The most terrible people Trump has hired for his hellish administration

It’s almost too shocking to believe, but it seems that Donald Trump is actually not a radical anti-militarist who wants to break with the status quo. Since his win last week, the US president-elect has hired a bunch of hawkish warmongers who love Israel and want to nuke Iran.

These new appointments represent a significant win for the “neocons”, who favour a more aggressive and interventionist foreign policy, over the isolationists who broadly want the US to stay out of global conflicts (and who are aligned more closely with Trump himself.) No one seriously expected Trump to be better on Palestine, but these new hires are still bleak: there’s Marco Rubio as Secretary of State, who is against a ceasefire in Gaza, and Mike Huckabee as the new Ambassador to Israel, who has previously said, “There is no such thing as the West Bank – it’s Judea and Samaria. There is no such thing as settlements […] There is no such thing as an occupation.”

As well as being factually incorrect, this statement is completely at odds with international law and extreme even by the standards of American politics. Even aside from Palestine, Trump’s latest appointments are so hawkish that even some of his own supporters are annoyed – they really seemed to think they were voting for the anti-war guy.

Foreign policy is just one part of a depressing picture: based on these hires, we can also expect an extreme slashing of government services and hard-right positions on social issues. From alleged child sex traffickers to Red Scare guests, here are some of the worst, most dangerous and annoying people who will be heading up the next Trump administration.

MATT GAETZ

A disconcertingly large segment of the American public continues to believe that Trump is engaging in a holy war against a cabal of elite paedophiles – but just as these people have never battled an eyelid at his close personal relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, don’t expect them to be outraged about the fact that he has just appointed as attorney general a man who has faced federal investigation for child sex trafficking offences.

Matt Gaetz – the man now in charge of the US’s law enforcement – faced a long list accusations while he was a Florida congressman, including sexual misconduct, statutory rape and sex trafficking of a 17-year-old girl across state lines. He has denied any sexual relationships with minors and hasn’t been charged with any offences, although an investigation by the House Ethics Committee is ongoing. Gaetz’s appointment shows that as long as you’re straight, white and right-wing, you can have the sleaziest, most discrediting history imaginable and still rise to the top of American politics.

ELON MUSK

If we’re talking about their character and politics, Trump is probably just as bad as Elon Musk, but at least he provides some laughs. Musk, on the other hand, has pulled off the impressive feat of being the wealthiest man alive and still coming across as a loser, desperate to be liked and excruciatingly unfunny. Along with failed Republican primary candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, Musk has now been put in charge of the “Department of Government Efficiency”, which you might notice spells out the acronym ‘DOGE’, a dog that became an online meme and cryptocurrency – epic and hilarious stuff!

This isn’t going to be an official department, but Musk will be working as an advisor and helping Trump to – as he put it – “dismantle government bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures and restructure federal agencies”. Musk himself has previously called for eliminating hundreds of federal agencies, while during his primary campaign Ramaswamy promised to cut 75 per cent of the workforce and close down the Department of Education, the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

If they’re able to pull this off, life in the US will become even more hazardous and impoverished than it already is (it would be difficult to argue that it currently suffers from a permissive attitude to gun control or an overly generous public school system.) But Musk is already annoying the White House staff with his presence and Trump seems to regard him with barely disguised contempt. Hopefully it won’t be too long before DOGE gets put down.

PETE HEGSETH

Pete Hegseth, announced as the new defence secretary, is a Fox News presenter who has never previously held a government position. He does have some relevant experience, as an Army National Guard officer who has served in the military, but his appointment has still been met with widespread bafflement – according to an article in Politico, even defence industry insiders are asking “who the fuck is this guy?”

It’s unlikely that Hegseth is going to act as a moderating influence on Trump, who he has previously persuaded to pardon three convicted former soldiers who had been accused of war crimes. Recently, he has used his platform on Fox to urge Trump to bomb cultural sites in Iran (which would be a war crime) and “re-write the rules” of international law so that they’re more advantageous to the US. Unsurprisingly, he is also a hardline supporter of Israel, who believes that “Americanism and Zionism” are intertwined as “the front lines of Western civilisation.”

TULSI GABBARD

Tulsi Gabbard now enjoys the dubious honour of being the first-ever Director of National Intelligence who has appeared on Red Scare. Formerly a congresswoman for a district in Hawaii, Gabbard has had a strange trajectory: not only was she a Democrat, she was to the left of the party, and in 2016 she even resigned from her position as vice chair of the DNC in order to endorse Bernie Sanders. She supported Biden at the last election and it was only earlier this year that she officially became a member of the Republican Party. But in the last five years or so, she has drifted to the right on social issues, including LGBTQ+ rights and abortion, and become a regular fixture on Fox News. 

She seems to have maintained her long-running opposition to US military intervention, including support for Ukraine, but this puts her at odds with the majority of Trump’s hawkish new appointments. She will be in charge of 17 different spy agencies, but whether she’ll be able to exert much influence at all on US foreign policy remains unclear, as does whether she’ll exploit her new power to promote cigarettes, eating disorders, ironic bigotry and the work of Christopher Lasch.