After an election where podcasts and influencers played an outsize role, conservatives were quick to declare that traditional media was dead.
Turns out a lot of it is just moving into the West Wing.
President-elect Donald J. Trump, whose rise was fueled by reality TV stardom, is once again turning to television to recruit the key cast members of his new administration.
The latest was Dr. Mehmet Oz, the former syndicated TV host, who was picked by Mr. Trump on Tuesday to oversee Medicare and Medicaid.
Dr. Oz follows Pete Hegseth, who could move straight from co-hosting the weekend edition of “Fox & Friends” to overseeing 1.3 million active-duty troops as defense secretary, and Sean Duffy, a Fox Business host and former star of MTV’s “The Real World,” who is now poised to run the Transportation Department. (His wife, Rachel Campos-Duffy, is Mr. Hegseth’s erstwhile “Fox & Friends” co-host.)
Mike Huckabee, Mr. Trump’s pick for ambassador to Israel, hosted a live Fox News show for seven years. Tulsi Gabbard, whom Mr. Trump has said he plans to nominate for national intelligence director, was a paid Fox News contributor until August. His choice for border czar, Tom Homan, was a contributor at the network until last week.
At this rate, the second season of the Trump administration may end up with more television stars than the first one.
“Trump wants an administration beginning with him, but including his cabinet and senior staff, who are effective communicators who can keep the country up-to-date regularly on what they’re doing on behalf of the American people,” said Kellyanne Conway, a senior White House counselor during Mr. Trump’s first term.
One difference this time around is the sheer size and responsibility of the positions Mr. Trump is filling with figures who are better known for on-air punditry than managerial skill.
Mr. Hegseth, whom Mr. Trump considered for veterans affairs secretary in 2018, served in the military but has no experience overseeing a sprawling bureaucracy; the Defense Department is largest agency in the federal government. Until 2022, Dr. Oz hosted a daytime talk show; now he would be responsible for providing health coverage to more than 150 million Americans.
Ms. Conway — herself now a Fox News contributor — said in an interview that Mr. Trump prized a “public-facing” team that could deliver a clear message. She drew a contrast between the incoming administration and the Biden White House, which she said had “spent three years telling us that behind the scenes, Biden is a triathlete trapeze artist, we just can’t see it.”
Mr. Trump, for all his appearances on niche media outlets during the campaign, remains a careful observer of mainstream cable news and the Nielsen ratings of specific programs and anchors.
The last time he held office, he picked the CNBC star Larry Kudlow as his chief economic adviser and the “Fox & Friends” anchor Heather Nauert as a State Department spokeswoman.
John R. Bolton, a former ambassador to the United Nations who became a Fox News fixture, became his national security adviser. In recent days, Mr. Bolton has castigated Mr. Trump’s selection of Ms. Gabbard and referred to the pick of Matt Gaetz for attorney general as “the worst nomination for a cabinet position in American history.”
(Omarosa Manigault Newman, a familiar face from Mr. Trump’s “Apprentice” days, also briefly held a White House role. It ended in acrimony: She later joined “Celebrity Big Brother” and criticized the administration as “so bad.”)
The surfeit of Fox News-adjacent personalities poised to join the new administration is an interesting contrast to Mr. Trump’s purported anger at the network, with which he has maintained a topsy-turvy relationship.
For a five-month period in late 2022 and early 2023, Mr. Trump did not appear on Fox News at all. And as recently as the weekend before Election Day, he denounced the network as “not our friend” and complained about its running pro-Democrat ads.
None of that has prevented Mr. Trump from using the cable channel as a kind of recruitment firm.
Laura Ingraham, the longtime Fox News host, happened to be on-air when Mr. Hegseth’s nomination was announced last week.
“Wow, that is pretty cool,” Ms. Ingraham said, looking surprised. “Gosh, we’re going to miss him at Fox. But that’s a gain for the country.”
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