Many ideologies lie behind the veil of “America first” in Donald Trump’s cabinet nominations.
President-elect Donald Trump’s final flurry of cabinet picks and other appointments rounded out what his aides described as a unified, loyal, MAGA-driven administration. But scratch the surface and there are at least three distinct factions and a range of ideologies, barely suppressed to get through the rigours of the confirmation process.
And then there is a government shrinkage team led by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, whose goals are wildly ambitious, to put it mildly. They want to carve what Musk says will be “at least” $US2 trillion from the annual federal budget, a figure that exceeds the annual cost of salaries for every federal employee. The total federal budget in the 2024 fiscal year was $US6.75 trillion.
Even as the Republican Party has adopted the MAGA philosophy, it may have been unreasonable to expect that members of a Trump administration would all be cut from the same cloth.“Consistency of ideology or anything else is the last thing we should expect in Trump’s nominees,” Chris Whipple, the author of, a book about White House chiefs of staff, said on Saturday. “That’s because there is no process in place to make these choices – it’s all according to the whim of the boss.
The newly named pick for Labour Secretary, congresswoman Lori Chavez-DeRemer, also seems likely to straddle two camps. Chavez-DeRemer, an Oregon Republican who lost her seat in the House this month, often spoke of her father’s membership in the Teamsters and won the support of about 20 labour unions during her unsuccessful re-election bid.As the GOP moved quickly to solidify around Trump and promised to kill off government regulation, Chavez-DeRemer moved the other way.
One who does fit neatly into the mould of a Trump aide is Brooke Rollins, whom Trump named on Saturday as his choice for agriculture secretary. She served as domestic policy adviser in the first Trump administration, then became head of the America First Policy Institute, a sort of Trump government in waiting staffed with other former members of his administration.
Trump met North Korean leader Kim Jong-un twice during his first term, hoping to contain North Korea’s nuclear arsenal.His new deputy, Alex Wong, worked for Mitt Romney in 2012, part of a wing of the Republican Party that has never reconciled itself to Trump. But Wong worked at senior levels of the State Department on North Korea, helping to set up Trump’s two meetings with Kim Jong-un.
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