I’ve been mulling a post on Trump’s Cabinet appointments and had planned to share some thoughts about them this afternoon. Today’s appointments, which not surprisingly are of a different character, allow me to add a bit more.
Let’s start with everything up until today. I said the first-thing announcements were different from what many expected. They were mainly not ideologues. They were mostly ride-or-die Trumpers. They had shown Trump they’re 100% loyal and up for anything. In many cases, they had shown little or no Trumpiness before Trump came on the scene. And they were people who if you watch closely don’t actually show that much today that is coming from them organically. They’re just 100% on board for anything Trump tells them to do. There are a few who are ideologues but they’re mainly hawks. Some of those you wouldn’t have been surprised to see in a Mitt or Jeb administration. So in a very Trumpy way, those choices all appear to be totally about loyalty. The White House makes the call to this or that department and it’s “You got it, boss” from any of these people. Yes, some of them are true believers. But they’re true believers in Trump.
Now you’ve got these three announcements today. And I’ll include Peter Hegseth at the Pentagon, even though that came last night. These are very different appointments. They’re each bananas on their own and in a distinct way. It shouldn’t surprise us that these are different because these are the “power ministries” that Trump personally cares most about — in charge of the military, who gets prosecuted and who knows the secrets of the intelligence world.
The one that surprises me is Tulsi Gabbard, but maybe not for the reasons you’d expect. Needless to say, it’s a crazy and frankly dangerous pick. I think many observers of the U.S. national security world have to have real questions about her allegiances. And that’s obviously not a great thing for the person overseeing the entire U.S. intelligence world. But here’s the thing. Matt Gaetz is 100% ride or die. I get the sense Hegseth is too. Gaetz is maybe the closest of all these MAGA world characters to an ideologue. Sorta.
But Tulsi Gabbard is pretty new to MAGA world. I’m frankly a little surprised he trusts her. I don’t mean trusts her not to become normal or actually do the job. I think she’s as crazy as he is. But all these other people have shown over many years that they’re 100% in Trump’s camp. Gabbard’s pretty new to MAGA. And you might be saying, well I could tell she was Trumpy back in 2019. And yeah, me too. But that’s not the same as being a ride-or-die loyalist to Donald Trump. It may not matter. I’m simply noting that that is the first and really only nomination that surprises me. Not because she’s nuts and a pretty severe threat to U.S. national security but because her time as a Trumper is quite limited. As we remember from the old Sesame Street segments, one of these things is not like the other. And that thing is Tulsi Gabbard.
As for Matt Gaetz — comically inappropriate, totally unqualified, but completely unsurprising. There may be no apparatus Trump wants to control more than the Department of Justice. Gaetz throws in the additional benefit of being a total chaos agent. And it might even free up opportunities in his dating life. In many ways, this is provocation as much as anything. A big F You to everyone who believes in the rule of law.
Hegseth? I mean, he’s not coming off an investigation for a statutory rap. So that’s something. This seems like that standard Trump pattern that Trump thinks he has leading-man good looks and he’s good on TV. And that’s the reason he got this nod. I wonder though whether Hegseth might end up being a bit out of his depth in the Pentagon bureaucracy. Just a thought.
There’s a method to this madness. Note that Stephen Miller and Tom Homan, the two biggest immigration hawks, are housed within the White House. Miller is deputy chief of staff for policy, a very critical position. Homan is “border czar.” But that’s not a thing. That’s just an advisor with a title at the White House. Concentration of power in the White House is a feature of most recent administrations. But here we see a particularly acute version of it: People who are generally non-entities in many key positions and the decision-making housed in the White House, free of whatever minimal oversight the Senate might have over the departments.
