“Consistency of ideology or anything else is the last thing we should expect in Trump’s nominees,” Chris Whipple, the author of The Gatekeepers, 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.”
Bessent made a late conversion to MAGA ideology. He seems to embrace Trump’s enthusiasm for tariffs, though in recent weeks he has noted that imposing them gradually – a nuance Trump has not discussed – is critical to avoiding economic shocks.
His identity as a gay, married father certainly clashes with the beliefs held by some of Trump’s evangelical and far-right supporters. He told Yale’s alumni magazine in 2015 that “in a certain geographic region at a certain economic level, being gay is not an issue”. He added: “If you had told me in 1984, when we graduated, and people were dying of AIDS, that 30 years later I’d be legally married, and we would have two children via surrogacy, I wouldn’t have believed you.”
Hedge fund investor Scott Bessent, Donald Trump’s Treasury secretary pick, made a late conversion to MAGA ideology. Credit: nnaebennett
But more jarring to some of the MAGA faithful may be the fact that Bessent raised money for the presidential run of a Democrat, Al Gore, in 2000. Or that a dozen years ago, he was chief investment officer for Soros Fund Management, the $US30 billion instrument of George Soros, the subject of scores of right-wing conspiracy theories. When listing Bessent’s many qualifications for the job, Trump left off the fact that he is considered among Soros’ most successful proteges.
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.
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As the GOP moved quickly to solidify around Trump and promised to kill off government regulation, Chavez-DeRemer moved the other way. She was one of three Republicans who sponsored a 2023 bill that would have shielded workers seeking to organise union representation from retribution or firing, while giving new powers to the federal government to punish employers who violate workers’ rights.
It was not the only area where she saw more room for government intervention. “One of the things that transcends party is public safety,” Chavez-DeRemer said in an interview with The New York Times during her re-election bid. “People want to wake up in the morning, know that it’s safe to go to take their kids to school and drive on safe roads,” she added. “Those transcend party. Those are the kind of things I focus on.”
The news on Friday that she was named to head the Labour Department was hailed by the teamsters and their president, Sean O’Brien. The AFL-CIO (American Federation of Labour and Congress of Industrial Organisations) expressed wariness of Trump’s “anti-worker agenda” in a statement posted on social media, but conceded that “Lori Chavez-DeRemer has built a pro-labour record in Congress”.
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.
Rollins’ organisation has called for getting rid of civil-service protection for many federal employees, speeding gas and oil drilling on federal lands, and doing away with red-flag laws meant to keep guns from people who are deemed by a judge to be a danger to themselves or to others.
Then there is the national security team. Michael Waltz, the designee for national security adviser, was a strong advocate of sending more aid to Ukraine and doing whatever was necessary to push back the Russian invasion, until he voted against the $US95 billion in additional aid to Ukraine in the northern hemisphere spring.
Trump met North Korean leader Kim Jong-un twice during his first term, hoping to contain North Korea’s nuclear arsenal.Credit: Getty Images
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.
That diplomatic high-wire act was rooted in Trump’s belief that a combination of personal diplomacy and economic lures would drive Kim to give up his arsenal of nuclear weapons.
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The effort failed: the talks collapsed, and the North Korean leader today has a larger arsenal than he did before the meetings. Kim has insisted that he is done talking to Washington. In the intervening years, Wong has served as chair of the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission, a congressionally appointed, bipartisan group studying the national security implications of America’s economic engagement with Beijing.
Such topics never had an airing during the campaign. Discussion of the complex economic, technological and military relationships with China was distilled by Trump to a declaration that tariffs would solve all problems. But his national security advisers clearly have a more nuanced view.
That leaves Musk, the world’s richest man and newest denizen of Mar-a-Lago, and Ramaswamy. They are supposed to head the Department of Government Efficiency, writing in The Wall Street Journal on Thursday that “the entrenched and ever-growing bureaucracy represents an existential threat to our republic”.
The department, or “DOGE” as Musk calls it in a nod to the cryptocurrency dogecoin, is not a department at all, but a group of volunteers. But the two men insist their future department will have a direct pipeline to the White House Office of Management and Budget that will look to cut regulations, cut head counts and cut budgets.
It remains to be seen how they will work with the Office of Management and Budget’s proposed head, Russell Vought. He was a major figure in Project 2025, which laid out a plan to rework the US government to enhance presidential power by tearing down and rebuilding executive branch institutions.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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