Loyalty, loyalty, loyalty. These are the three most critical factors driving Donald Trump as he chooses his new-look team to run the US for the next four years.
Trump’s choices range from the unlikely, such as Fox News host Pete Hegseth as defence secretary, to the predictable, such as new CIA chief John Ratcliffe, to the experimental, such as billionaire ally Elon Musk to “restructure” the US government.
Yet each shares a common trait: complete loyalty to the incoming president and a willingness to disrupt the status quo.
They speak to the fact that for his second term in the White House, Trump does not want to be surrounded by the same sort of establishment Republican figures who gave him such push-back during his first term.
He wants to be able to enact his mandate for change from defence to immigration to intelligence to slashing government waste without the fights that marred his first term in office. The benefit of such a team is that it makes it much easier for Trump to achieve what he was elected to achieve.
That is a valid aim for any president. The potential downside is that a president needs more than “yes” men to push back on his excesses.
A president also needs experience and some of the choices he has made look more like a wing-and-a-prayer candidates than proven leaders.
Yet traditional experience ranks less highly with Trump than does loyalty and a willingness to push boundaries. That is why the experienced Mike Pompeo and Nikki Haley were excluded from the new administration because they hadn’t shown the level of loyalty Trump demands.
So let’s go through the grab bag of new appointments. Trump followed up on his relatively standard choices of senator Marco Rubio as secretary of state and congressman Mike Waltz as national security adviser with the wildly left-field choice of Hegseth as defence secretary. The 44-year-old is a long-time Fox news host and a veteran of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
He was an earlier backer of Trump in 2016 and has been an informal adviser to him at times.
Hegseth has also been a vocal critic of US military leadership, saying it was more focused on diversity in the ranks than creating a lethal fighting force. He has also championed the cause of combat veterans accused of war crimes.
By being an outsider, Hegseth may be the disruptor in the Pentagon that Trump is looking for, although he is the president-elect’s most radical cabinet appointment to date.
By contrast, Trump’s decision to choose his former director of national intelligence, Ratcliffe, to head the CIA makes sense.
Trump is deeply suspicious of US intelligence agencies, lumping them as part of his so-called “deep state” apparatus, and he liked how Ratcliffe previously was a vocal critic of intelligence investigations into ties between Russia and Trump’s 2016 campaign.
Trump’s decision to tap South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem as homeland security secretary also makes sense, and reflects her longstanding strong support for much tougher border security.
Noem has made immigration a key issue and she will have a broad mandate to prosecute sweeping plans for mass deportation of undocumented immigrants.
Among Trump’s less impressive choices is the appointment of personal friend, fellow golfer and campaign donor Steve Witkoff as a special envoy to the Middle East.
Witkoff, a fellow New York real estate investor, has zero government or diplomatic experience yet he will be catapulted into the cauldron of the Middle East.
Good luck with that.
Easily the most intriguing of the new appointments is that of the eccentric Musk to work alongside failed presidential aspirant Vivek Ramaswamy in leading a new “Department of Government Efficiency” meant to slash regulations and waste, and “restructure” federal agencies.
According to Trump, “These two wonderful Americans will pave the way for my administration to dismantle government bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure federal agencies.”
How this will work is anyone’s guess, but by choosing them Trump is being true to his mission to be an agent for change during his second term in Washington.
The new team is fast taking shape and they are looking like a merry band of disruptive loyalists.
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