Say what you will about President-elect Donald Trump, but he is never short of surprises. I don’t think anyone quite expected these top Cabinet picks: What do Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), former Rep. Matt Gaetz, former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. have in common?
We are told from numerous reports that the No. 1 criterion for the president-elect is “loyalty.” In the left-wing press, this is usually described with dark undertones, as if Cabinet members being loyal to the president was some sort of departure from constitutional government. It is the opposite that is the case. Under the American system of government, the loyalty of Cabinet members to the president, who is the head of the executive branch, is a given. It was under the first Trump administration that this norm was breached, as establishment appointees took it upon themselves to undermine the elected president’s agenda. The president-elect wants to enact his agenda, which, naturally, given past experience, raises this concern about loyalty.
But this context, in turn, raises an interesting question: How to ensure this loyalty?
One thing is for sure: The president-elect is set on having the people he wants for the jobs he considers most important. According to our reporting at PolicySphere, later confirmed by the New York Times, Trump has decided to pick whomever he believes is the best person for the job and, should that lead to a hard confirmation battle, fight that battle.
The next point is pure speculation, but I think I know how Trump intends to ensure this loyalty, at least for the key jobs: by picking people for whom the job is personal.
Anyone who knows Rubio and has followed his career knows that foreign policy is a deep passion of his, rooted in his history as the child of Cuban immigrants.
For Gabbard, issues around war are also clearly personal, given her history of military service, including a stint in combat in Iraq as a medic.
Kennedy has spent his entire adult life campaigning on issues related to public health. Regardless of the validity of his claims, he has accepted being cast out of polite society, being labeled an “anti-vaxxer” (a label that he denies) rather than recant them, and left his family’s Democratic Party to support a Republican candidate for president. RFK Jr., who is singularly obsessed with chronic disease, has been diagnosed with spasmodic dysphonia, a rare neurological condition affecting the voice box. And finally, the assassinations of his father and uncle have left him with, to put it mildly, a healthy level of disregard for the deep state and Washington bureaucracies.
Which brings us finally to Gaetz. Gaetz’s appointment to serve as attorney general has been the most controversial, with even Republicans sympathetic to Trump raising the issue of his lack of qualifications. We know Trump’s chief concern when it comes to the DOJ is deep reform and rooting out political prosecutions and investigations. For this, Gaetz brings an important qualification: The FBI tried to destroy his life. The FBI spent two years investigating him, during which it leaked thinly substantiated stories to the media accusing him of nothing less than being a child sex trafficker. The investigation ultimately came to nothing, and there was no prosecution. How motivated do you think Gaetz is to reform the DOJ? I don’t have to guess, and neither does Trump.
This is very clever. This is a better test of loyalty than whether or how long someone has been “MAGA.” As Donald Trump Jr., who has had a key role in vetting endorsements and appointments for his father, pointed out, many early supporters turned out to be false friends, and many late converts, like Vice President-elect J.D. Vance, turned out to be fervent supporters. It’s also a better test than flattery, which reporting says that Trump is avid of, but which he does not actually seem swayed by.
Has Kennedy really particularly “flattered” Trump? More than any other possible HHS secretary? That doesn’t seem to be the case at all. Same with all the other appointees: Certainly none of them are political adversaries of Trump, and all have said nice things about him, but it would be strange if the opposite was true. There doesn’t seem to be a direct correlation between how much of a Trump fan one has been and whether he or she got appointed.
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Again, I am just speculating, but if I had to guess, I do think this is part of Trump’s calculus: If it’s personal for him, then he’ll probably do a good job. If so, that’s actually genius.
Politics is one thing. But sometimes, it’s personal.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry is the publisher of PolicySphere, a news website for conservative policy professionals in DC.