In our candidate-centric political system, every president is a singular figure in his own way, whose appeal to the public is at least a little distinct from that of his party. But presidents still have a relationship to that party, and their choice of cabinet members and other high-level officials can tell any close observer a good deal about the nature of that relationship.
This is more than the standard observation that personnel is policy; to see who gets what job is to get a better sense of the coalition that put the president into office.
The president who puts a strong rival in a key position, like Abraham Lincoln did for William Seward when he made him secretary of state, might be working to keep a divided party together and a potential critic within the fold of the administration.
The president who taps an ideologue to lead an important agency could be showing his commitment to a set of ideas. That’s what we saw, for example, when Ronald Reagan placed supply-side true believers and conservative evangelicals in key roles in his administration, cementing their influence in the Republican Party and bringing their agendas into positions of power.
So it goes for Donald Trump, as he announces his plans, chooses his subordinates and moves closer to beginning his second term as president.
As a candidate for president, Trump openly distanced himself from the mainstream of the Republican Party. He disavowed the party’s position on abortion, despite appointing the judges who helped overturned Roe v. Wade, and he rejected Project 2025 as unrelated to his campaign. “I know nothing about Project 2025,” he said over the summer on Truth Social. “I have no idea who is behind it.”
As president-elect, he has somewhat reversed course. He plans to return Russ Vought, one of the architects of Project 2025, to prominence as head of the Office of Management and Budget. He has also looked to a handful of more traditional Republicans to fill a few high-profile roles. When they are, inevitably, confirmed, Senator Marco Rubio of Florida will be Trump’s secretary of state, and Gov. Kristi Noem of South Dakota will lead his Department of Homeland Security. Representative Elise Stefanik will serve as U.N. ambassador and Gov. Doug Burgum of North Dakota will take secretary of the Interior.
But Trump intends to fill a large portion of his cabinet with figures who would otherwise struggle to find a place in a typical presidential administration of either party. There is the scandal-ridden Pete Hegseth, a Fox News host slated to be the nation’s secretary of defense. There is Robert Kennedy Jr., namesake of one of the most famous Democrats of the 20th century, chosen to serve as secretary of Health and Human Services. There’s Tulsi Gabbard, a one-time Democratic congresswoman from Hawaii, tapped to be Trump’s director of national intelligence. And to lead the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Trump wants to replace Christopher Wray — who he brought in to replace James Comey in 2017 — with an outright sycophant, Kash Patel, last seen threatening Trump’s political opponents with criminal prosecution and publishing children’s books (“The Plot Against the King”) glorifying Trump as though he were some secular deity.
For all of the incompetence and mismanagement of the George W. Bush administration, it is hard to imagine him selecting, as Trump has, Dr. Mehmet Oz to lead the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, as if a large and important bureaucracy could be easily managed by a television personality. (See Trump’s own experience as president for evidence that this is a dubious proposition.)
There are others. Kari Lake, failed Arizona statewide candidate, has been picked to serve as ambassador to Mexico. The onetime wrestling entertainment executive Linda McMahon has been selected to lead the Department of Education. A second Fox Host, Dr. Janette Nesheiwat, has been elevated to the role of surgeon general of the United States, and still another Fox contributor, Monica Crowley, has been picked to be chief of protocol at the State Department.
Compare this group with virtually any other Republican White House or cabinet and you’ll see a team with shockingly little governing experience and almost no connection to the institutional Republican Party outside of donations made to affiliated political action committees. Trump is not picking from within the broad universe of the Republican Party; he has no interest in most of the politicians, policy entrepreneurs and experienced bureaucrats who comprise most Republican administrations. He is interested, more or less, in who he sees on TV.
What he wants, as is clear to most observers, is deputies and subordinates who will show a special and specific loyalty to him, above and beyond everything else. Put a little differently, Trump is less concerned here with the health of the Republican Party, less concerned with building out the next generation of Republican leaders, than he is with serving his most narrow interests. The Republican Party could wither and die, and Donald Trump would not care, provided it did not disrupt his ability to enrich himself and his family. This dynamic, a president who does not care about his party, sets up an interesting tension. What happens when the interests of the president and the interests of the party diverge?
This dynamic also underscores one of the most important — and yet under-remarked on — elements of the Republican Party in the age of Trump: its fundamental political impairment. Like its rival, the Republican Party is, to use a recent term of art, hollow. “At the heart of hollowness lies parties’ incapacity to meet public challenges,” Daniel Schlozman and Sam Rosenfeld observe in “The Hollow Parties: The Many Pasts and Disordered Present of American Party Politics.” And for the Republican Party, this looks like a party that moves through American politics in the form of a “shambolic, lumbering, and decidedly dangerous mess” whose incapacity is “not just the absence of a common public purpose but, more ominously, the inability to control dangerous tendencies located ever more centrally inside the party.”
The institutions of the Republican Party — the establishment, as it were — have no capacity to influence, shape or discipline any of the actors who operate under the Republican umbrella. This has been true for some time — it is a large part of how Trump could execute a hostile takeover in the first place — and it is especially true at this moment, when the party is little more than a patronage network centered on the personalist rule of an American caudillo and his billionaire allies, whose money can be deployed to circumvent party structures as much as bolster them. That Elon Musk could decide to run the Republican campaign apparatus and then subsequently make himself Trump’s unofficial co-president is evidence enough of the problem.
To the extent that there is anything left of a national ideological or programmatic agenda, it is a reflection either of Trump’s idiosyncratic preoccupations or those of the cadres of ideologues who have opportunistically latched on to the incoming president. Put another way, consider the very plausible world in which Trump lost his bid for a second term. A two-time loser, he would have been a clear burden on the party’s ability to win. If he leaves or is forced out of the political scene, what happens to the Republican Party? Does it quickly reshape itself? Or does it enter a period of terminal crisis now that it is bereft of a figure who organized its priorities for nearly a decade?
In the absence of Trump, does the Republican Party look like an entity that can build or mobilize anything like a working electoral majority? Even now, in this world, it is clear that the president-elect’s appeal is distinct from that of his party; Republicans lost four Senate races in states that he won and the party’s House majority teeters on a knife’s edge. All of this is made worse by Trump’s indifference to party building, as well as his demands for loyalty. What is good for him — paying his legal bills, for example — may not be good for the ability of the party to succeed and win.
The weakness of the institutional Republican Party, the fragility of the Republican majorities, and the volatility of Trump himself are a recipe for political instability and chaos. It all serves as a reminder that whenever Trump does leave the scene, he will likely leave behind a Republican Party that will struggle to find an identity outside of his reach and influence.
Over on the other side, the Democratic Party is locked in an internal battle over what the party means outside of its opposition to Trump. It is searching for some kind of identity that will help it both cohere as a coalition and rebuild its relationship to voters both inside and outside its walls. And insofar that the party’s November defeat was useful, it was because it jump-started this process. The Republican Party is obviously not in the same place. But that is just a matter of happenstance. Its victory means only that it can escape its reckoning for now. There will be a time after Trump, and soon enough Republicans will have to deal with what that means.
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