The Most Extreme Cabinet Ever

Joe Biden, once again, seems to be cursed with awful timing. On Wednesday morning, in an awkward photo op meant to underscore his adherence to old-fashioned constitutional principles, like the peaceful transfer of power, the forty-sixth President welcomed Donald Trump to the Oval Office. “Congratulations,” Biden said, to a man he has called an aspiring “dictator.” Resurrecting a tradition that Trump rejected four years ago in favor of an all-out effort to overturn his defeat, Biden pledged a smooth transition and offered to do “everything we can to make sure you’re accommodated.” The reassuring optics of the two men shaking hands in front of a crackling fire seemed designed to convey the message that Americans need not worry about all that election-season rhetoric: If Trump were really a fascist-in-waiting, as his own former White House chief of staff has warned, Biden wouldn’t have gone through with a meet and greet, would he?

Poor Biden. Soon after leaving the White House, Trump announced not only two of his most controversial personnel decisions ever but quite possibly two of the most controversial Cabinet choices ever made. At 3:14 p.m., Trump posted on Truth Social that he would name Tulsi Gabbard, the former Democratic congresswoman from Hawaii, as director of National Intelligence. Gabbard, who left the Democratic Party two years ago and actively campaigned for Trump, is best known for making two secret visits to the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, in 2017, and for her public amplification of Kremlin talking points blaming the United States for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Giving her access to classified information, never mind appointing her to supervise such information, would have been unthinkable in any other Administration, including Trump’s first. But Trump soon overwhelmed this news with his announcement, at 3:24 p.m., that he would name Matt Gaetz, the Florida congressman currently under investigation by his own Republican colleagues in the House for alleged illegal drug use and sexual misconduct with a minor, as his Attorney General.

Given the resulting furor, it was easy to forget that just a day earlier Trump had announced that he would name Pete Hegseth, a weekend Fox News anchor with no government experience beyond his Army National Guard service, as his Secretary of Defense. Hegseth, who routinely inveighs against “woke generals” on television, publicly pushed for clemency toward war criminals in Trump’s first term; more recently, he has advocated that Trump should fire C. Q. Brown, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, who is Black, in order to show that he would no longer support diversity-and-inclusion efforts in the military. At such a moment, it seemed like mere quibbles to point out that Trump’s decision, also announced on Tuesday, to name Kristi Noem as his Secretary of Homeland Security, in charge of America’s embattled immigration agencies, came despite the South Dakota governor’s lack of relevant experience or the revelation that she had shot and killed her family’s puppy.

Perhaps it was no surprise that Trump, with his demands for ostentatious displays of loyalty and his penchant for obsessive television watching, has quickly assembled the makings of a second-term Cabinet that might be better suited for a Republican reality-show casting call. The immediate questions raised by these appointments were practical ones: Could these extreme nominees, even in a Republican-controlled Senate, possibly be confirmable? And what, more broadly, would it tell us about the excesses we might expect from the new Trump government if they are?

Reactions from Capitol Hill in the aftermath of the Gaetz news offered a priceless snapshot of an institution, once more, on the brink. “God-tier level trolling . . . to own the libs in perpetuity,” John Fetterman, the blunt-talking Democratic senator from Pennsylvania, said. But it quickly became apparent that the Republicans as much as the Democrats were being owned by Trump; with Gaetz’s appointment, not to mention Gabbard’s and Hegseth’s, he is practically daring the G.O.P. to defy him. After eight years of watching Republicans squirm while ultimately doing his bidding, Trump has every reason to believe they will not. Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democratic senator from Rhode Island, may have been even more on point than Fetterman when he observed that the dual nominations of Gaetz and Gabbard were like an autocrat’s “crawl test”—as in, a public trial to determine “Republican senators’ willingness to crawl for Trump.”

This is a familiar move from the Trump playbook, though it was striking that he was acting with such speed to execute on it again. In his first term, he relished proving the hollowness of his Republican allies’ excuses for him; time and again, he exposed them as hypocrites more effectively than their partisan rivals ever did. Lindsey Graham, who is set to be the Judiciary Committee chairman in the new Senate, and who is always a good barometer of how far G.O.P. officials are willing to go to appease Trump, initially sounded dubious. By Wednesday evening, however, he appeared on Fox, telling Sean Hannity that Trump “won the election. He deserves a chance to pick his Cabinet,” and praising Gaetz as “bright” and “qualified.”

Trump’s Cabinet rollout shows pretty definitively his plan for the new Administration: He does not just want to explode the norms of the capital when he returns to it. He wants to stomp on them—and anyone who might be tempted to stick to the old rules that Trump loves to flout. His embarrassment of Biden, I’m sure, was just one welcome side benefit of making his head-exploding announcements on Wednesday. Another effect was to overshadow the election of a new Republican Majority Leader in the Senate, John Thune, of South Dakota. Thune, a longtime lieutenant of the outgoing Senate G.O.P. leader Mitch McConnell, beat out two other candidates, including the MAGA favorite Rick Scott, for the post; he is what remains of his party’s pre-Trump establishment in Congress, and, like McConnell, he criticized Trump for “inexcusable” actions leading up to the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. (Not that it stopped either man from endorsing Trump in this election.)

It is also possible, of course, that Trump’s most dubious picks will be defeated in the Senate, or that Gaetz never even makes it as far as a formal nomination. His sworn enemy, the former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, insisted as much in an interview with Bloomberg Television. “Look, Gaetz won’t get confirmed,” he said. “Everybody knows that.” McCarthy, who was dumped as Speaker last year by House Republicans in a coup orchestrated by Gaetz, suggested that Gaetz, while unconfirmable, offered a “deflection” from Trump’s other questionable nominees—and he is surely right that, so long as Gaetz remains in the running for Attorney General, it will be hard to focus on any other controversy. Marco Rubio, Trump’s choice for Secretary of State, and Mike Waltz, his pick for national-security adviser, appear like statesmen from another era in contrast.

Soon after Trump made his announcements on Wednesday, his ally and former chief strategist Steve Bannon went on a long gleeful podcast rant about Trump’s Cabinet choices, from his delight over the “brilliant, determined, focussed, relentless” Gaetz as a possible A.G. to the “shock inside this city” that has greeted Trump’s early moves. As a matter of tactics, he seemed almost in agreement with McCarthy that the Gaetz pick could have the result of making it easier to push through otherwise shocking choices, such as Hegseth and Gabbard. “It’s going to make Pete Hegseth look like General Grant,” Bannon joked.

The tawdry theatrics involved in the rollout of Trump’s picks for key national-security posts should not, however, obscure an underlying substance that is no less striking for having been utterly predictable: this time, the former President—who promised revenge and retribution, who openly admired Vladimir Putin’s “genius” invasion of Ukraine, and whose advisers dream of dismantling the “deep state”—looks like he really wants to follow through on his pledges of disruption.

Whether or not Gaetz ends up as a “blowtorch” that Trump aims at the Justice Department, as Bannon put it, the point is as much about the blowtorching as it is about the personnel. How far will Trump go? By Thursday afternoon, Trump announced his next controversial choice: Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the vaccine-skeptical, conspiracy-theory-spreading former Democrat, for Secretary of Health and Human Services. Before the election, Trump had signalled as much, saying that he wanted Kennedy to “go wild” on America’s public-health agencies. How much clearer could he be?

I expect to see more such announcements in the coming days. Trump 2.0, right out of the gate, has already gone far beyond the most extreme people and policies contemplated in Trump’s first term. And maybe that’s the hidden benefit of his wild new Cabinet’s début—the immediate obsolescence of the post-election wave of hot takes, wishful thinking, and psychological self-soothing by many in the capital that maybe, just maybe, this time things wouldn’t be so crazy after all. ♦