What does it take to be appointed as a cabinet secretary or other senior member of Donald Trump’s second administration?
Expertise and experience in the pertinent area aren’t relevant: his choice as education secretary, for example, is most famous for her role in the wrestling industry.
Being mega-rich helps. Trump has so far nominated thirteen or more billionaires to government posts. His cabinet alone is worth at least $7 billion, sixty times the collective wealth of Joe Biden’s cabinet. Being associated with Fox News also helps: twenty of Trump’s picks so far have been Fox News hosts or contributors.
But for the most senior national security and law enforcement jobs, the overriding qualification is simple: potential appointees must endorse Trump’s fiction that the 2020 presidential election was stolen by the Democrats. It is a symptom of how quickly the unthinkable becomes the new normal that this has attracted so little attention.
None of these appointees is likely to believe Trump’s claim. Immediately after the 2020 election the Republicans mounted more than sixty legal challenges; all of them were dismissed. In the four years since then, no evidence of any significant fraud has emerged. More than that, theories of foul play have been debunked — most expensively the claims about rigged voting machines that resulted in Dominion Voting Systems receiving almost a billion dollars from Fox News. As the Washington Post data analyst Philip Bump wrote last year, “No election in American history has been scrutinised as robustly and ceaselessly as the 2020 election.”
Trump’s appointees are also aware of Trump’s cynical history of labelling as a fraud every election result he hasn’t liked since Obama’s landslide win in 2012. They also know that influential Republicans were positioning themselves to allege fraud yet again in the months leading up to the 2024 election. “As things stand now there’s zero chance of a free and fair election,” the Heritage Foundation’s Mike Howell charged in July last year. Such concerns magically evaporated when the result came out right.
So what sort of government are these expedient liars likely to deliver?
Trump’s first-term approach can be characterised as malevolence tempered by incompetence. His first major action — the “Muslim ban” banning migrants and visitors from seven predominantly Muslim countries — was blocked by the courts; his signature policy, repealing Obamacare, failed to get through Congress. Setbacks like these are what he was determined to avoid when he makes his return to the White House.
So far, there is no apparent lessening of his malevolence. Indeed, four more years of accumulating grievances have fuelled a strong new focus on retribution. As the election neared, writes Fintan O’Toole, a close observer of US politics, Trump’s rhetoric became “increasingly surreal, vituperative and lurid” and he increasingly spoke of “the enemy within.” The chair of the joint chiefs of staff should be executed, he declared; the NBC television network was guilty of “treason” and would “pay” for it; the Democrats were running a Gestapo administration; Republican senator Liz Cheney should go to jail; and the special prosecutor overseeing his trials, Jack Smith, should be thrown out of his job and out of the country.
One key appointment points to the vigour of Trump’s quest for retribution. His appointed head of the FBI, Kash Patel, served in the first Trump administration and then wrote a book that provides a lists of “deep state” officials to target. Trump called the book “a blueprint to let us take back the White House and remove these Gangsters from all of Government.’’
So the malevolence is at least as great, but is it still tempered by incompetence? Certainly Trump’s second administration has got off to a very different start. In 2016 the federal government set aside a large amount of money for both parties’ candidates to staff their presidential transition teams. Trump and Hilary Clinton had both built massive teams of people ready to enter the fifteen big departments and hundreds of smaller federal agencies and see what was happening inside. A thousand or so Obama officials were waiting for them, along with briefings that had taken them six months to prepare.
But then, days after the election, Trump simply fired the 500 or so people on his transition team. “Chris, you and I are so smart that we can leave the victory party two hours early and do the transition ourselves,” he told a perplexed Chris Christie, the former governor of New Jersey, who had assembled the team. Soon he also fired Christie. It is hard to fathom such arrogance and laziness.
Trump was much better prepared this time. The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, a 900-page manifesto compiled by a team of right-wing ideologues (including many ex-Trump staffers), methodically spelt out how to reshape the American government. Whenever its recommendations provoked controversy during the campaign, Trump distanced himself from the document. But several of its authors were among his early appointees, and its prescriptions are clearly driving Trump’s assault on government institutions.
The better preparation doesn’t end there. Trump has also identified more possibilities for his own enrichment. Not content with selling caps, mugs and even his God bless the USA bibles, he opened new money-making avenues in the days before his inauguration. He announced two meme cryptocurrencies with outrageous market values, $TRUMP and later $MELANIA, both of them likely to ruthlessly exploit the more credulous among his followers. In practice, he will be doing his best to write the rules governing business ventures from which he and his family are profiting.
Underlying the preparations for Trump’s second term is a self-serving diagnosis of the frustrations of the first. Trump’s laziness, limited abilities or short attention span weren’t the problem, or the inherent flaws of his plans. The administration was sabotaged by traitors in its midst.
In search of people who would do exactly as instructed, Trump turned over staff at a high rate: four chiefs of staff, four press secretaries and seven communications directors in just four years. Part of the problem, as economist Noah Smith wrote, is that “almost all of the people who work for him seem to end up hating him.” His longest-serving chief-of-staff, John Kelly, described him as “a person that has nothing but contempt for our democratic institutions, our Constitution and the rule of law.” Another former chief-of-staff Mark Milley described him as fascist to the core.
For the Trumpists, though, the problem was not Trump but the appointees. Straight after the 2024 election Donald Trump Jr. declared he would be “heavily involved” in the 2025 transition, adding: “I want to make sure, now that we know who the real players are, the people who will actually deliver on the president’s message, the people who don’t think that they know better than the duly elected president of the United States.”
Two examples will suffice. Trump has fired (with no reason given) the current chair of the joint chiefs of staff, America’s central military group, and appointed air force lieutenant-general Jon Caine to the position. Announcing the appointment, Trump said that Caine had told him, “I love you, sir. I think you’re great, sir. I’ll kill for you, sir.”
Having appointed one loyalist to head the FBI, Trump appointed another, far-right commentator Dan Bongino, as his deputy. Bongino, who has cheered Trump’s “total personnel warfare” on his program, once produced two toy robots — an orange one representing Trump and a blue one he called “liberal screaming Karen” — and used the Trump robot to beat “Karen” over and over. “Yes!’ he yelled. “This is how we fix this place.”
In a well-known passage, the great scholar of totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt, argued that totalitarian regimes “invariably replace all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.”
Arendt stresses the political dimension of such appointments, giving top priority to loyalty and conformity, but they are also the perfect recipe for what psychologists call groupthink. Groupthink occurs when cohesive, united groups make disastrous decisions because they ignore dissonant information and place their priority on maintaining internal consensus. When all members share the same worldview, they are more likely to stereotype outsiders as ignorant or evil and less likely than a more diverse group to consider risks, costs and counter-arguments.
The dangers of groupthink in the second Trump presidency — already obvious — are compounded by other factors that make bad decisions more likely.
The first is hubris. After his second and more decisive victory, Trump is “infused with the swagger of impunity,” writes O’Toole. His confidence stems from having outmanoeuvred his political foes, evaded any serious consequences of his myriad legal battles and even escaped an assassin’s bullet.
All American presidents can influence government contracts and the drafting and implementing of regulations. Each of them is surrounded by people and groups keen to take advantage of the largest source of patronage in the democratic world. Every big corporation and interest group is keen to maintain a positive relationship with the White House.
In dealing with a president like Trump, guided not by rules and procedures but by a sense of a world divided into allies and enemies, the incentive to behave deferentially is even greater than usual. The heads of many of the America’s biggest companies in the country have dutifully travelled to Mar-a-Lago since Trump’s election: they include Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Apple’s Tim Cook, Google’s Sergey Brin and Sundar Pichai, Amazon and the Washington Post’s Jeff Bezos and Open AI’s Sam Altman.
Because the American media has become so intertwined with corporate interests, companies’ political strategies can easily impinge on editorial decisions. The national TV network ABC paid Trump $15 million to settle a defamation case that most commentators thought it could win. Mark Zuckerberg eliminated Facebook’s American fact-checkers, claiming the recent election was a cultural tipping point and fact-checkers had destroyed more trust than they created. Jeff Bezos has banished “anti–free market” views from the Washington Post’s opinion page.
Not only is there more internal conformity in Trump’s second administration, but he will also face far fewer external checks and balances. He has more solid support in Congress from a cowed Republican Party and more appointees in the bureaucracy and judiciary.
Even knowing all this, the pace of Trump’s first month in office has been astounding. He and Elon Musk have taken to heart the Silicon Valley mantra — move fast and break things — and are daring the courts and Congress to keep up. Of these actions, several are clearly illegal; they include an order contravening the constitution’s stipulation that all people born in the United States are entitled to citizenship and a freeze on much spending already authorised by Congress. In these cases, the White House is effectively daring the courts to try to enforce the law. Trump’s blanket declaration, echoing Napoleon, is that he who saves his country doesn’t violate any law.
One of Trump’s aims is to undermine the system’s capacity to check his actions. He fired fifteen of the independent inspectors-general who keep a check on federal agencies. (Without offering any reason he ignored the regulation that requires him to give Congress thirty days’ notice of such an action.) Elon Musk’s attempts to increase government “efficiency” is all sledgehammer and no scalpel. Apart from the immediate chaos, apart from the injustices done to innumerable individuals, and apart from the suffering inflicted by the closing of programs, what are the long-term institutional effects?
But perhaps the most alarming actions involve Trump’s weaponisation of the wheels of justice. He has fired several career lawyers who worked on legal cases involving him, making clear this was the reason for their dismissal. Several senior FBI leaders have been told to leave the agency or be fired. Legal actions arising from the administration’s abrupt actions could take months or years to work their way through the system.
The consequent chaos — unprecedented as it is — is occurring at a moment of relative stability. But what if conditions become less benign? Imagine if the current outbreak of avian flu got completely out of control. Medical and healthcare institutions will have had their capacity to respond weakened, and the government’s response would be guided by anti-science health secretary Robert Kennedy Jnr. Where would be the voices arguing for fast and appropriate preventive measures?
Or imagine a further intensification of severe climate-induced weather patterns. During the Los Angeles wildfires and after the fatal air crash at Washington DC airport, Americans have had a taste of how Trump responds to disasters. His reactions to future disasters will be predictably vituperative but his administration’s readiness to reduce the damage is in doubt.
Trump inherited an economy described by the Economist as the envy of the world. Inflation and unemployment have been low and growth relatively high. Although it is hard to know how much is posturing and bluff, and how much will actually be put into practice, there is a possibility that Trump’s tariffs will lead if not to a damaging trade war then to higher prices and supply-chain shortages. His pledge to cut business regulations and his uncritical support for the crime-infested crypto-currencies could have multiple consequences, foreseen and unforeseen.
Karl Marx once quoted Hegel’s observation that everything important in history happens twice. What he forgot to add, said Marx, was that they occurred the first time as tragedy and the second time as farce. The Trump presidencies look likely to reverse Marx’s axiom.
Among the farces of the first Trump administration was its failed attempt to build a southern border wall — a wall Mexico was meant to pay for but didn’t. But there were also real tragedies, including the separation of more than 5000 children from their parents at the border with no plan to reunite them. And if America’s official response to Covid had been the equal of other affluent democracies, an estimated 188,000 more people would have survived.
The second time around, however, with the White House and the upper echelons of government gripped by Trumpian groupthink, the scope for tragedy is much, much greater. •
