Donald Trump Jr – pulling the strings to reward Maga faithful

The white, male Republican Party core is now embodied by The president-elect’s eldest son, not least because he helped to bring many of its leading voices into the inner circle.

Donald Trump Jr has long been a favourite of the Maga base. Picture: Grant Baldwin / AFP

As Donald Trump rolled out an extraordinary line-up for his second cabinet Elon Musk appeared omnipresent, but the real power behind the picks was staying out of the limelight.

Donald Trump Jr, the president-elect’s eldest son, has grown steadily in influence while becoming the biggest draw on the campaign circuit after Trump himself. His spiky take-downs of rival Republicans and Democrats have made him a favourite of the Maga (Make America Great Again) base.

The white, male Republican Party core is now embodied by Trump Jr not least because he helped to bring many of its leading voices into the inner circle, starting with JD Vance as his father’s running-mate and including the jaw-dropping choices this week of Robert F Kennedy Jr for health secretary and Matt Gaetz for attorney-general.

The precursor was a social media post from Trump ruling out two conventional Republicans. It had his eldest son’s fingerprints all over it. “I will not be inviting former ambassador Nikki Haley, or former secretary of state Mike Pompeo, to join the Trump administration, which is currently in formation,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.

Two days after the election, Trump Jr tweeted: “I want to make sure now that we know who the real players are, the people who will actually deliver on the president’s message, the people who don’t think that they know better than the duly elected president of the United States … I want to make sure that those people are in this administration.”

He had already been working for months to make this happen. A friend of Vance since his election to the Senate in 2022, Trump Jr led the charge to have him selected over Doug Burgum, governor of North Dakota.

With the former Fox News host Tucker Carlson and the PayPal tycoon Peter Thiel, he argued that only Vance could cement the Trump legacy by ensuring the party did not return to its country-club, neo-conservative ways.

Trump Jr advocated for JD Vance’s nomination as his father’s running-mate. Picture: Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images / AFP

His disdain for traditional Republicans was clear from his appearance in Iowa for the caucuses. He said: “If the deep state could make a candidate in the lab, like a fake conservative, you’d get Nikki Haley.”

His message was popular with local voters and millionaires. “From a donor standpoint, he’s by far the number one requested person,” a party fundraising consultant said. “He goes places and they sell out immediately.”

Pompeo, a former CIA director and secretary of state in Trump’s first administration, was at one point seen as a possible defence secretary but Trump Jr had other plans. When the right-wing libertarian comedian Dave Smith posted in support of the “stop Pompeo movement” on Sunday, Trump Jr retweeted and added: “Agreed 100 per cent 100 per cent 100 per cent!!! I’m on it.”

This left space for an unexpected pick: the Fox & Friends presenter Pete Hegseth, a veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan and a serving National Guard officer who had caught Trump’s eye with his right-wing commentary. Almost nobody outside Trump’s inner circle saw his elevation coming, given his lack of political experience. But Hegseth, 44, is the sort of Maga loyalist that Trump Jr was pushing for.

There was a deeper reason for him to block Haley and Pompeo from the cabinet: insiders say it is all part of the plan to keep the field as clear as possible for Vance to run for president in 2028.

Trump Jr, 46, was also instrumental in bringing forward Tulsi Gabbard, the former Democratic congresswoman now nominated for director of national intelligence, and Kennedy Jr as health supremo. Gabbard has no experience working in the field of intelligence and Kennedy Jr has a long record of opposing conventional public health initiatives such as vaccination and water fluoridation. Trump Jr saw their value in bringing more anti-establishment voters into the Maga movement.

Arguably the most astonishing nomination of all was the Florida congressman Matt Gaetz for attorney-general. He is unpopular on Capitol Hill for his self-aggrandising antics including the way he triggered the downfall of Kevin McCarthy as Speaker.

Markwayne Mullin, a fiercely pro-Trump senator from Oklahoma, told CNN last year that none of his Republican colleagues defended Gaetz after allegations – denied by Gaetz – that he had sex with an underage girl, “because we had all seen the videos he was showing on the House floor of the girls that he had slept with”.

This week Mullin said he “completely trusted” Trump on Gaetz’s nomination, exhibiting the kind of U-turn that Republicans may have to get used to.

Gaetz’s promotion was down to Trump Jr, according to a Floridian Republican who saw their friendship up close. Cris Dosev, a staunch Trump supporter, was mounting a strong challenge to Gaetz in the 2018 Republican primary for his House district when Trump Jr showed up to tip the scales in his rival’s favour.

“Gaetz knew how to get tied in with the family,” Dosev said. “He’s very smooth, very vain, and they are both nepo babies,” he said, referring to nepotism because Gaetz’s father, Donald, led the Florida senate from 2012 to 2014.

One person who is not seeking a formal role in the administration, by all accounts, is Trump Jr himself. He prefers to pursue business interests and agitate on his podcast, Triggered.

The Times