Cabinet Makers II

As I noted previously, the 2024 Trump transition has been remarkable not just for the breakneck speed of the nominations, but for the reckless choices they’ve made as well.

While most incoming administrations would only just now be starting to roll out their first major nominees, Trump has been trying to set a record for speed here. He’s already designated dozens of nominees for high-profile positions in the Cabinet and beyond.

It turns out, when a transition team decides to skip the FBI background checks, that speeds things up considerably. But, of course, that decision doesn’t mean that other actors won’t run their own background checks on these nominees. As we’ve already seen with the withdrawn nomination of the alleged sexual predator Matt Gaetz and with the flailing nomination of the alleged sexual predator, alleged alcoholic and proven fuckup Pete Hesgeth, this path is fraught with real political difficulties, and we’re not even to the congressional hearings yet.

It’s a guarantee now that other nominees will face similar problems. The nomination of a MAGA true believer like Kash Patel to lead the FBI should spark a significant fight, for instance, and Lord knows what will come out of a confirmation hearing of a former heroin addict who has willingly told tales about sawing off a whale’s head or dumping a bear carcass in Central Park but who now wants to lead the Department of Health and Human Services.

Despite the grandstanding attitude of the Trump transition team, the bumbling of these nominations does matter. Historically speaking, botched Cabinet nominees are the canary in the coal mine for a new White House. They’re widely taken as signs that an incoming administration doesn’t understand their jobs well enough or that Congress is willing and able to provide some pushback, or some combination of both.

We can expect to see the usual pushback from the transition team in the coming weeks, with an insistence that Trump somehow won a major mandate in the election — one more time, he did not! — and therefore he deserves to pick whoever he wants, no matter how drunk, rapey, or psychotic they might seem. But that’s just bluster, of course. Trump voters told us they were upset about the price of groceries; they weren’t voting Trump in order to put a failson host of Fox & Friends in charge of the Pentagon.

As much as they want to invoke an imaginary mandate to prop up these nominees, every time they do it simply diminishes the illusion of that mandate itself. They’re wasting political capital here, forcing their erstwhile allies in the Republican Senate to face some unnecessarily awkward questions and make some unpopular decisions.

That said, there are so many of these nominations flooding the zone and not much will in the Republican caucus to resist, so we should expect that most of these clowns actually do get confirmed to high positions of power. Media pressure might derail a couple, and the sliver of moderates left in the Senate GOP might be able to pick off one or two, but they won’t do more than that. Trump has set the cast for his second term and the odds are good he’ll get most of them.

So what will this administration look like?

Well, in addition to the assorted array of Trump loyalists and true believers like the ones I’ve mentioned above, there’s a different set of advisers — slated for both official government roles but also advisory spots like the dumb DOGE commission — who are notable not just for their weird politics, but also for their extreme wealth.

It’s a bit of an awkward combination. When Eisenhower unveiled his Cabinet, one comprised entirely of wealthy businessmen with the exception of a union leader for Labor, The New Republic’s Richard Strout joked that Ike had picked “eight millionaires and a plumber.”

As I joked on Bluesky, Trump picked “eight billionaires and Nixon’s Plumbers.”

But more seriously, we don’t have to imagine this awkward combination of a Cabinet. We’ve seen this precise mix of wealthy and weirdos before, in the comically corrupt administration of Warren G. Harding.

Like Trump, Harding selected some of the richest people in America to fill out key roles in his Cabinet. Secretary of the Treasury Andrew Mellon, for instance, was the third richest man in the nation at the time — surpassed only by Rockefeller and Ford — while Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover had made millions as an engineer, geologist and financier.

But Harding spent more energy surrounding himself with old friends, family members and associates who, he hoped naively, wouldn’t cause him any problems. However, by selecting men who were personally loyal to him but not professionally fit for their job, he set in motion one of the truly disastrous administrations in American history. The acts of corruption, graft, and bribery are legendary by now, and with good reason.

Things didn’t end well for Harding’s men. His Secretary of the Interior became the first Cabinet official sent to federal prison, while his head of the Veterans’ Bureau (not yet a Cabinet level post) likewise wound up in Leavenworth. Harding’s Attorney General, his corrupt former campaign manager, literally set all his files on fire at the Department of Justice and only escaped prison time after two hung juries. Several other officials went to jail; one to an insane asylum. Many more committed suicide to avoid that fate.

And Warren Harding, stunned as all these revelations rolled out, died in office of a brain hemorrhage. He wanted to surround himself with familiar faces in order to feel safe and secure, but he set in motion the scandals that brought an end to him and his administration too.

There’s still plenty of time before the new administration is sworn in, so we’ll see who makes it and who doesn’t. But rest assured we’ll be swearing at the ones who do in no time at all.