When Trump is Trump — 11/25/24
When former Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz announced last week that he was withdrawing from consideration for Attorney General, the number of Donald Trump cabinet nominees who have been accused of sexual assault was diminished by one third. The number of Trump cabinet nominees who have made hateful antisemitic comments in public was cut in half. The President-elect’s selection for Director of National Intelligence has a history of support for Russian President Vladimir Putin and Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. His nominees to run the Defense, Homeland Security and Education Departments have little or no experience in the fields they will be asked to oversee and face allegations about their past personal conduct.
Yet a new CBS News/YouGov poll shows that Americans approve of Trump’s Cabinet selections by a 59-41 margin. If those poll numbers don’t make sense to you in light of the information outlined in the previous paragraph, then you have not paid much attention to Trump’s political career over the last nine years.
Trump is a disruptor. His voters want him to disrupt. Sometimes he disrupts too much, which is why Gaetz is no longer his nominee and why he backed off his administration’s immigration policy of family separation during his initial term in office. He has become confident in his ability to not only create chaos but to benefit from it. He knows that his opponents will react loudly and angrily, and he has learned how to leverage that anger in a way that rallies his supporters to his side.
The President-elect’s selection of his new cabinet members is designed with this goal in mind. Gaetz was more than even some Trump loyalists could stomach, but Pete Hegseth, Tulsi Gabbard and Robert Kennedy, Jr. are extremely controversial selections as well: at least one of them is likely to meet the same fate as Gaetz in the weeks ahead.
But that is just fine for Trump. After his initial victory back in 2016, he assembled a team that was mostly comprised of more traditional Republicans designed to pass muster with the Beltway crowd—or at least the conservative portion of it. But many of those conventional appointees tried to prevent him from pursuing many of his unconventional goals by delaying, ignoring or opposing his orders, The experience taught him that the most important quality in any appointee is loyalty: his current group of nominees does not include a single individual who would reject his instructions under almost any imaginable circumstance. And in his mind, loyalists are essentially interchangeable. If one falls short, just bring in the next.
It’s hard to begrudge a president who doesn’t want his appointees to be loyal. But when that becomes the most important qualification for a senior position entrusted with great responsibility, it becomes more worrisome, especially given a chief executive who has not spent a great deal of time working in the public sector. The most difficult internal fights of Trump’s first term came when his appointed cabinet pushed back against what they thought were ill-considered decisions from the commander-in-chief. It’s not yet clear who on Trump’s current team possesses that type of experience, confidence, and courage.
But Trump’s hard-won outsider status is the greatest part of his appeal to voters who believe (with some justification) that they have been marginalized by traditional politicians from both parties. Trump won the support of voters who desired a candidate who represented change by a sizable margin over the first nonwhite woman to be a major party’s nominee in our nation’s history. Kamala Harris’ credentials as a credible change agent were certainly diminished by her status as the sitting vice president. But even when Trump occupied the Oval Office, he still managed to present himself as the people’s representative against an oppressive and uncaring government.
The cabinet sideshow, per Trump’s design, is intended to be a distraction. He has promised extensive and immediate policy change, none of which will come easy in a deeply divided Washington. The time that his opponents spend debating his personnel decisions is time that they are not devoting to outlining their objections to his goals on taxes, tariffs and borders. At the same time, the most contentious fights over Trump’s nominees serve to galvanize his base and prepare them for the more substantive battles ahead.
Think of the current arguments as preliminary skirmishes that allow the two sides to test each other’s strength and resolve. But the main events are still to come.