President-elect Donald J. Trump’s final flurry of cabinet picks and other appointments rounded out what his aides described as a unified, loyal, MAGA-driven administration. But scratch the surface and there are at least three distinct factions and a range of ideologies, barely suppressed to get through the rigors of the confirmation process.
There is a revenge team, led by prospective nominees with instructions to rip apart the Justice Department, the intelligence agencies and the Defense Department, hunting down the so-called deep state and anyone who participated in the prosecutions of Mr. Trump.
There is a calm-the-markets team, which Mr. Trump hopes will be led by Scott Bessent, the Wall Street billionaire who Mr. Trump chose for Treasury secretary. Mr. Bessent can recite the MAGA lines about deregulation and lower taxes but would likely try to make sure Mr. Trump’s most extreme solutions, like inflation-inducing tariffs on foreign goods, do not end the post-election stock market surge.
And then there is a government shrinkage team, led by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, whose goals are wildly ambitious, to put it mildly. They want to carve what Mr. Musk says will be “at least” $2 trillion from the annual federal budget, a figure that exceeds the annual cost of salaries for every federal employee. (For the record, the total federal budget in the 2024 fiscal year was $6.75 trillion.)
How these missions will mesh and where they will collide is one of the biggest unknowns of the incoming administration.
Diversity of ideology and opinion is usually seen as a strength, not a defect, of presidential cabinets. But if there is a surprise about Mr. Trump’s choices in recent days, it is the range of experiences and worldviews that in some cases lie just beneath a veneer of recently declared Make American Great Again loyalty — and loyalty to Mr. Trump himself. It is hard to imagine a few of his picks sitting comfortably at a Trump rally.
“There is more ideological diversity here than I expected,” Michael Beschloss, a presidential historian, noted on Saturday. “And if you look at this group in the context of history, there is some potential here for arguments and debates. If those debates are allowed to unfold in a civilized and open manner, history shows that such conflict has sometimes led to policies that worked.”
Even as the Republican Party has adopted the MAGA philosophy, it may have been unreasonable to expect that members of a Trump administration would all be cut from the same cloth.
“Consistency of ideology or anything else is the last thing we should expect in Trump’s nominees,” Chris Whipple, the author of “The Gatekeepers,” a book about White House chiefs of staff, said on Saturday. “That’s because there is no process in place to make these choices — it’s all according to the whim of the boss.”
Mr. Bessent made a late conversion to MAGA ideology. He seems to embrace Mr. Trump’s enthusiasm for tariffs, though in recent weeks he has noted that imposing them gradually — a nuance Mr. Trump has not discussed — is critical to avoiding economic shocks.
His identity as a gay, married father certainly clashes with the beliefs held by some of Mr. Trump’s evangelical and far-right-wing supporters. He told Yale’s alumni magazine in 2015 that “in a certain geographic region at a certain economic level, being gay is not an issue.” He added: “If you had told me in 1984, when we graduated, and people were dying of AIDS, that 30 years later I’d be legally married and we would have two children via surrogacy, I wouldn’t have believed you.”
But more jarring to some of the MAGA faithful may be the fact that Mr. Bessent raised money for the presidential run of a Democrat, Al Gore, in 2000. Or that a dozen years ago he was chief investment officer for Soros Fund Management, the $30 billion instrument of George Soros, the subject of scores of right-wing conspiracy theories. When listing Mr. Bessent’s many qualifications for the job, Mr. Trump left off the fact that he is considered among Mr. Soros’s most successful protégés.
The newly named pick for labor secretary, Representative Lori Chavez-DeRemer, also seems likely to straddle two camps. Ms. Chavez-DeRemer, an Oregon Republican who lost her seat in the House this month, often spoke of her father’s membership in the Teamsters and won the support of about 20 labor unions during her unsuccessful re-election bid.
As the G.O.P. moved quickly to solidify around Mr. Trump and promised to kill off government regulation, Ms. Chavez-DeRemer moved the other way. She was one of three Republicans who sponsored a 2023 bill that would have shielded workers seeking to organize union representation from retribution or firing, while giving new powers to the federal government to punish employers who violate workers’ rights.
It was not the only area where she saw more room for government intervention. “One of the things that transcends party is public safety,” Ms. Chavez-DeRemer said in an interview with The New York Times during her re-election bid. “People want to wake up in the morning, know that it’s safe to go to take their kids to school and drive on safe roads,” she added. “Those transcend party. Those are the kind of things I focus on.”
The news on Friday that she was named to head the Labor Department was hailed by the Teamsters and their president, Sean O’Brien. The A.F.L.-C.I.O. expressed wariness of Mr. Trump’s “anti-worker agenda” in a statement posted on social media, but conceded that “Lori Chavez-DeRemer has built a pro-labor record in Congress.”
One who does fit neatly into the mold of a Trump aide is Brooke Rollins, whom Mr. Trump named on Saturday as his choice for agriculture secretary. She served as domestic policy adviser in the first Trump administration, then became head of the America First Policy Institute, a sort of Trump government in waiting staffed with other former members of his administration.
Ms. Rollins’s organization has called for getting rid of civil-service protection for many federal employees, speeding gas and oil drilling on federal lands, and doing away with red-flag laws meant to keep guns from people who are deemed by a judge to be a danger to themselves or to others.
Then there is the national security team. Michael Waltz, the designee for national security adviser, was a strong advocate of sending more aid to Ukraine and doing whatever was necessary to push back the Russian invasion, until he voted against the $95 billion in additional aid to Ukraine in the spring.
His new deputy, Alex Wong, worked for Mitt Romney in 2012, part of a wing of the Republican Party that has never reconciled itself to Mr. Trump. But Mr. Wong worked at senior levels of the State Department on North Korea, helping to set up Mr. Trump’s two meetings with Kim Jong-un, the North Korean leader. That diplomatic high-wire act was rooted in Mr. Trump’s belief that a combination of personal diplomacy and economic lures would drive Mr. Kim to give up his arsenal of nuclear weapons.
The effort failed: The talks collapsed, and the North Korean leader today has a larger arsenal than he did before the meetings. Mr. Kim has insisted that he is done talking to Washington. In the intervening years, Mr. Wong has served as the chairman of the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, a congressionally appointed, bipartisan group studying the national security implications of America’s economic engagement with Beijing.
Such topics never had an airing during the campaign. Discussion of the complex economic, technological and military relationships with China was distilled by Mr. Trump to a declaration that tariffs would solve all problems. But his national security advisers clearly have a more nuanced view.
That leaves Mr. Musk, the world’s richest man and newest denizen of Mar-a-Lago, and Mr. Ramaswamy. They are supposed to head the “Department of Government Efficiency,” writing in The Wall Street Journal on Thursday that “the entrenched and ever-growing bureaucracy represents an existential threat to our republic.”
The department, or “DOGE” as Mr. Musk calls it in a nod to the cryptocurrency dogecoin, is not actually a department at all, but a group of volunteers. But the two men insist their future department will have a direct pipeline to the White House Office of Management and Budget that will look to cut regulations, cut head counts and cut budgets.
They promised to focus first on “$500 billion plus in annual federal expenditures that are unauthorized by Congress or being used in ways that Congress never intended,” including grants to international organizations or the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
(For perspective, the $535 million in federal funds to the public broadcasting group, which Mr. Trump’s supporters believe pays for liberally biased programming, would be a 0.026 percent down payment on Mr. Musk’s promised $2 trillion in cuts. Even eliminating the entire defense budget of the United States would not get him halfway to the goal.)
It remains to be seen how they will work with the Office of Management and Budget’s proposed head, Russell Vought. He was a major figure in Project 2025, which laid out a plan to rework the American government to enhance presidential power by tearing down and rebuilding executive branch institutions.
The post Trump’s Cabinet: Many Ideologies Behind the Veil of ‘America First’ appeared first on New York Times.
