U.S. president-elect Donald Trump's nominee for Attorney General, Matt Gaetz, speaks with Trump's nominee to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., at the America First Policy Institute gala at Mar-A-Lago in Palm Beach, Fla, on Nov. 14.Carlos Barria/Reuters
In the 10 days since winning back the U.S. presidency, Donald Trump has rolled out his cabinet picks at breakneck speed. His apparent aim is to install an administration of loyalists to enact a sweeping campaign agenda that includes mass deportations of undocumented immigrants, purges of civil servants and revenge on perceived enemies.
His more surprising and contentious choices have drawn criticism from across the political spectrum: an anti-vaccine activist tapped to lead the department of health, a proposed national-intelligence director who has excused Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, a man investigated for sex trafficking picked for attorney-general, and for defence secretary a television host who says women should not serve in military combat roles. All are vocal supporters of Mr. Trump.
As he prepares to return to the White House next Jan. 20, the president-elect is set on avoiding the clashes with top appointees that often marked his first term.
“The biggest mistake I made was I picked some people that I shouldn’t have picked,” Mr. Trump told podcast host Joe Rogan during an interview last month, speaking of his previous Oval Office stint. “Bad people or disloyal people.”
Donald Trump’s cabinet picks are meant to send a message
Donald Trump’s pick to lead U.S. Defence Department was accused of sexual assault in 2017
His nominees will also be a loyalty test for the Republican Senate caucus. The upper chamber, in which Mr. Trump’s party won a 53 to 47 majority last week, must confirm his cabinet appointees. Whether they agree to his most incendiary choices will demonstrate how complete his dominance over the party has become.
So far, the one in for the roughest ride appears to be Matt Gaetz, the former Florida Republican congressman tapped for attorney-general. The Department of Justice that he seeks to lead once investigated him for allegedly paying a 17-year-old girl for sex, which he denies. Mr. Gaetz also earned the anger of his own party when he gridlocked the House last year by leading a coup against then-speaker Kevin McCarthy.
One moderate Republican senator, Susan Collins of Maine, told reporters she was “shocked” that Mr. Trump had put forward Mr. Gaetz. Another, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, was even more blunt: “I don’t think it’s a serious nomination.” Four GOP senatorial defections would sink the nomination.
While federal prosecutors ultimately declined to charge Mr. Gaetz, the House oversight committee has also been investigating him. Mr. Gaetz resigned shortly after Mr. Trump announced his nomination, narrowly avoiding a Friday committee vote on whether to make public a report into his conduct.
Both top members of the Senate judiciary committee, Democrat Dick Durbin and Republican John Cornyn, have called for the committee to release the document anyway. But Speaker Mike Johnson, a Trump loyalist, has told the committee not to. And some GOP senators have suggested that they will defer to what the president-elect wants. “I’m inclined to support presidential cabinet picks,” said Lindsey Graham, who described Mr. Gaetz as “smart, clever.”
The role of attorney-general is set to be particularly pivotal. Mr. Trump has promised to launch prosecutions of political rivals, everyone who worked on the four criminal cases against him, as well as various other people and corporations.
Ty Cobb, a White House lawyer during Mr. Trump’s first term, said choosing Mr. Gaetz was Mr. Trump’s reaction to the resistance he met from cabinet members during his first term.
Mr. Trump fired his first attorney-general, Jeff Sessions, for not shutting down an investigation into ties between Mr. Trump’s circle and the Russian government. His second, Bill Barr, drew his boss’s wrath for refusing to go along with Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
“He wants people who are totally loyalists, totally suck-ups and will do any illegal thing he comes up with,” Mr. Cobb told The Globe and Mail.
The president-elect’s nomination of Tulsi Gabbard to be the country’s spymaster, meanwhile, will test the Republicans’ traditional emphasis on national security. The former Democratic member of Congress has regularly repeated Kremlin talking points to argue against U.S. involvement in foreign conflicts.
After Mr. Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Ms. Gabbard blamed President Joe Biden for not acquiescing to “Russia’s legitimate security concerns” about NATO expanding. She also posted a video promoting a baseless conspiracy theory that the U.S. had secret biological weapons labs in Ukraine.
“He’s sending a signal that we have lost our mind when it comes to collecting intelligence,” John Bolton, Mr. Trump’s former national-security adviser, said of the president-elect’s choice of Ms. Gabbard in an interview with the NewsNation cable channel. He described her as “a serious threat to our national security.”
Mr. Trump’s choice for secretary of health and human services, Ms. Gabbard’s former fellow Democrat, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is best known for promoting medical misinformation and conspiracy theories. He has claimed that vaccines cause autism and that public-health officials made the COVID-19 pandemic worse in order to increase demand for vaccines.
Pete Hegseth, the nominee for secretary of defence, said in a podcast interview last week that “we should not have women in combat roles” and called for the firing of “woke” generals. In his book, The War on Warriors, he suggested that the U.S. should consider no longer observing the Geneva Conventions against war crimes because America’s terrorist enemies do not abide by them.
Mr. Hegseth, a Fox News host and decorated combat veteran, served tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan but has less experience than others who have held the job he is seeking, which controls the world’s largest military budget of US$900-billion. Most secretaries of defence have held top leadership positions in government, the military or business.
Mr. Trump is pushing for Senate Republicans to help him circumvent the usual confirmation process by adjourning the chamber once he takes office. This would trigger the “recess appointments” provision of the Constitution, which would allow him to install his cabinet without Senate confirmation. The chamber would then later have to decide whether to keep his cabinet picks in office or reject them. “We need positions filled IMMEDIATELY!” Mr. Trump posted on X.
Senator John Thune, elected this week to lead the Republican caucus in the upper house, has not agreed to such a plan.
Some of Mr. Trump’s other contentious choices will not need Senate confirmation at all. Stephen Miller, the anti-immigration hardliner set to be White House policy chief, can start his duties as soon as Mr. Trump takes power. Billionaire campaign backer Elon Musk will have a role outside government: He will co-lead a task force charged with crafting ideas for cutting spending and bureaucracy.
Even where the president-elect has made more conventional cabinet picks, he has chosen those who have tailored their views – at least recently – to align with his own.
Both Senator Marco Rubio and Representative Elise Stefanik, his nominees for secretary of state and UN ambassador, respectively, were once staunch supporters of Ukraine. But both this year voted against the latest U.S. aid package for the country. And Mr. Rubio said Kyiv would have to accept “a negotiated settlement” with Russia, which would almost certainly entail conceding territory.
“He’s looking for people who will implement what he says, rather than who will give him advice,” said Gordon Gray, a former high-ranking U.S. diplomat, now an international affairs professor at George Washington University. “It’s certainly not going to be a team of rivals.”