How Donald Trump’s team of billionaires will change the US
What the billionaires, talk show hosts, loyalists and familial connections on Team Trump can accomplish will depend on a number of factors.
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First they get the money, then they get the power, then they get accused of sexually abusing the women.
The familiar playbook of Donald Trump’s staffing picks, and the Washington DC reaction to stigmatise their character and stymie their agenda, threatens the president-elect’s ability to fulfil his governing mandate once he takes office.
“It looks like the requirements to be in the Trump White House that you either abuse women or you’re an out-of-touch billionaire,” said Democratic Congressman Jim McGovern. “What’s next? Are they going to replace FBI background checks with a Fox News screen test?”
How much can be accomplished by the billionaires, talk show hosts, loyalists and familial connections joining the Trump administration will depend on the immune response by the two-party bureaucratic establishment, as seen in Mr McGovern’s histrionics, to the cast of characters expressly selected to disrupt and diminish their authority and control.
They got their first scalp in former Congressman Matt Gaetz, who withdrew from the running for Attorney-General amid allegations of sex trafficking, which he denies and which the Department of Justice declined to charge due to lack of evidence.
The crosshairs turned to Secretary of Defence designate Pete Hegseth, who faces anonymous accusations of sexual assault that echo the campaign to derail Mr Trump’s nominee for the Supreme Court, Brett Kavanaugh.
Mr Trump stood by Justice Kavanaugh as he appears to be standing by Mr Hegseth. As a result, Mr Hegseth, who denies all the allegations, has since won support from some of his harshest critics within the GOP to execute Mr Trump’s marching orders.
“Return the Pentagon to the warfighters. Get in there and clean out all the social justice, politically correct garbage on top, and get back to lethality, war-fighting, accountability, meritocracy, and readiness,” Mr Hegseth said on Fox News.
But the “Fox & Friends Weekend” star is just one domino in more than 60 key cabinet and staff nominations, and Mr Trump’s continued support of Mr Hegseth is seen as a line in the sand to prevent the other dominoes falling after Mr Gaetz spilt blood in the water.
Billionaires like Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy don’t need Senate confirmation in roles outside the administration for their remit to cut waste under the newly-created Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
Neither do so-called “tsar” positions, like Silicon Valley venture capitalist David Sacks as artificial intelligence and crypto tsar, or the border and immigration tsar Tom Homan, tasked with Mr Trump’s #1 agenda priority of deporting illegal immigrants.
But among those requiring the consent and advice of the Senate, the Eye of Sauron has already moved on from Mr Hegseth to former Democratic Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard.
Nearly 100 former senior US diplomats and intelligence and national security officials wrote a letter expressing “alarm” over her nomination as Director of National Intelligence.
If that sounds familiar, it’s because it’s the same playbook as the 51 former intelligence officers who colluded with the 2020 Biden campaign to write a letter dismissing the discovery of evidence on Hunter Biden’s laptop as “Russian disinformation”. See President Joe Biden’s subsequent, 11-year blanket pardon as to that letter’s credibility.
Like Mr Hegseth, the foreign policy agenda Ms Gabbard brings to the oversight of the US’s 18 intelligence agencies is informed by her deployments to the Middle East.
“In short, when it comes to the war against terrorists, I’m a hawk,” Ms Gabbard told the Hawaii Tribune-Herald when she was still a Democrat during her 2016 presidential primary run. “When it comes to counter-productive wars of regime change, I’m a dove.”
In his first broadcast TV interview since winning re-election, Mr Trump told NBC’s Kristen Welker he would not direct the United States’ federal intelligence agencies, law enforcement, or judicial departments to investigate his enemies.
But he doesn’t have to with the nominations of Pam Bondi over the Department of Justice (DOJ), and Kash Patel over the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI): “Two great people” who closely share Mr Trump’s perspective of the agencies’ weaponisation against political opposition.
“He’s going to do what he thinks is right … If they think someone was dishonest, crooked, or corrupt politician, I think he probably has an obligation to do it,” Mr Trump said of Mr Patel.
As chief investigator in the Congressional probe into alleged Trump-Russia collusion, Mr Patel uncovered widespread government surveillance abuse. It led to the special counsels that found no evidence of collusion and traced the origin of the FBI “Crossfire Hurricane” investigation to Democratic Party misinformation from the 2016 election against Hillary Clinton.
In his 2023 memoir, “Government Gangsters: The Deep State, the Truth, and the Battle for Our Democracy”, the former Deputy of the Director of National Intelligence outlined his plan to eradicate “government tyranny” within the FBI: Firing “the top ranks” and prosecuting “to the fullest extent of the law” anyone who “in any way abused their authority for political ends”.
“The FBI’s footprint has gotten so freaking big, and the biggest problem the FBI has come from out of its intel shops. I’d break that component out of it. I’d shut down the FBI Hoover building on day one, and reopen it the next day as a museum of the Deep State,” Mr Patel said while promoting his book.
“And I’d take the 7000 employees that work in that building and send them across America to chase down criminals. Go be cops. Your cops, go be cops. Go chase down murderers, and rapists, and drug dealers, and violent offenders.”
If the Republican Party doesn’t have the stomach to support the nominations and agendas of Mr Hegseth, Ms Gabbard or Mr Patel, then Robert F Kennedy Jr doesn’t stand a chance. The self-confessed compulsive womaniser and former heroin addict, who survived a brainworm and faced allegations of defiling animal corpses, would make Mr Trump blush.
As a nominee to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, Mr Kennedy is key to Mr Trump’s “Make America Healthy Again” alliance that helped deliver him the White House.
They may not need Mr McGovern’s suggested Fox News screen test, but all of Mr Trump’s cabinet picks will have to pass an FBI background check and go through The Ethics in Government Act (EIGA), including: The WWE’s former billionaire owner Linda McMahon (Education), billionaire hedge fund manager Scott Bessent (Treasury), billionaire Governor Doug Burgum (Interior), and billionaire investment banker Howard Lutnick (Commerce).
The investigation is conducted by the Office of Government Ethics (OGE), and nominees usually submit disclosures to surface potential conflicts of interest in their financial holdings.
But Mr Trump “may be angling to forgo the process altogether”, according to Danielle Caputo, legal counsel for the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Centre’s ethics team.
“It is already highly unusual that Trump began announcing his nominations without beginning the ethics investigation and vetting his picks,” she said.
“This, coupled with the fact that the inauguration and subsequent confirmation hearings are just a few weeks away, suggests that Trump’s nominees have no plans to initiate the process at all.
Senator Tom Cotton, known for his deep understanding of the Republican caucus and not for hyperbole, said he fully expects the Senate to “select all” of Mr Trump’s nominees.
“No one should be surprised that a republican Senate is going to confirm the Republican president-elect’s cabinet secretaries,” he said.
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