Critics of the administration set the bar low for President Donald Trump’s Cabinet secretaries and agency administrators, but several of his picks managed to defy expectations — for better or worse. Post Opinions writers Robert Gebelhoff, Dominic Pino, Henry Olsen, James Hohmann and Damir Marusic share which appointee they think has taken the most surprising turn.
Robert Gebelhoff: Doug Burgum
I didn’t have high expectations for Trump’s second Cabinet, yet Doug Burgum still managed to shock with his underperformance as interior secretary. Not long ago, Burgum marketed himself as something of a moderate. As governor of North Dakota, he avoided culture war issues and adopted an “all of the above” energy policy, celebrating wind projects as they rapidly expanded in his state. In 2021, he even set a goal to make North Dakota “carbon neutral” by 2030.
Yet upon entering this administration, he shed his skin and became one of the more embarrassing enforcers of the president’s agenda. While the administration crowed about its efforts to cut red tape, Burgum added more: He required personal sign-off on solar and wind projects touching federal land and spearheaded a campaign to block wind projects that were already under construction (it failed).
More recently, he doubled down on the administration’s claims that its botched Reflecting Pool paint job was the result of vandals, a narrative he’s still pushing even after prosecutors dismissed charges against his department’s scapegoats. Meanwhile, Politico reported last week that Interior staffers are fed up with his management. Politics is often the art of reinvention. Burgum is proof that not all makeovers are for the better.
Dominic Pino: Sean P. Duffy
My answer has to be Transportation Secretary Sean P. Duffy. He’s a very typical pick for a bottom-tier Cabinet post like Transportation: retired congressman, party loyalist, scant policy record, affable guy. You don’t expect transportation secretaries to do much, and they generally live up to that expectation. But Duffy deserves real credit for opposing the rumored plans to bail out Spirit Airlines this spring.
Pushing the long-overdue revamp of Dulles International Airport, which the federal government owns, will also be a major improvement for the nation’s capital. It would be even better if the Transportation Department went further — by privatizing Dulles and separating air traffic control from politics, for example. But Duffy is still showing real leadership in a Cabinet where most secretaries are not.
Henry Olsen: Scott Bessent
No one expected Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to be one of the Trump Cabinet’s breakout stars. Yet 18 months in, that’s exactly what he is: someone trusted by Trump and global markets.
Bessent’s secret is that, almost alone among recent treasury secretaries, he relishes both the inside and the outside games a modern secretary needs to play. He can go on television and explain current monetary or fiscal policy in clear, ordinary language. He can make partisan points with aplomb. He rivals former Trump economic adviser Larry Kudlow in his ability to make the complex seem simple.
The market also clearly believes that Bessent understands global finance and is a voice of sanity within the often-chaotic Trump economic policy team. That doesn’t mean he echoes anti-tariff globalist market bromides, but it does mean he knows that the administration can’t simply will global markets into submission. Trump clearly trusts Bessent’s advice regarding potential market reaction to the administration’s actions, which probably explains why major announcements now come with more deliberation than the shambolic rollout of the “Liberation Day” tariff schedules in April 2025.
All this is good for America. If you like Trump’s new economic direction, you see Bessent as helping the captain steer the ship through choppy waters. If you don’t, you see him as someone helping keep the ship from running aground. Either way, Bessent is seen as a grown-up in the room and as loyal to the president. That’s quite an achievement.
James Hohmann: Mehmet Oz
Mehmet Oz was caricatured unfairly during his 2022 Senate campaign as a crudité-loving TV doctor. As administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, he’s been serious and energetic about taking on problems neglected by previous administrations. Foremost among them is combating rampant fraud.
He’s pursued politically difficult but necessary changes. He championed the expiration of costly Obamacare subsidies at the end of last year and worked behind the scenes to shore up the votes for tightening Medicaid eligibility in the tax bill. He just announced that a Medicare Part D subsidy will end earlier than planned.
Oz is willing to tell hard truths. He said earlier this year, for example, that healthy Americans would benefit from delaying retirement by a year to keep entitlement programs stable. And he’s made medical innovation a priority by embracing artificial intelligence at an agency that’s historically been way behind the times.
Damir Marusic: Marco Rubio
Secretary of State Marco Rubio had a reputation as an ideological chameleon, pivoting from freedom-agenda neoconservatism to China-obsessed hawkery during the first Trump administration. To gain Trump’s favor and a spot in his Cabinet, Rubio had to discard some of his previous commitments to human rights in favor of a more ambiguous, realist stance.
Paradoxically, under the mercurial Trump, Rubio appears to have found his core. His recent speech eviscerating communism went viral, in no small part because the conviction is palpable. “One of the criticisms you sometimes hear of communism, for example, is that it sounds good in theory, but it never works in practice,” he said during a July 16 ministerial on political terrorism. “That’s actually not true. Communism does not sound good in theory.” He went on to rip into what he described as a culture of resentment eating away at the left, a culture that favors “a world without miracles, without myths, without men who rise above the rest to do incredible and extraordinary things.”
Were these cheap shots at a “socialist” left that claims to have renounced the excesses of its predecessors? I suppose we’ll find out as democratic socialist candidates face voters in November. For my part, I’m glad that someone on the Trump right is coming out swinging. With real conviction.
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