Trump’s cabinet of youth: A changing of the guard

The average age of key cabinet and White House officials in the new Trump administration is 54.1 years – the youngest presidential leadership team this century.

Age shall not weary Trump’s cabinet of youngsters.Here’s a fun little factoid that might be helpful the next time there’s a US politics round at your pub trivia.

The average age of key cabinet and White House officials in the new Trump administration, as per an Axios analysis, is 54.1 years.

Which may sound fairly middle aged until you consider that this is the youngest presidential leadership team this century.

Trump’s VP, JD Vance, is just 40.

No meat tray, by the way, for correctly guessing which presidential posse was the oldest.

When Joe Biden was sworn in what seems like a lifetime ago, his top people came in at an average age of 63.7.

Trump’s VP, JD Vance, is just 40, helping to make this the youngest presidential leadership team this century. Picture: ROBERTO SCHMIDT / AFP)

These are important numbers. Not only do they partially explain how Donald Trump’s administration has been able to execute first 100 days policy with a velocity that probably beats every presidency since JFK’s (with youth comes energy), the difference in ages also underlines just how much the US is seeing a changing of the guard.

Under Biden, who was barely with it by the end of his term, the US felt like it was being led by a gerontocracy not far removed spiritually from the hacking and wheezing Brezhnev-era Soviet apparatchiks who would sit in the freezing cold above Red Square to review the troops on May Day.

Now, despite Trump’s 78 years, the whole American scene feels fresher and more authentically youthful. This youthfulness also helps – despite critics clutching their pearls at every turn – make more sense of the Trump program and its radical moves to end long festering problems before they become unsustainable burdens.

Take government debt, a US$36 trillion problem. Trump’s tasking of Elon Musk and a group of high IQ 20-somethings to open the books and end wasteful, and often corrupt spending absolutely has a political aim – namely, to end the multi-billion dollar slush funds that it appears have been used to funnel money to progressive NGOs, churches, and media outlets who then turn around and give money and favours back to the Democrats.

But there is also the fact that government spending is a far greater problem for the young, who will bear the lion’s share of paying $1 trillion a year just in interest payments on US debt by 2026.

Trump’s seemingly madcap plan to go into Gaza territory, relocate the two million people who live there to “some really nice places”, and then use his experience in property development and politics to build a new “Riviera” on the Med, also has a generational character.

The Gaza conflict is something that goes back decades, generations, and has been allowed to set in concrete.

No one who talks about a “two state solution” really believes this will happen any time soon, and in the meantime, what? More tit for tat wars between Hamas and Israel?

Ending the fight and giving everyone a chance to get on with their lives takes this off the books for coming generations.

The point in both cases is not to romanticise either proposal but rather to acknowledge that older generations on all sides of politics have failed and that bringing youthful thinking to bear can only be a good thing.

Originally published as Trump’s cabinet of youth: A changing of the guard