Trump’s Cabinet Picks Go to Washington

This week, on Capitol Hill, the House of Representatives held a floor debate over whether to make a congressional time capsule. The proposed legislation mandates that the Architect of the Capitol, the agency responsible for maintaining its buildings and grounds, create the capsule, which would be filled with “institutional milestones of Congress” and then buried under the West Lawn until 2276. It was the final Monday afternoon of the year before Congress adjourned for the holiday recess. As I watched the time-capsule debate, staffers for the Architect of the Capitol were at work on the West Front, building the seating platforms for Donald Trump’s Inauguration next month. “It’s thirty-four days until President Trump takes the oath of office, but he’s already begun the power of the Trump effect,” Speaker Mike Johnson said, at a news conference.

Part of that effect could be detected, over the past several weeks, in the series of Trump Cabinet nominees traipsing around the Hill to court senators whose votes they’d need to get confirmed. Trump made his selections quickly, then watched from Florida as they made their rounds in Washington. Matt Gaetz, the pick for Attorney General, was first, showing up before Thanksgiving with J. D. Vance and hunkering down in the Strom Thurmond Room to receive senators who were concerned, among other things, with his alleged sexual misconduct involving a minor; when it became clear that Gaetz, who denies wrongdoing, couldn’t get the votes, he dropped out, making way for Pam Bondi (Attorney General No. 2)—and Pete Hegseth (Secretary of Defense) and Tulsi Gabbard (director of National Intelligence) and Kash Patel (F.B.I. director)—to roam the Capitol hallways.

Now it was Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.,’s turn. On Monday, a little before four o’clock, Kennedy walked into the Hart Senate building. While he got wanded by security guards, a group of journalists congregated and then started to chase him as he made his way to the Florida senator Rick Scott’s office. “I’m all for the polio vaccine,” Kennedy, whom Trump has chosen to run the Department of Health and Human Services, said, before disappearing inside. (In the past, he has suggested that the vaccine killed “many, many, many, many, many more people than polio ever did.”) Other than that, he remained more or less monosyllabic in encounters with reporters over the course of the week. Spectators gathered on several of the glass balconies that look onto the Hart building’s atrium, which is largely taken up by Alexander Calder’s massive sculpture “Mountains and Clouds.” (The cloud components of the piece were removed, in 2016, after a structural analysis deemed them unsafe; they are set to be reinstalled when funding becomes available.) About half an hour after Kennedy went in, Scott emerged from his office to a barrage of questions: “Did you talk about high-fructose corn syrup?” “Did you talk about abortion?” Scott turned out to be something of a decoy; Kennedy had left through another exit and made his way to the second floor. “Please don’t run,” a staffer told those sprinting to try to catch him.

It wasn’t clear why it would be worth running. The Constitution empowers the Senate with an “advice and consent” role in Presidential appointments, and the chamber votes to approve nominees for the Cabinet, the Supreme Court, ambassadorships, and the like. The pre-hearing meetings are one of the “folkways of the Hill,” Katherine Scott, the Senate historian, told me. “The practice of nominees making so-called courtesy calls with senators has a long tradition that dates back to at least the late nineteen-sixties and the Nixon Administration.” Only recently has the process evolved to “include a gaggle of reporters trailing the nominee from office to office,” she added.

Tom Korologos, who was the Nixon White House’s chief lobbyist in the Senate, spent decades shepherding more than three hundred nominees, including Alexander Haig, for Secretary of State; Donald Rumsfeld, for Secretary of Defense (twice); and Antonin Scalia and Robert Bork, both for the Supreme Court. Does parading them around before their confirmation hearings accomplish anything? Korologos, who died earlier this year, has described “the art of getting confirmed” as “very arcane.” His approach: “This is not a time to set policy or have grandiose schemes. Senators don’t like to hear from unconfirmed nominees what their grand scheme is for solving the economy, defense, housing . . . Do not ever assume you have the job. Do not go to the agency or to the office to which you are nominated, at all, during this process.” The visits, he went on, “will tip you off on what the senator cares about in terms of the issues and may ask you at the hearing.” This is helpful for the preparatory mock hearings Korologos would conduct with the nominee, which he called “murder boards.”

It’s rare for a President’s nominee to be rejected. In 1987, after Bork was questioned, in televised hearings, on everything from his staunch conservative views to his beard (Korologos thought it was “weird,” and had begged Bork to shave it), the Senate voted him down. “Bork” is now a verb—meaning “to attack or defeat (a nominee or candidate for public office) unfairly through an organized campaign of harsh public criticism or vilification”—and the Times briefly featured a “bork-o-meter” for George W. Bush’s nominees. In 1989, there was significant pushback against George H. W. Bush’s choice for Secretary of Defense, John Tower. “The twice-divorced former Senator from Texas, who makes no secret of his appreciation for a glass or two of wine or for the company of an attractive woman, describes himself as ‘a man of some discipline’ who has no drinking problem,” the Times reported, as Tower was put through the congressional wringer. (Maureen Dowd recently recalled Tower’s defenders proposing that to get confirmed he’d commit to drinking only two glasses of wine per night—they even suggested that it’d be exclusively white.) He fell short by six votes, the first time a Cabinet nominee had been denied since 1959. In 1993, two of Bill Clinton’s top picks for Attorney General—both women, after he promised a Cabinet that would “look like America”—were quickly withdrawn from consideration when it came to light that they had employed household workers who weren’t legally authorized to work in the United States. The kerfuffle was known as Nannygate. No one could shepherd their way out of it.

Kennedy, who wore a pin-striped suit, moved through the Senate surrounded by a security detail, but he was otherwise alone. At a news conference earlier in the day, at Mar-a-Lago, Trump fielded some questions about Kennedy and polio vaccines, acting as something of a shepherd from afar. “I think he’s going to be much less radical than you would think,” Trump said. “He’s got a very open mind or I wouldn’t have put him there.” He went on, “Nothing’s going to happen very quickly.”

For those not already immersed in Kennedy’s Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) principles, his trip to Washington was a chance to tout some of the less controversial ones. “We’re just going to try to make life more simple and safer,” Tommy Tuberville, of Alabama, said, after meeting with Kennedy. “It’s the low-hanging fruit that we’ve got to do first.” Take Red Dye 3 and 40, he went on. “We can’t put it in cosmetics because it causes cancer, but it’s allowed to be put in our food. Now, give me a break.” The problem extended to medical research more broadly. “Europe’s twenty years ahead of us,” Tuberville said. “They shouldn’t be twenty years ahead of anybody.”

I watched through the glass door of the office of Ron Johnson, of Wisconsin, as he met with Kennedy for about thirty minutes while Kennedy’s security made small talk with the staffer at the front desk. At one point, an agent picked up and then put down an office copy of “Goodnight Moon.” Flanking the door were two officers with the Capitol Police. “This is just gonna continue till January, these nominations?” one asked. The other nodded: “Overtime.” The TV in the office was tuned to CNN, which was playing live footage of the media stakeout. “Look, you’re on TV,” one of the officers told the other. Members of the press, assembled outside, deliberated as to whether Kennedy would use the Santa-shaped hand-sanitizer dispenser on his way out. He emerged, a flash of tan, and sped directly into the neighboring office of Senator Markwayne Mullin, of Oklahoma. A new round of waiting began.

Kennedy’s vaccine skepticism and permissiveness on abortion have earned him the ire of both parties, but some of his stances on health policy, among them removing processed food from school lunches, aren’t difficult to embrace. (Even his more Goop-adjacent wellness ideas, such as Make Frying Oil Tallow Again, have an increasingly broad appeal.) On some positions, he’s likely to be malleable, or at least willing to make exceptions to accommodate Trump’s whims. Recently, on a flight back from New York after attending a U.F.C. fight, Kennedy was photographed eating McDonald’s with the President-elect. The Twitterverse wondered whether he really had any principles. Someone Photoshopped images of fresh vegetables into his hands.

Toward the end of the afternoon, I took the tram from the Hart building to the Capitol, where instead of posing questions about polio or corn syrup, reporters were asking when the text for the stopgap spending bill would come out. Heading into the Senate chamber, John Thune, the incoming Majority leader, was asked what he and Trump talked about at the weekend Army-Navy game. “We watched some football,” he said, then went inside. Lisa Murkowski was trailed from the tram to the senators’ elevator to the chamber. Reporters jogged the stairs next to Susan Collins as she rode the escalator. Nobody approached Tom Cotton.

I made my way back to Hart. A few minutes later, Kennedy left Mullin’s office, and the senator stayed behind to talk about their meeting. “I think he’s going to question science, and I’m glad,” Mullin said. “We should question science.” He said that they had talked about vaccines: “Your two-year-old goes in and they come out like a pin cushion.” Had they discussed high-fructose corn syrup? Fluoride? Abortion? Guns? “I’ve got a gun in my office,” Mullin said. He planned to support Kennedy “a hundred per cent,” though he conceded that all the healthy-food chat didn’t especially move him. “It’s not my thing,” he said. “I have a horrible diet. I prefer a Pop-Tart over a carrot.” Someone asked whether Kennedy explained why he ate McDonald’s with Trump. Mullin laughed. “I don’t know,” he said. “I had McDonald’s today. I eat awful.” He added, “But I work out.”

This prelude to next year’s confirmation battle is playing against the backdrop of historically small margins in both the House and the Senate. (At one morning press conference, Steve Scalise introduced Speaker Johnson as “the leader of the House today, and in the majority by the narrowest of margins in January.”) It’s only in the past quarter-century that the votes have started to be close at all—for many years, nominees received near unanimous consent. “This is a different party era,” Scott, the Senate historian, said. “These majorities are razor thin. If you lose three votes, three people in the majority party are uncertain about a nominee, that nominee may not go through.”

Kennedy continued his visits throughout the pre-holiday week. Ron Johnson, Tommy Tuberville, Rick Scott, and two other senators announced that they had formed a MAHA caucus; at one point, John Fetterman stood in the doorway of his office so he could shake Kennedy’s hand as he went past. Elsewhere in the building, Paris Hilton, visiting to promote a bill aimed at stopping the abuse of minors in residential treatment programs, walked around with a portable lighting device to use when taking photos. Meanwhile, on the Senate floor, outgoing members who were either retiring or had lost their seats gave farewell speeches. On the House side, in the Rayburn Room, Mike Johnson hosted a menorah lighting with the Democratic Party leaders Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries. Johnson took the stage in front of a painting of George Washington. “They’re finding me a yarmulke,” Johnson said, waiting behind the lectern. A staffer rushed up and handed him one. Johnson supplied his own menorah, which was made out of shrapnel from rockets shot down by the Israel Defense Forces. A rabbi lit a candle and told Jeffries and Johnson that he would be handing it to them to hold together, to begin lighting the others. Before reciting the blessings, he said that he was honored to be in this “temple of democracy”—particularly this room, an “island of togetherness in what can be a sometimes very fractured space.” By the end of the week, Elon Musk had done his best to scuttle the spending bill, and Johnson was desperately trying to avoid a government shutdown before the holiday recess. In the New Year, the time-capsule bill, which passed the House, awaits debate in the Senate. ♦