Douthat: Three theories on what Trump’s Cabinet picks portend

By Ross Douthat / The New York Times

Before Donald Trump’s victory, making detailed predictions about how his second administration would govern seemed like a fool’s errand; there were too many multitudes within the Trumpian tent, too many promiscuous promises to voters, to say for sure what forms of Trumpism would end up expressed in a second four-year whirl.

It did seem, at least, that the appointments to Trump’s Cabinet might help us make plausible statements about the trajectory of his administration. But now, with most of the major names put forward — and retracted and replaced, in one case — I’m still not sure how best to generalize about where this particular cast of characters will take us.

That Trump has picked more loyalists than last time is true, inevitable and not especially useful in terms of figuring out how exactly (apart from never appointing a special prosecutor to investigate the boss!) those loyalists are likely to occupy themselves. That some of his nominees are eccentric or unfit-seeming and others are more conventional is likewise to be expected. Neither observation gives us a general theory of Trump 2.0.

Instead, let’s consider three subtheories of how this Cabinet might actually work. First, as climate journalist Matthew Zeitlin suggested, you could see his picks as making up an American version of a European-style coalition government, where small parties join with a bigger party and receive various ministries in exchange for their support.

The choices of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard, especially, fit this model: Trump’s big anti-progressive tent requires him to make a variety of very different worldviews feel represented, which means giving the health ministry to Kennedy’s Green MAGA Party (I’m swiping that moniker from sociologist Holly Jean Buck) and a foreign policy job to Gabbard’s Anti-War Party, even as other jobs like secretary of commerce and secretary of state go to members of the actual Republican Party.

Likewise with Oregon Rep. Lori Chavez-Deremer, the pick for labor secretary, an unusually pro-union Republican whose appointment looks like a reward to Trump’s union supporters: You might call her a tacit representative of the Populist Party or the Teamster Tories. You could fit Pete Hegseth, the pick for defense secretary, and Mike Huckabee, the ambassador to Israel, into that frame as well, since their particular style of evangelical Christian hawkishness (I would call it the Christian Nationalist Party if the term “Christian nationalist” were not so much abused) is often a worldview unto itself.

Seen in this light, as a team of ideological rivals contesting for influence and favor, the Trump Cabinet seems to be set up for a lot of internal conflict; Gabbard against the rest of the foreign policy team on whether to expose more national security secrets, the pro-choice and regulation-friendly Kennedy against abortion opponents and free-marketeers, the pro-union Chavez-Deremer against other economic appointees, Hegseth against the more cautious J.D. Vance, perhaps, on how far to go on behalf of Israel and against Iran.

But another way to look at these picks is that they’re designed to stoke conflict within the different agencies rather than within the Cabinet. As Yuval Levin notes in National Review, the chief qualifications of Hegseth, Gabbard, Kennedy and (before his flameout) Matt Gaetz lie in their roles as fierce external critics of the institutions they’ve been appointed to oversee. Which suggests that what Trump 2.0 is seeking is less the representation of different factions and more just disruption of all kinds; with Elon Musk’s efficiency project looking over the shoulder of each disruptive appointee, taking notes and offering suggestions and encouragement.

Levin, a wise institutionalist, fears this interaction, since “an inclination to destroy something is not evidence of an ability to manage it, or reform it, or improve it — quite the contrary.”

But for precisely that reason, perhaps one should expect the disruption to often remain on the surface, a matter of what the appointees say more than what they manage to accomplish.

Which points to a third interpretation of the Trump Cabinet: That he’s assembling a “team of podcasters,” to use conservative writer Ben Domenech’s formulation, a Cabinet of “communicators, not administrators,” who are picked for their celebrity and their experience as faces and voices — on cable news, on podcasts, on daytime television in the case of Mehmet Oz, the proposed head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, or just in the general glare of celebrity that attends any scion of the Kennedy clan.

In which case it’s a mistake to look too closely at either their ideological commitments or their administrative experience. Trump mostly just wants them as charismatic faces who will be public salespeople for whatever he decides to do.

But the actual administration of the Cabinet agencies still needs to happen, and Trump’s policy decisions are still likely to be strongly influenced by the ideas and proposals that are surfaced from below.

In which case the team-of-podcasters dynamic will increase the influence of the many secondary roles still waiting to be filled; Hegseth’s deputies, Kennedy’s deputies, the figures who always have a certain sway but whose powers may be MAGAfied under the strange conditions of Trump’s second term.

For more clarity, stay tuned.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times, c.2024.