerns are also coming from outside the house:

A Western security source said there could be an initial slowdown in intelligence sharing when Trump takes office in January that could potentially impact the “Five Eyes,” an intelligence alliance comprising the U.S., Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

The worry from U.S. allies is that Trump’s appointments all lean in the “wrong direction”, the source said.

Inside and outside the U.S. intelligence network, much of the anxiety focuses on Trump’s choice of Gabbard, 43, as director of national intelligence, especially given her views seen as sympathetic to Russia in its war against Ukraine.

But you don’t have to take our allies’ word for it, Russia themselves are pretty clear where Tulsi Gabbard’s allegiances lie:

Russian State TV even called Gabbard a “Russian agent” and their “girlfriend.”

But sure, Donald, what could go wrong with this pick?

In normal times, any one of these nominees would have been a non-starter out of the gate. Remember when two Bill Clinton nominees were thwarted because they hired undocumented workers in their homes? How quaint.

The other thing about this list is that it makes Trump’s other selections appear almost normal by comparison.

Lest we forget, Trump has nominated Project 2025 authors Brendan Carr to head up the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), Russ Vought to head up the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), and Tom Homan to be his Border Czar. But sure, Project 2025 has nothing to do with Trump…

Lest we forget, Trump has tapped Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to lead the nonexistent Department of Government Efficiency, which apparently will not actually be a government department, but will totally cut government waste? Musk has already conceded that his cost-cutting plans will result in “temporary hardship” for Americans. Not for him though. Never for him.

Lest we forget, Trump’s pick for Secretary of Education is being accused of knowingly allowing the sexual exploitation of children as CEO of WWE in the 1980s.

And we definitely did not have renowned puppy killer and South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem on our bingo card to head up the Department of Homeland Security. How unqualified is she? The Bulwark counts the ways.

Trump seems to be following a page out of Steve Bannon’s “flood the zone with shit” playbook, but so far he has only reinforced that Trump is just as dangerous and volatile as Democrats claimed during the campaign, and that Republicans can shut down problematic nominees without any cost.

And he hasn’t even been sworn in yet.