How To Make Sense of the Trump Appointees

Not all of Trump's cabinet picks are created equal

LEFT: U.S. President-elect Donald Trump's nominee to be Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images. CENTER: Former Chief of Staff to the United States Secretary of Defense Kash Patel. Photo by PATRICK T. FALLON/AFP via Getty Images. RIGHT: Former U.S. Representative from Hawaii Tulsi Gabbard. Photo by John Lamparski/Getty Images.

We’re a month out from Donald Trump’s narrow electoral victory, and the president-elect is still struggling to win acceptance for his picks to lead his administration. That’s not surprising, given that his choices have included

• A disgraced, accused sex trafficker for Attorney General (Matt Gaetz);

• A frequently publicly drunk and credibly accused sexual predator for Secretary of Defense (Fox & Friends host Pete Hegseth);

• A conspiracy-pushing, vengeance-seeking but incompetent lickspittle for FBI Director (Kash Patel);

• A suspected Russian asset and fascist apologist for Director of National Intelligence (Tulsi Gabbard); and

• A crackpot, former heroin addict, and dangerous disinformation vector as head of Health and Human Services (RFK, Jr.).

Just to name a few.

This ghastly crew is so norm-defyingly repellant that it’s easy to throw up our hands. Trump is simply trolling the public and daring the GOP to reject his choices. It’s all a flex, the argument goes, and anyway, Trump doesn’t really care who gets knocked back because he’ll just name someone else equally as unqualified and horrible.

In today’s piece, I want to step back and poke some holes in this thinking. It’s not just that this position is intellectually lazy. It’s that if we simply close our eyes and pray for deliverance, we could miss key opportunities to weaken the Trump White House, even before he takes office. There is a commonality and purpose to many of these appointments, and Trump very much does want them all confirmed.

As I’ll explain, the fact that some are in trouble and some have already flamed out actually matters. It is fairly bad news for Trump and his agenda, but good news for the system and institutions that many remain keen to protect.

How Trump sees the appointments

It’s analytically useful to sort the appointments Trump has announced into three distinct categories.

First, there are the nominations Trump really cares about. As a would-be dictator and aspiring fascist, Trump knows intuitively, and from some experience, that if he wants to be able to intimidate and go after his political enemies while also suppressing any domestic opposition, he needs to control the most important levers of power. Those are 1) the Justice Department, 2) the Pentagon, and 3) U.S. Intelligence services.

Second, there are the appointments that assist Trump politically. Whether it’s sealing deals made in exchange for political support during the campaign or rewarding big donors for their big checks, Trump understands the importance and thrives within the world of transactional politics.

Third, there are the throw-away and consolation positions. Trump doesn’t really care who is Secretary of State, for example, because he doesn’t really care about policy, foreign or otherwise. Give that to Little Marco Rubio. Housing and Urban Development? Hand that one to a Black guy, just like last time. It’s “urban,” right?

I want to explore category one and a bit of category two. Everyone else is in category three and doesn’t really matter in Trump’s eyes.

The “power ministries”

As Democracy Docket lawyer Marc Elias noted,

Trump is seizing control of the investigative and prosecutorial powers of the state by staffing them with the most conspiratorial and blindly loyal nominees… Political retribution is his priority. The rest of governing he doesn’t care about.

I largely agree with this, but would add that Trump also wants to make sure he has the military in line. The Pentagon and its institutional leaders, after all, were the source of a great deal of resistance to Trump during his first term.

With Justice, the Pentagon, and the U.S. Intelligence all headed by Trump loyalists, Trump could become much more like that despot he so admires, Vladimir Putin. Russian state power has traditionally rested upon control of three ministries: Intelligence, Interior, and Defense. And Trump is borrowing heavily from that playbook.

As Olga Lautman, author of the Unmasking Russia newsletter, observed, “This is authoritarianism in the making, mirroring tactics seen in Russia, where the FSB is used to intimidate and control. Under Trump, the FBI will become a tool of the regime, much like the FSB in Russia, used to keep opponents in check, silence Republicans who don’t fall in line, and consolidate power through fear.”

Trump and the Justice Department

Trump very much wanted his close ally, former Congressman Matt Gaetz, who has shown unwavering fealty to him in the past, to head up Justice. If Trump demanded that his enemies be investigated and charged, Gaetz would have brought the full weight of the Department on them, no questions asked. And he’d have done it gleefully, likely with disgusting victory laps on social media.

But Gaetz’s nomination met fierce resistance in the Senate, and Trump wasn’t willing to try to force it through using the recess appointment power. Instead, he let Gaetz go and turned to former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi, another useful idiot who asks “how high?” when Trump says “jump.” But if there is a silver lining here, it is that Bondi is far less likely to want to destroy the DoJ from within, as Gaetz would have sought to do. She will likely be more like Bill Barr, doing the president’s bidding by bending rather than breaking legal norms.

Trump’s other priority is the FBI, which plays both a key role within the DoJ and interfaces with other national intelligence agencies. The FBI is where Trump wants to install yet another dangerous political bomb thrower, Kash Patel. As I wrote earlier this week, Patel should be considered Trump’s scariest pick because he could inflict the greatest harm upon our system in such a position.

Patel has openly threatened to come after Trump’s political enemies as well as the media. That could erode both our system of political checks and balances and freedom of the press. Trump understands that Patel is an obedient attack dog, as Gaetz would have been. If he becomes the FBI Director, Patel has sworn to deploy the full power of the bureau to back Trump up. This includes intimidating officials, including those in his own party, into compliance. It also means surveillance, investigations, and even blackmail of Trump’s enemies—horrors we once saw under FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover before the bureau was reformed.

Taking control of Justice and the FBI and shaping prosecutions and investigations into political cudgels is a move straight out of the fascist playbook. If there were ever a nomination to beat, it is Patel’s. The Senate confirmation battle over his appointment is a clear one to watch.

Trump and the military

Trump’s pick for Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, is another MAGA loyalist. He is ready to tear down the Pentagon rather than work within it. Specifically, Hegseth has pledged to go to war over the military’s “woke” policies, meaning the promotion of “diverse” candidates and women in combat roles. He also wants to fire top generals, many of whom have opposed Trump in the past. And most ominously, he likely would back Trump should he invoke the Insurrection Act and deploy the military against U.S. civilian protesters or in the effort to deport millions of undocumented migrants.

But Hegseth, who has since been exposed as a wastrel, a drunk, and an accused sexual predator, is facing increasing opposition by the GOP. There is talk of a bloc of “hard no” GOP senators who intend to deny him confirmation should it come to an up or down vote. That means there is a decent chance he will also withdraw from consideration before the situation deteriorates further.

There are even reports that Trump is in active talks with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis to take the job instead. Like Bondi as Attorney General, DeSantis would work to deliver results to Trump. But unlike Hegseth, DeSantis has actual experience working with massive government bureaucracies. His default likely would be to work within existing structures and push the limits of rules and norms rather than smash them utterly. Moreover, if picked and confirmed, DeSantis might proceed more cautiously than Hegseth in taking on hot-button issues. For example, DeSantis has already gone to war against “woke” in Florida with decidedly mixed results, and he may have less appetite to stoke the same exhausting controversies in the military.

Trump and our Intelligence Services

Trump’s choice of Tulsi Gabbard as Director of National Intelligence sent shudders through many of the 18 different intelligence agencies she would oversee, which include the CIA and the NSA. That’s because many experts view Gabbard as a Russian asset, and it’s not hard to see why.

Gabbard frequently parrots Russian talking points, including on the critical question of the invasion of Ukraine. On the day of that attack, Gabbard acted as an apologist for Putin, tweeting that Russia had “legitimate security concerns” and that NATO encroachment had led to the invasion. She also later spread false Russian propaganda about the U.S. funding bio-weapons in Ukraine.

Gabbard has also defended Syrian President Assad, a Russian puppet and a sworn enemy of the United States, and argued against actions to stop his genocidal violence.

But from Trump’s perspective, Gabbard earned big points for guest hosting on Fox for Tucker Carlson. In August of 2022, after the FBI searched Mar-a-Lago for classified documents, Gabbard claimed that “there’s no denying that the unprecedented raid on [Donald Trump’s] Palm Beach home earlier this week has set our country on a dangerous new course, and there’s no turning back.” She also asserted that U.S. law enforcement had been weaponized “to target the political opponents of the … Biden regime,” a move which had the “hallmarks of a dictatorship.”

In short, Gabbard would agree with Trump that the biggest threat to our national security is not a foreign power such as Russia or China but rather the “enemies from within” that Trump has railed against at his rallies and in interviews. Trump would use Gabbard to shift focus away from true foreign threats and toward imaginary internal ones, leaving us vulnerable to attack by our enemies while intimidating, surveilling, and terrorizing Trump’s political opponents.

Gabbard happens also to serve another political purpose, which I will discuss next. Along with RFK, Jr., she represents an important political realignment that Trump hopes to cement through her appointment.

The transactional appointments

The second group of appointees we should keep a close eye on are all of a tit-for-tat nature, whether political or financial.

On the political side, the clearest example is RFK, Jr., who endorsed Trump late in the campaign in exchange for a position within the administration. Trump appointed him head of Health and Human Services with a promise that he could “go wild” on health. Not great for the well-being of our country, but the truth is Trump couldn’t care less about that.

Gabbard is also being rewarded for switching sides. To the MAGA faithful, she and RFK, Jr. are valuable conversion stories, evidence that Trumpism can win over Democrats and even loopy environmentalists and health nuts like RFK, Jr., or peacenik apologists and U.S. isolationists like Gabbard. After all, if the horseshoe bends far enough, it’s just a small hop over from the far left to the far right.

As Mark Caputo of The Bulwark aptly noted,

Confirming Gabbard and Kennedy is seen as an opportunity for the president-elect to cement his legacy of broadening the Republican coalition to include disaffected Democrats and independents. They note that the two are considered Blue MAGA rock stars among the Trump faithful. They’re both loved by the new influential podcasters whom Trump courted this election and give Trump the chance to burnish his anti-establishment bona fides.

“The appointments of RFK and Tulsi Gabbard represent a realignment in American politics that you saw in the election,” said Roger Stone, a longtime Trump friend and adviser. “He understands the historical significance of that realignment.”

Trump’s second group of transactional appointments is in recognition of the deep pockets who have supported him. If you’re a big donor to the Trump campaign, you can receive a choice appointment, even if you utterly lack any relevant qualifications. Here are just a few examples:

• Linda McMahon, who ran the Small Business Administration during Trump’s first term, has scant experience in education, yet she will head the Education Department as a reward for being one of Trump’s biggest donors.

• Warren Stephens is a major Trump donor and is up for the top post of UK Ambassador, alongside convicted but Trump-pardoned felon Charles Kushner, father of Saudi lapdog Jared Kushner, who will be ambassador to France.

• Jared Isaacman is a billionaire Trump has tapped to head NASA, where he can help out his buddy Elon Musk. The sum total of his space experience apparently is as a passenger aboard civilian SpaceX shuttles.

• Musk himself has been put in charge of the yet-to-be-made official Department of Government Efficiency, which he co-chairs with the uber-wealthy and disturbingly sycophantic Vivek Ramaswamy.

• John Phelan is up for Secretary of the Navy. He has zero military experience; his only qualification is that he was a major donor to the Trump campaign.

• Howard Lutnick is the billionaire CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald and now Trump’s transition team head and choice for Commerce Secretary.

• Stephen Feinberg is a billionaire and major Trump donor, and he’s just been tapped to be the No. 2 at the Pentagon as the Deputy Defense Secretary.

The staffing of the government with billionaires in every corner threatens to make the U.S. more an oligarchy than a democracy. Trump, like Putin, knows he can maintain the loyalty of the billionaire class by appealing to their greed and allowing them to plunder the state wherever and however they can. It certainly doesn’t matter to Trump whether his nominees are in any way qualified for their positions; the only qualification that matters here is utter subservience and major donor dollars.

Raising the political costs

With so many horrible, unqualified, and frankly sociopathic and damaged nominees up for confirmation, does it really matter who gets in and who doesn’t?

It matters a great deal. Remember, Trump has claimed that his re-election is proof that he has some kind of mandate to push his agenda, even though he won the popular vote by the narrowest margin in generations. He believes he is entitled to full deference on all his picks, and that anyone who stands in his way is defying the will of the American people.

This is precisely why having Gaetz and likely soon Hesgeth go down in flames is important. Trump is not invincible. In fact, he can’t seem to get his own nominees past his own party in the Senate, an embarrassing setback for a president who hasn’t even taken office yet. Indeed, if the media were doing its job, we’d see headlines confirming that the second Trump administration is off to a disastrous start with several nominees in trouble even though Republicans control government.

Remember back when President Bill Clinton’s two picks for Attorney General had to withdraw because they (checks notes) hadn’t paid the payroll taxes on their children’s nannies? It was considered such a scandal that it made the cover of Time:

By contrast, the public is so used to Trump’s blunders that they hardly make the news.

Yet it is still vitally important to understand why Trump’s picks are blowing up. His failure comes from his lack of judgment and jumbled priorities. Rather than pick officials based on whether they have experience and can navigate the complexities of the departments they would head, Trump basically picks people based on 1) how much they suck up to him, and 2) how good they are on television. Such a collection, were he to get most installed, would act as “yes men” to his every idea. This fawning set and lack of meaningful dissent could lead to truly disastrous decisions. It also explains how Trump could bankrupt casinos that are supposed to always win.

On top of these meaningless qualifications, his own transition team fails to properly vet candidates, leaving a mess to clean up when things like Hegseth’s past come back to bite. Perhaps they would receive straighter answers to the question, “Anything else we should know about?” if they didn’t also pick serial liars and swindlers.

It’s also important to watch the Senate under incoming Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD), who is something of an institutionalist, flex its power against a president who will be in his second term. So far, Thune has not buckled completely to Trump, and the debacles with Gaetz and Hesgeth have only strengthened his hand and confirmed to Trump’s detractors that they should stand firm.

If opponents of Trump’s wrecking ball agenda can succeed in taking down one or two more of his nominees (preferably Patel and/or Gabbard), forcing Trump to instead pick someone who at least will respect the institutional nature of the departments they will head, that would be a noteworthy win. It certainly would be a far cry from the burn-it-down, worst-case scenario we faced under a nominee like Gaetz.

And perhaps with enough failures among his nominees and checks upon his power by his own party’s senators, many will remember to see Trump again as he truly is: an incompetent leader who can’t get his own nominees past his own party without crapping the bed.