Donald Trump is not just rewriting American history, he is ripping it to shreds by nominating the most radical assembly of outsiders ever seen in a presidential administration.
By choosing a grab-bag of bomb-throwers with riding instructions to dismantle the Washington ‘swamp’ and tackle the ‘deep state,’ the incoming president has thrown down a historic challenge to the nation’s capital.
His message is that there is a rotten core lurking within the most fundamental institutions of the US government, from the FBI and the intelligence agencies, to the Pentagon to the departments of justice, health, education and immigration among others.
Mr Trump’s solution is to root out what he sees as this rotten core by appointing loyalists, from Robert F Kennedy Jr, to Matt Gaetz, to Tulsi Gabbard to Pete Hegseth, whose starting point is a deep distrust of the institutions they have been chosen to preside over.
Each of these candidates has close to zero of the traditional qualifications and experience once deemed necessary to run the country’s mega-institutions and their hundreds of thousands of staff.
But while the Washington beltway and its political milieu is apoplectic about this, predicting little short of the fall of Rome, they should remember that this is what America voted for.
Mr Trump has campaigned on ‘draining the swamp’ of Washington ever since he was first elected in 2016, and having failed to shake-up these institutions to his liking in his first term, he is taking no chances this time, by appointing a specialist team of loyal disrupters.
As such, we are about to see one of the greatest and most dramatic contests in American politics unfold. How far can a president, aided by a merry band of willing accomplices, truly bend the institutions of American government and democracy to his will?
Those Trump voters who anticipate revolutionary change in the way America’s government works are likely to be sorely disappointed. There is only so much reform that even the most eager and determined change-agents can make to longstanding institutions of government. In other words, don’t expect to see the abolition of the FBI or the Department of Health any time soon.
Yet even Mr Trump’s loudest critics must admit that he is being true to his word by nominating such a team of disruptive outsiders. But given the truly radical nature of some of these nominations – especially those of Mr Gaetz and Mr Kennedy – has the incoming president gone too far, even for his own party?
The gatekeepers for Trump’s chosen new team will be the Republican Senators, led by the establishment Republican Senator John Thune, whose team must approve the nominations.
Already there are disgruntled signals coming from several Republican moderates about the nominations of Mr Gaetz and Mr Kennedy in particular. The Republicans hold a majority of only three in the new Senate, so only a handful of their Senators need to oppose a nomination in order to block it. Senator Thune is set for a baptism of fire, caught between a new president who wants him to steer through his nominations and a group of moderate Republican Senators who believe their new president has taken his electoral mandate too far by choosing some conspiracy theorists and general kooks to fill these key roles.
Arguably the most controversial of Mr Trump’s nominations, in a highly competitive field, is Mr Kennedy, an anti-vaccine activist who opposes the use of fluoride in water, to head the Health and Human Services Department.
Mr Trump has said he would like Mr Kennedy ‘to go wild on health,’ saying “Americans have been crushed by the industrial food complex and drug companies who have engaged in deception, misinformation, and disinformation when it comes to Public Health.”
Mr Kennedy’s nomination will shake up America’s health sector, where he has been widely derided for being a ‘science denier’ on medical and health issues. Not all of Mr Kennedy’s positions are seen as unpopular or fringe. For example, his call to strip ultra-processed food from school cafeterias has broad public support. But he is an outlier in his claims that vaccines cause autism and in his desire to remove fluoride from water, as well as his resistance to many public health measures and his embrace of alternative medicine. Mr Kennedy has said the entire nutrition department in the Food and Drug Administration should ‘pack your bags.’
Mr Kennedy’s nomination is the culmination of a quixotic political journey for the former Democrat and son of Democratic Senator Robert F Kennedy who was running for president before pulling out and aligning himself with Mr Trump.
But the Trump nominee who is likely to receive the most opposition from Republican Senators is the former congressman Matt Gaetz who has been picked to be Attorney-General.
The choice amounts to a declaration of war by Mr Trump against the FBI and the Department of Justice which has pursued him for so long. Mr Gaetz, a Trump loyalist and fellow MAGA warrior, has been a fierce critic of what he calls the weaponisation of the Justice Department against the former president, going so far as to call for the possible abolition of both the DOJ and the FBI.
Mr Gaetz has skin in the game also, because the DOJ investigated him for several years on allegations of sex trafficking and having sex with a 17 year old.
Until this week, a house ethics committee was completing a report on him over allegations of sex trafficking, sexual misconduct and drug use, but he resigned from Congress immediately after Mr Trump announced his nomination, effectively ending that investigation.
Mr Gaetz was an enthusiastic backer of Mr Trump’s belief that the 2020 election was stolen and he praised the rioters who invaded the Capitol building on January 6.
But his biggest problem, in the eyes of Senate Republicans, is that Mr Gaetz was a bomb-thrower against his own party last year when he led the revolt against the house speaker Kevin McCarthy which removed Mr McCarthy but led to a paralysis in his party’s leadership for almost a month.
Some Senate Republicans are now demanding that they see the report on Mr Gaetz by the house ethics committee on his alleged misdemeanours before they approve his nomination. With media reports suggesting that the report is highly critical of Mr Gaetz, any leak of the report’s findings is likely to be used by some Republicans as a welcome excuse to kill his nomination. At this point, the odds are against Mr Gaetz being confirmed by the Senate.
The other Trump appointments likely to be subject to solid questioning are Tulsi Gabbard, who has been nominated for director of national intelligence and Pete Hegseth, a Fox News host and army veteran who has been tapped for Defence Secretary without having ever worked in government before.
Ms Gabbard, a former Democrat, has previously expressed some sympathy for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, saying Russia had “legitimate security concerns” about Ukraine’s bid to join NATO.
Ms Gabbard’s nomination reflects Mr Trump’s scepticism about the US intelligence community but Admiral Mike Rogers, who headed America’s largest intelligence agency, the National Security Agency during Mr Trump’s first term, told The Weekend Australian this week that spy agencies were still able to do their job properly without interference from the then president despite his obvious scepticism about their work.
Mr Trump’s other key outsider nomination was to tap fellow billionaire Elon 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.
And yet, amid all of these deeply unconventional nominations, the incoming president has also made some highly conventional ones, especially the choices of the experienced hawkish Senator Marco Rubio as Secretary of State, intelligence veteran John Ratcliffe to head the CIA, and China hawk and congressman Mike Waltz as his national security adviser.
The common thread among all of these nominations – conventional and unconventional – is that they are deeply loyal to the new president. Mr Trump wants his team of loyal disrupters to be ready and willing to disrupt on day one of his new administration. He wants them all in his corner when the bell rings on inauguration day, January 20, for the first round of Trump v Washington.
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