Trump would surround
himself with a frightful coterie of uncomfirmables
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By Frank Bruni |
If you watched any of Donald Trump’s
recent rally in Butler, Pa., you probably noticed Elon Musk beside him —
jumping, jiving, arms raised, belly bared — and wondered what in the name of
Tesla the chronically overstimulated gazillionaire was doing. Impromptu
aerobics? A cheerleading audition? Charades?
If only. Musk, I fear, was previewing
a second Trump administration — in which Trump would embrace and embolden a
crew of self-impressed eccentrics and ideological outliers who are happy, even
eager, to make confounding and fawning spectacles of themselves. Consider Musk
their spirit animal. Multiply him by about two dozen and you have the Trump
cabinet of tomorrow — or an only slightly exaggerated cartoon of it.
Much of the fallout of a Trump victory
is unknowable. But this much is certain: Returned to the White House, Trump
would get input from — and award key positions to — a bestiary of nihilists,
destructionists and even criminals unlike any collection of advisers that any
other president assembled. They’d be unscrupulous in all fashions but one:
unswerving loyalty to Trump. He fumed about what he saw as a lack of that among
his previous cadre of helpmates. The coming coterie would affirm Trump’s worst
impulses, nurture his nuttiest ideas and gleefully carry out his orders.
The first time around, Trump cared
about impressing the Washington crowd and was fixated on what he believed to be the high
I.Q.’s of his department and agency heads. He made them sound
like the Incredibles.
The current team in waiting? They’re
the Unconfirmables.
I’m not saying that Trump would fail
to fill crucial government jobs. If Republicans get very lucky, prevail in most
of the closest Senate races and wind up with a three- or four-seat
majority in that chamber, he might be able to get its sign-off
on a cockapoo as Treasury secretary. Or, worse yet, Jared Kushner. And even
without such a majority, Trump could find ways to circumvent Senate involvement
and oversight.
But whatever the legislative
arithmetic, I have a hard time seeing some cast members of “Trump: The Sequel”
passing an F.B.I. background check, let alone winning Senate approval or
getting high-level security clearances. And while a right-wing provocateur like Laura
Loomer wouldn’t find herself as an assistant secretary of the
interior, she and the rest of the Unconfirmables would quite possibly find
themselves in the Oval Office when they sought Trump’s ear, and he sought their
adulation.
Trump’s staffing process would be ugly
in part because he would hardly have his pick of shining political stars: His
quickness to torment, fire and then publicly vilify the people who worked for
him between 2017 and 2021 — when he burned through chiefs of staff and
reportedly shrugged at a
gathering mob’s pledge to execute his vice president — would leave him an
unusually limited group of applicants.
“There are two categories, right?”
former Gov. Chris Christie, the New Jersey Republican who led Trump’s 2016
transition for a while, said to me. “The first category is people who just want
to have a title no matter what and aren’t really up to the job. And I think
that’ll be a large part of who he gets.” The second category, Christie said,
are “people who believe: Well, if I get in there, I can help to make it a
little better.” That contingent, he added, would be much smaller than in 2017.
On top of which, Trump’s campaign has
been a steady amassing of debts: to the oil and gas industry, which he
effectively encouraged to buy the election for him; to Musk, who turned X into
a digital Trump pep rally and is essentially cartwheeling across Pennsylvania
with fistfuls of money for
anyone with any inkling to vote for the madman of Mar-a-Lago; to Robert F.
Kennedy Jr., who took a break from playing with animal carcasses —
I mean, terminated his own presidential campaign — to endorse and stump for
Trump. Trump has already said that he’ll repay Musk by putting him in charge of
some new government efficiency commission, and he gave Kennedy a place on his
transition team, presumably the bullpen from which Kennedy would emerge into a
prime administration slot. A public health conspiracy theorist would be reborn
as a steward of public health.
Trump cares less than ever about rules
and is more intent on rebellion. He’s not going to worry about the sketchy
semiotics of communicating with, or getting counsel from, the likes of Steve
Bannon, Paul Manafort and Peter Navarro, all of whom have done time in the
clink. Each will wear his incarceration as a badge of honor. Trump will accept
it as such.
To Bannon, Manafort and Navarro, add
Roger Stone, who was convicted of seven felonies but had his sentence commuted by Trump just
days before he was supposed to report to a federal prison for a 40-month term.
Trump’s own felony convictions in Manhattan in May didn’t differentiate him
from his posse. He just blends in all the better now.
“If Trump is elected,” said the
Democratic strategist Doug Sosnik, who worked in the White House under Bill
Clinton, “you’re going to see personnel much more, um, exotic than before.”
Sosnik was referring not only to the
criminals around Trump but also to the zealots and cranks whose feeding of
Trump’s ego during his campaign has surely been an audition for a similar
fattening of it during another Trump presidency. I bring you Stephen Miller, a
senior adviser during the Trump administration whose own obsessions —
detention camps, mass deportations — have become Trump’s. It’s probably no
coincidence that the day before Trump claimed during his debate with Vice
President Kamala Harris that Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating
people’s pets, Miller wrote a post on X with
that precise allegation. That’s how hallucinations bloom in Trump’s brain.
That’s the caliber of company Trump keeps.
How about Loomer? Two days before the
Trump-Harris debate, she warned on social media that a victory in the election
by Harris, whose mother was Indian American, would mean that the White House
would “smell like curry.” The vileness of that comment didn’t prevent Trump
from letting Loomer tag along with
him to the debate. Nor did her past trafficking in Sept. 11 conspiracy theories
discourage him, a day later, from bringing her to a memorial service for
victims of those 2001 terrorist attacks. So there’s no reason to believe it
would bar her from his White House — which, I suppose, would smell like
McDonald’s.
Knowledgeable Republicans told me that
they can’t imagine Trump trying to put someone like Bannon or Stone in his
cabinet. But they can imagine Trump taking a chance on, say, Ric Grenell, a
gratuitously combative foreign policy maven who in 2020 led a sham effort to
discredit and overturn Joe Biden’s victory in Nevada. Grenell is now being
touted as a possible secretary of state or national security adviser.
Trump could similarly promote Kash
Patel, a populist pugilist who, in an appearance on Bannon’s podcast last
year, served notice that
he and other Trump allies were prepared to “go out and find the conspirators
not just in government, but in the media,” including journalists “who helped
Joe Biden rig presidential elections.” Trump, during his presidency, reportedly
thought about deputizing Patel to conduct purges of inadequately obsequious
staffers, but cooler heads in the administration quashed that idea. There’d be
no such sentries and no such resistance in the future; Trump’s sons Don Jr. and
Eric have pledged a thorough vetting of
would-be aides that identifies and repels possible dissidents. Not so
coincidentally, Patel “has been mentioned alongside many others as a potential
C.I.A. director, attorney general or, if he fails Senate confirmation, a top
job on the National Security Council,” Elizabeth Williamson wrote in The Times
last week.
Patel might indeed fail Senate
confirmation, as might Grenell, Kennedy (if nominated to a post of that nature)
and other Trump darlings if Republicans remain in the Senate minority or regain
the majority by only one or two seats. Republicans wouldn’t be able to survive
defections, and a few of the senators in their caucus — most notably, Susan
Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska — aren’t reliable rubber stamps
for Trump.
“I think it will be hugely problematic
for him to try to find a team that can be confirmed,” former Senator Heidi
Heitkamp, a North Dakota Democrat, told me.
But, she added, that doesn’t
necessarily augur epic confirmation battles: “My question is: Does he simply
bypass the Senate confirmation altogether and just put people in positions and
dare people to challenge them?”
She and other Washington insiders
explained that Trump could do that by presenting his appointees as provisional
choices and affixing the word “acting” to their titles, as he did when he made
Grenell the acting director of national intelligence in February 2020. They’d
be time-limited but would in some cases have many months, not weeks, to wreak
havoc. “I like ‘acting,’” Trump said in 2019, when
his revolving-door administration left him with a bevy of vacancies to fill.
“It gives me more flexibility.” So expect plenty of “acting” if Trump gets
another go at this gig.
Expect more highhanded commands like
the orders he once issued to John F. Kelly, his White House chief of staff at
the time, to grant Kushner a top-secret security clearance. Such executive
action has become increasingly common among presidents, and the Supreme Court,
with its ruling on presidential immunity,
has given Trump every incentive to indulge his whims.
So has Trump’s own political history:
After impeachments, damning judgments in civil suits, federal indictments and a
guilty verdict on all 34 counts in a Manhattan criminal case, he nonetheless
has an apparent 50-50 shot at an inauguration in January. Why wouldn’t he junk
any nettlesome procedures? What’s to stop him from putting a neutered
figurehead in a job that senators monitor and giving more power to far-right
flatterers in the shadows?
What’s to stop those flatterers from
plundering and degrading the richest and most powerful country on earth?
Certainly not Trump. He’d be too busy admiring their initiative and accepting
their compliments.