The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Trump's cabinet is shaping up to be deeply loyal—and deeply reckless.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard stand behind Donald Trump as they watch a UFC fight on November 16, 2024. (Photo by Kena Betancur / AFP via Getty.)

While Donald Trump was campaigning for a new presidential term, many of his critics warned that a second Trump administration would be far worse than the first if only because “the adults in the room” would not be there to restrain him. The more traditional Republicans who had staffed the first administration had mostly deserted the ship; in their place would be a team of hardcore loyalists and cronies, many of them incompetent and some of them outright cranks.

So what do his selections so far tell us about the incoming Trump Administration and the next four years?

The (Mostly) Good

Last week, Trump’s very first picks seemed reassuring: New York congresswoman Elise Stefanik for United Nations ambassador, Florida congressman Michael Waltz for National Security Advisor and Florida Senator Marco Rubio for Secretary of State, all with strong and fairly traditional foreign policy credentials. Rubio, Waltz and Stefanik are old-school internationalist conservatives who believe in the use of American military and political strength to maintain security and order (and, where possible, support freedom) around the world. More importantly, they are experienced public figures not known for radical rhetoric or for trafficking in dangerous conspiracy theories—unlike Trump’s picks for other positions.

True, their career trajectories also demonstrate a downright sycophantic willingness to not only bend the knee to Trump, but sacrifice principle to loyalty. (Rubio and Waltz have at various points refused to condemn Trump’s challenge to the 2020 election results, while Stefanik was a full-throated supporter of the attempt.) After Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Rubio came out strongly in support of U.S. military aid to Kyiv as well as economic sanctions against Moscow; yet earlier this year, when Trump strong-armed congressional Republicans into opposing a foreign aid package that included new funds for Ukraine, Rubio was one of the Republicans who went along. Waltz has followed a similar trajectory from early strong support for aid to Ukraine to a vote against it. Both Waltz and Rubio have insisted that they still regard Ukraine’s defense as vital to international security and U.S. interests, while also offering spurious rationales for opposing the aid package that were almost certainly an excuse for doing Trump’s bidding.

Both Waltz and Rubio are strong China hawks, which is in line with Trump’s agenda so far; whether they will offer pushback if Trump decides to go the route of a “deal” with China, or signals—as he did in an interview last July—that he is willing to back off from the American commitment to Taiwan’s security remains to be seen. Of course, it is useful to remember that during the first Trump administration, cabinet members and staffers who offered him pushback soon found themselves on the way out. But it was at least reassuring when Trump chose fairly conventional and experienced figures for government positions representing America on the world stage.

Then, the other shoe dropped—and dropped, and dropped, and dropped.

The Bad

First there was Defense Secretary pick Pete Hegseth, an aggressive culture warrior and Trump hyper-loyalist who has raised eyebrows partly because of his job as co-host of the Fox News show Fox & Friends Weekend. True, he is also a decorated National Guard veteran who has served in Iraq and Afghanistan. But the comments he has made from his Fox News perch include some genuinely radical rhetoric. On January 7, 2021, he offered a passionate defense of the pro-Trump rioters who had just stormed Capitol Hill to disrupt the certification of the election results (with a passing “I’m not saying it was okay” disclaimer). Hegseth described the insurrectionists as people who “love freedom,” who are angry about “what the anti-American left has done to America,” and who “feel like the entire system is rigged against them.”

There are other concerns. Hegseth has energetically championed soldiers credibly accused of war crimes. There has also been controversy about his prolific tattoos, among them the medieval crusader motto Deus vult!, or “God wills it.” Some have linked these tattoos to white supremacism while others have defended them as expressions of Christian faith. At the very least, they indicate an embrace of right-wing Christian nationalism—arguably no more appropriate for a Secretary of Defense than left-wing social justice militancy.

Hegseth’s criticism of “diversity, equity and inclusion” policies certainly has some validity, given that these policies have often focused on identity over merit; but his talk of purging anyone involved with “woke shit” or “DEI” from the military raises disturbing questions if he brings his own brand of identity politics to the task. What’s more, a (sympathetic) review of his recent book The War on Warriors notes that his hostility to “wokeness” in the military is not just about diversity vs. quality: he believes “wokeness” encourages soldiers to ponder the morality of their actions instead of demanding, in the reviewer’s words, “instant obedience to all lawful orders.”

Obviously, “lawful” is the key word. But given Trump’s disturbing statements about using the military against domestic “enemies” such as “radical left lunatics,” and given Hegseth’s ferocious loyalty to Trump, it is not paranoid to wonder just how far America’s next Secretary of Defense—if confirmed—would push the principle that “ours is not to reason why.”

The Ugly

Then there is Attorney General pick Matt Gaetz, the Florida congressman who, if approved, will head a Justice Department that recently investigated him for sex trafficking allegations (the probe ended with no charges). Gaetz is such a terrible pick that some people don’t believe he’s a serious one. There’s a theory that he’s a “sacrificial lamb” intended to let Senate Republicans show some independence by rejecting him—and to make a slightly less radical nominee more palatable. Another theory is that his nomination is a face-saving way for Gaetz to resign his House seat in anticipation of a House Ethics Committee report on multiple allegations, including that he had sex with a 17-year-old girl.

Others believe Trump is absolutely serious about Gaetz’s appointment as part of a quest for “retribution” against his supposed persecutors—the people Trump blames for his various legal troubles, including ones related to the 2020 election interference. One Trump advisor told The Bulwark that other candidates for the post “talked about their vaunted legal theories and constitutional bullshit” while “Gaetz was the only one who said, ‘Yeah, I’ll go over there and start cuttin’ fuckin’ heads.’” In this framework, Gaetz’s own legal scrapes—and consequent grievances against the very department he would be heading—are probably an asset in Trump’s eyes.

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If Gaetz is the “worst cabinet level appointment in history,” in the words of former Trump staffer-turned-critic John Bolton, Tulsi Gabbard, nominated for Director of National Intelligence, is the runner-up. Many regard her as a genuine national security risk, due to her history of channeling Kremlin talking points and cozying up to the Bashar Assad regime in Syria. Gabbard, a maverick leftist Democrat-turned-MAGA-Republican, has repeatedly blamed Putin’s invasion of Ukraine on the Biden Administration’s refusal to consider Russia’s “legitimate security concerns” about NATO expansion. About a month into the war, Gabbard told Tucker Carlson that the Biden administration was conducting a “modern-day siege against Russia” by means of economic warfare and diplomatic isolation, with the ultimate goal of removing Putin from power.

Gabbard has also boosted Kremlin-peddled conspiracy theories about sinister U.S.-funded “biolabs” in Ukraine. While the former congresswoman went on to clarify that she was not endorsing Russian claims that these laboratories were developing biological weapons, only that the presence of dangerous pathogens in a war zone was cause for alarm, there is little doubt that her initial comments helped promote the Russian narrative.

Given that the DNI’s task is to oversee coordination between different intelligence agencies, handing the post to someone who almost certainly couldn’t get a security clearance under normal circumstances seems… well, insane. In addition to Gabbard’s Kremlin affinities, there’s also the fact that her 2017 “fact-finding mission” to Syria—where she met with Assad—was reportedly sponsored by a front group for a pro-Assad, pro-Hamas, rabidly antisemitic fascist party.

Rounding out this parade is Trump’s pick for Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., formerly a far-left climate activist, now a MAGA convert who endorsed Donald Trump after dropping his own presidential bid.

A former environmental tort lawyer, RFK Jr. is best known these days as an anti-vaccine activist. He and his supporters dispute the label, claiming that he is only against harmful vaccines; but that’s pure sophistry, since he has explicitly stated (incorrectly) that no currently available vaccine is “both safe and effective.” He still embraces the debunked theory that vaccines cause autism. He has falsely claimed the polio vaccine causes cancer and has taken more lives than it has saved. And he has compared vaccination to the Holocaust (a remark for which he later apologized).

Other medical nonsense RFK Jr. has voiced or boosted: HIV may not cause AIDS; the coronavirus may have been deliberately designed to sicken and kill “Caucasians and black people” while going easy on “Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese”; Bill Gates’s promotion of COVID vaccination was tied to his business interests and to digitally tracking people with microchips.

RFK Jr.’s advocacy through his nonprofit group, misleadingly named Children’s Health Defense, already helped kill more than 80 people, mostly children, in Samoa in 2019 by contributing to a measles outbreak. (When fears of vaccines surged in the island nation after two infants died from improperly administered measles shots, RFK Jr. seized the opportunity, traveling to Samoa to ally himself with local antivax activists.)  Now, Trump wants to place him at the head of the department that oversees all the federal health-related agencies in the United States. Unsurprisingly, medical professionals are calling this a “genuine catastrophe.” Even the New York Post (which endorsed Trump) and the Wall Street Journal have run scathing editorials against the nomination.

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All in all, Trump’s most high-profile choices so far certainly don’t allay fears that the president-elect intends to take America in an extreme direction; this is particularly true of the Gaetz and Hegseth picks, given their stated intent to use the apparatus of the state to target perceived enemies. Add to this the Gabbard and Kennedy picks, and this may add up to an even scarier picture. As Robert Tracinski (no leftist) puts it in The UnPopulist, Trump is not merely signaling that he wants these appointments to reform the way government functions; what he’s attempting feels more like “a negation of government, an act of nihilism directed at the central function of each of our government’s agencies.” Whether this is a deliberate middle finger to “the system” or simply the result of Trump’s capricious pursuit of his own personal agenda, the government-subverting result is the same.

Of course, all these nominees have yet to be confirmed; a majority of Senate Republicans reportedly say in private conversations that they don’t see a path to confirmation for Gaetz in particular. Trump has already made it clear that he will try to force the Senate to adjourn in order to make “recess appointments” without confirmation—a move many conservatives regard as unconstitutional, a blatant end run around the Senate’s “advice and consent” function. If that’s the case, his term may begin with a bruising battle with his own party in Congress.

Even if all or most of the nominees survive the confirmation process in one way or another, it’s hard to imagine this administration running smoothly. Gabbard’s foreign policy outlook, for instance, will inevitably clash with Rubio’s, while Kennedy’s proposed crusade against chemicals in food and genetically modified goods will conflict with Trump’s declared deregulation agenda.

In all, the transition to Trump’s second term augurs authoritarian encroachments on the legitimate functions of government. The ray of hope is that these encroachments may be limited by institutional guardrails—depending on how strong they will prove to be—and by the reckless incompetence of the appointees themselves.

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