Philosemites, Anti-Vaxxers and Waterboarding Enthusiasts – Trump’s Cabinet Picks So Far

Though it’s still exactly a month before Donald Trump enters the White House for the second time (presuming no January 6 hijinks from the pink pussy hat brigade) he’s already set about nominating his cabinet picks. They are a ragtag bunch of characters – climate activist RFK Jr is there alongside outright climate diners – but the unifying factor is all are extremely (albeit, in some cases, only recently) loyal to the big man.

It’s important to say that Trump may not get everyone on his wish list. The most senior positions (i.e. the 25 heads of the government’s executive departments) will need to be voted through by the Senate, following a committee hearing, financial disclosure and a questionnaire. While the Republicans now have a significant majority in the upper house, this plus existing opposition to Trump within the GOP may mean his more controversial picks (Mike Gaetz, for example) don’t make the cut.

With that in mind, here are ten of Trump’s 27 picks so far (the New York Times is tracking the full cabinet here).

Marco Rubio, secretary of state.

What a difference eight years makes. In 2016, then-Republican presidential hopeful Marco Rubio said Trump reminded him of “a third-world strongman”. Now, “Little Marco” is taking shelter under that same strongman’s wing.

The Florida senator, who comes from a working-class Cuban American family, is known for having attempted (unsuccessfully) to push through a bipartisan bill to give undocumented immigrants a pathway to US citizenship and trying (unsuccessfully) to expand the child tax credit.

On the flip side, he is also known as an incurable foreign policy hawk (except, interestingly, on Ukraine, voting against a military aid package to the country earlier this year).

On Israel, however, he said: “I want them to destroy every element of Hamas they can get their hands on.” Bodes well.

Kristi Noem, homeland security secretary.

If you thought Rubio’s line on Israel was extreme, meet Kristi Noem, Trump’s pick for secretary of the department of homeland security and one of the Republican party’s most popular figures.

In March, the governor of South Dakota, a religious Christian who once tried to ban abortion from the moment a foetal heartbeat is detected, passed a law privileging the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) definition of antisemitism, a move she claimed would “ensur[e] the security of God’s chosen people”. We’re all good, Kristi, but thanks.

Perhaps more concerning is that Noem will be leading a department that oversees the government’s response to extreme weather events caused by climate breakdown – despite the fact that she herself seems sceptical that they are even happening. “I think the science has been varied on it,” Noem told a reporter in 2022, “and it hasn’t been proven to me that what we’re doing is affecting the climate.”

As governor Noem turned down millions of dollars in state funding to address climate change, she was the only state governor to opt out of a $4bn programme to make homes more energy efficient, and one of five to decline Biden’s money to tackle climate pollution.

It isn’t just Biden’s money she doesn’t want: she was also the only governor to reject an additional $400 a week of unemployment benefits from Trump during the pandemic. I’m sure South Dakotans are immensely grateful for her service in rejecting the overtures of the big state.

Matt Gaetz, attorney general.

Never one to miss an opportunity for drama, Trump sent shockwaves through Washington on Thursday when he announced Mike Gaetz as his attorney general pick – though it’s not hugely clear how much legal experience Gaetz actually has, having been admitted to the Florida bar in 2008 and being made a congressman two years later.

Congress’s in-house stuntman, Gaetz once tried to remove two grieving fathers of children killed in a school shooting from a hearing after they objected to his comments about gun control. A year later, during the pandemic, he marched onto the floor of the house wearing a gas mask to indicate his concern about the virus. He’s also said journalists should be imprisoned for refusing to disclose their sources.

In a reversal of fortunes similar to Noem’s, Gaetz could now be leading the department that once investigated him as part of a sex trafficking investigation by the House ethics committee – which wrapped up by default on Wednesday when Gaetz resigned from Congress (he denies wrongdoing). House speaker Mike Johnson, a Republican, has advised that the ethics report on Gaetz shouldn’t be published as he’s no longer technically a member, which is very convenient.

Crucially, there is no guarantee Gaetz will assume his intended role. His is one of 24 posts the Senate will need to agree to – and given that even his GOP colleagues are already expressing their disgust at his nomination, it is by no means a done deal.

Mike Huckabee, US ambassador to Israel.

The US ambassador to Israel was never going to be a liberal, but you couldn’t get much weirder than former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, who believes Palestinians do not exist.

The evangelical Christian and former Fox News host supports Jews’ right to the entirety of the land between the river and the sea, including the illegally occupied West Bank (which he refers to as Judea and Samaria). He has criticised Biden for being too hard on Israel during the war, criticism that will shock many in the UK.

Unsurprisingly, Israeli leaders have leapt at the news of his nomination, with hard-right national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir tweeting simply “Mike Huckabee ❤️”. You took the words right out of our mouths.

If the UK continues to copy the US’s homework on Middle East policy, that ban on violent Israeli settlers should be disappearing any moment now.

RFK Jr, health secretary.

The Kennedy scion, environmental lawyer and independent presidential candidate swept up a whopping 0.5% of the popular vote in the election – but has received a pretty good consolation prize for his efforts.

Though in some respects an unusual pick – an environmental lawyer, Kennedy has previously represented indigenous groups and was arrested protesting the Keystone XL pipeline – in most ways that matter, RFK Jr is about as Trumpian a health secretary as you can imagine. An anti-vaxxer who believes that wifi causes “leaky brain” and that poppers cause AIDS, he has been diagnosed with mercury poisoning that he believes may be at the root of his chronic memory loss. That or the dead worm inside his brain. Not the most prudent pick for a president whose main attack on Biden was that he is senile.

Yet after Trump’s disastrous handling of the coronavirus pandemic – over 400,000 US residents died of the virus during his presidency, roughly 40% of which are thought to have been preventable – Americans aren’t laughing. “Robert F Kennedy Jr is a clear and present danger to the nation’s health,” Public Citizen, a consumer nonprofit, told the Guardian in response to his nomination, adding that Kennedy’s appointment would be a “public health catastrophe” not dissimilar to the pandemic.

An intermittent faster and enemy of processed foods, it’s possible that Kennedy will forward some good ideas – such as regulating ultra-processed foods, as much Latin America has done, and restricting access to Ozempic, of which he is a fierce critic – along with the bad. That, however, will be little consolation for Americans who can’t survive on raw milk and good vibes alone.

Peter Hegseth, defence secretary.

Not the only cable TV host to be catapulted from the Fox News sofa to the White House, nor indeed the only never-Trumper to perform a volte-face, Pete Hegseth was announced last week as Trump’s pick for defence.

A former veteran, Hegseth has since carved out a lucrative career attacking his former employer for its alleged wokeness: Hegseth is opposed to women in combat roles and to trans troops altogether (Trump already granted that particular wish once, though Biden reversed it) and has said that “any … general, admiral, whatever, that was involved in any of the DEI [diversity, equity and inclusion] woke shit has got to go”.

Hegseth isn’t always critical of the military, however: he has reportedly leapt to the defence of combat veterans accused of war crimes, lobbying Trump to pardon several servicemen accused of premeditated murder.

Despite Hegseth’s hawkishness, his appointment looks set to deepen the longstanding confrontation between Trump (who once described those who have died in combat as “suckers” and “losers”) and military chiefs. “Everyone is simply shocked,” one anonymous defence official told CNN.

While Hegseth’s record on defence is patchy at best – he has had no military command role nor any government experience – on defending his own reputation, it is rather illustrious: he reportedly paid off a sexual assault victim after having her sign a nondisclosure agreement (claims he denies).

Elon Musk & Vivek Ramaswamy, the department of government efficiency (Doge).

A new role apparently intended largely to boost the value of Elon Musk’s large holding of dogecoin (he apparently owns around a quarter of the total amount in circulation), the new department of government efficiency will be headed by the X CEO alongside his sidekick, the pharma entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy. Desperate to impress his new employer, Musk is already hiring a “high-IQ” taskforce for the department, which will help him “dismantle” bureaucracy (echoing Starmer’s pledge to “rip up” bureaucracy) and cut government spending. In typically self-regarding style, Trump has compared it to the Manhattan Project, the US’s secretive second world war taskforce to rapidly develop nuclear weapons.

Elon and Vivek pic.twitter.com/Js8I1Nj1oY

— Liz Charboneau (@lizchar) November 13, 2024

If we are shocked by Trump’s appointment of two unelected businessmen to his cabinet, we might remind ourselves that Starmer made a key-cutting boss his prisons secretary and a well-meaning but nevertheless unelected barrister his attorney general. It’s also worth remembering that much of Musk’s enormous power in the US state was bestowed upon him by the Biden administration, which handed Musk billions of dollars worth of federal contracts, from defence ($3.6bn) to veterans affairs ($463,000 and obviously, Nasa ($11.8bn) – and which I’m sure Musk’s promised spending cuts will carefully bypass.

Tulsi Gabbard, director of national intelligence.

Of all of Trump’s selections so far, perhaps the most controversial has been Tulsi Gabbard. The representative for Hawaii and rightwing firebrand was formerly a Democrat of 20 years’ standing – and even briefly ran for president in 2020 before becoming an independent two years later (and now, a Republican).

The chameleonic Gabbard has some pretty extreme views on national security, including that Russia justifiably invaded Ukraine to prevent it from developing bioweapons (Russian media has welcomed Gabbard’s appointment, even jokingly calling her a Russian spy). She has also secretly met Syrian president Bashar al-Assad on what she claimed was a “fact-finding mission”.

Like many of Trump’s picks, she is hawkish when it suits her (on Israel, for example) and dovish when it doesn’t (such as on Syria). She basically admitted to this inconsistency when she ran for president in 2020: “When it comes to the war against terrorists, I’m a hawk. When it comes to counterproductive wars of regime change, I’m a dove,” she said.

The first ever Samoan-American or Hindu member of Congress, she is like Marco Rubio further proof that, as they say, skinfolk aren’t necessarily kinfolk: having previously flip-flopped on the issue, she has more recently said she is open to the idea of a border wall.

Stephen Miller, deputy chief of staff, policy.

Remember this guy? The guy behind Trump’s Muslim travel ban and separating child migrants from their parents? The guy MSN nicknamed The Deporter? Yeah, well he’s back – and with a juicy promotion.

Despite being nominally a mere speechwriter, then advisor, to the first Trump administration, Miller became, according to a profile in the New Yorker, “the true driving force behind [its] racist agenda”. He is now coming out of the shadows to assume a role in the cabinet.

His appointment – alongside the fact that Trump has appointed a “border tsar” in the form of Tom Homan – are signs that border control (including potentially finishing his infamous border wall with Mexico) will remain one of the top priorities of the new administration.

Nobody, ideally – education secretary.

One of Trump’s campaign pledges was that he would scrap the US department for education as part of his war on woke. This isn’t a new idea – Ronald Reagan floated it during his own presidential campaign in 1980, just a year after the department was established, saying that education should be handled at a local level.

Trump could make good on Reagan’s original dream, though he’ll need a supermajority of congresspeople behind it, which is unlikely.

Regardless, he will likely continue to attack the department, and educational institutions more broadly, for feeding DEI and gender ideology directly into their cerebral cortexes – much as the Democrats have done.

And the ones that got away…

Donald Trump announces Nadine Coyle as Head of Passport Control pic.twitter.com/c4OWLQ6usE

— Fiona Small (@FionaSmall) November 13, 2024

real pic.twitter.com/goP41gZiwi

— Queen Liza (@KrystalWolfyAlt) November 15, 2024