So far, the incoming Trump administration looks exactly as terrible as any reasonable person could have imagined during the campaign.
After a relatively normal start elevating conventional political figures — the president-elect announced that he would nominate Senator Marco Rubio of Florida for secretary of state, Gov. Kristi Noem of South Dakota for the Department of Homeland Security, and Mike Huckabee, the former governor of Arkansas, for U.S. ambassador to Israel — Donald Trump immediately moved to reward the cavalcade of hucksters, conspiracy theorists and reprobates that followed him throughout the campaign.
On Tuesday, Trump announced that Pete Hegseth, a weekend host of “Fox & Friends,” would lead the Department of Defense and take command of the 1.3 million active-duty men and women of the American military and the world’s largest and most powerful bureaucracy. The next day, Trump announced that Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida would serve as attorney general of the United States. Later that day, Gaetz — who was investigated by the Justice Department for sexual harassment, illicit drug use and statutory rape, an investigation that resulted in no charges being filed — resigned from the House of Representatives ahead of the release of a report from the House Ethics Committee that was also looking into the matter.
You might have thought that was enough for one week, but on Thursday, Trump announced on Truth Social that he would nominate Robert Kennedy Jr. to lead the Department of Health and Human Services. The president-elect also intends to give former Representative Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii the sensitive position of director of national intelligence.
You do not need conventional credentials to successfully lead a government agency. You do need evidence of advanced competence at some skill or task that would justify a president’s decision to grant you the privilege of leading an executive agency, to say nothing of the power and authority that comes with it.
There is scant evidence for any of this among the latest batch of proposed nominees — not that there would be. The point of placing loyalists in positions of influence isn’t to make the government work; it is to bend the government to the president’s will, whatever that might be.
Recall Trump’s most frequent complaints as president in his first term. He was angry that the Department of Justice would not pursue his political enemies, mad that the generals would not entertain his desire to shoot protesters and furious that the “deep state” foiled his efforts to abuse the law. For his second term, then, Trump doesn’t want competence; he wants obedience.
And so he’ll give the Pentagon to Hegseth, an Army National Guard officer and cable-television pundit who helped persuade Trump, during the president-elect’s first term, to pardon a Navy SEAL, Edward Gallagher, who had been reported by his own men while he was serving in Iraq for “stabbing a defenseless teenage captive to death,” “picking off a school-age girl and an old man from a sniper’s roost” and “indiscriminately spraying neighborhoods with rockets and machine-gun fire.”
Hegseth has other views beyond support for accused war criminals. He opposes women in combat, stating forthrightly that he doesn’t think they belong on the battlefield. He also blames racial and gender diversity in the military for its recruitment problems and thinks there has been an “infection of left-wing social justice policies designed to isolate, resegregate, and stigmatize certain troops based on a specific racial, gender, or political philosophy,” as Hegseth put it in his book, “The War on Warriors.” He thinks that Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., a decorated veteran and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, should be fired for being too “woke.” Brown, an Air Force pilot with 40 years of service, is Black.
Above all, Hegseth is loyal to Trump, who wants to purge the generals who stood in his way during his first term. It is hard to imagine that Hegseth would resist.
The same goes for Gaetz, a professional provocateur who showed almost total contempt for governing during his time in the House of Representatives. Gaetz has been a cheerleader for Trump’s worst instincts, and there’s no doubt that he would perform the same role as attorney general. We can be as certain as the sunrise that Gaetz would investigate the president’s political enemies, prosecute his foes outside of government and turn the Department of Justice into little more than a thuggish vehicle for retribution on Trump’s behalf.
As for Kennedy and Gabbard? Kennedy shares the president’s skepticism of medical authorities and would affirm the impulses that led Trump to mishandle the government’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic, a blunder that claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of Americans. And Gabbard shares Trump’s solicitousness toward authoritarian regimes, especially the one that currently rules Russia — she’ll allow the president to talk to Vladimir Putin unchaperoned and unmolested by fears that the commander in chief was jeopardizing the security of the United States.
It is far too much to say that Hegseth or Gaetz or Gabbard or Kennedy would be effective in the sense of competently executing Trump’s demands. With no experience running large bureaucracies or dealing with the demands of high government service, they are very likely to mark their tenures, should the Senate give them a seat in the cabinet room, with chaos, dysfunction and rank incompetence.
But neither chaos nor dysfunction nor incompetence is an obstacle to Trump’s lawless intentions. If anything, they’re assets. A collapse in the actual capacity of their agencies to act will not stop these officials from doing everything they can to obey the president’s demands. They will aim to execute his objectives, no matter what the law says.
These nominations are confirmation of Trump’s authoritarian intent, of his desire to rule by fiat and act as a king. They are early evidence that he is exactly what his critics have said he is. They are a sign that he will, in fact, be a dictator on “Day 1.” Trump will devote his second term to revenge against his enemies while the oligarchs, ideologues and apparatchiks that staff his administration pursue their narrow ends and conspire against the public good.
There is, of course, the chance that the Senate will reject each nominee, or one or two of them anyway. Republicans might decide that Hegseth and Gaetz, in particular, are just a bridge too far. But this would require enough Senate Republicans to take a stand, as a body, against Trump in a way they couldn’t even muster when he was at his lowest point, after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. And while the incoming majority leader, Senator John Thune of South Dakota, is closer to Mitch McConnell than he is to MAGA, he has also said that he would be open to a recess appointment process that would allow Trump to install his nominees without the scrutiny of a Senate hearing.
If the elevation of his acolytes is a signal from Trump, then the question of confirmation is a test for Republicans. Will they bend? Will they break? Will they show a backbone? If Republicans say yes to this group — or allow Trump his recess appointments, neutering the Senate’s constitutional right to give advice and consent — they’ll say yes to anything.
There’s no use holding your breath here, unless you want to suffocate.
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