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.
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