President-elect Donald Trump nominated a flurry of allies to Cabinet posts over the past seven days, with his timing and picks coming as a marked shift from his first term in office.
Trump has named 11 candidates who require Senate confirmation to head Washington’s executive departments since Nov. 11. Since winning the 2024 presidential election 11 days ago, he has additionally tapped at least 11 people to fill coveted advisory and staffing positions in the West Wing. Trump has also appointed Vivek Ramaswamy and Elon Musk to head the first-ever Department of Government Efficiency, which seeks to slash bureaucratic waste and inefficiency.
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The nominations and appointments have taken place at breakneck speed when compared to how the process played out after Trump won his first term in 2016. At the same point eight years ago, Trump had yet to make a single Cabinet nomination. He didn’t make his first Cabinet-level selection until Nov. 18, tapping then-Sen. Jeff Sessions as attorney general. Trump didn’t announce his last pick until nearly two months later, on Jan. 19, 2017, when he chose former Georgia Gov. Sonny Perdue to serve as agriculture secretary.
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The process hasn’t just accelerated. The people Trump is appointing to head his administration have also changed from the figures he surrounded himself with during his first presidency.
Back in 2016, Trump chiefly named Washington, D.C., insiders to lead his agencies and advise him on matters of national security.
John Bolton was picked to be his national security adviser. Bolton, who was recently described by Musk as a “staggeringly dumb warmonger,” was widely considered to be a foreign policy hawk, and was a prominent proponent of the Iraq war during former President George W. Bush’s administration.
Other picks, such as Trump’s move to name retired Marine Gen. James Mattis as his defense secretary, and Marine Gen. John Kelly, who was tapped to run the Department of Homeland Security, were also seen as safe nominations and olive branches to the D.C. bureaucracy.
Many of the people Trump has named this time around, however, have expressed deep skepticism about the Washington establishment.
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Trump’s unconventional move to name Army veteran and Fox News host Pete Hegseth to serve as the secretary of defense sent shockwaves through the Capitol. Meanwhile, former Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, who was announced as Trump‘s pick for director of National Intelligence, and former presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has been nominated to head the Department of Health and Human Services, are both ex-Democrats who have characterized the departments they are set to lead as overrun with corruption.
The Cabinet realignment comes as the president-elect described his top picks to man Washington’s bureaucracy back in 2016 as the “biggest mistake” of his first term during an appearance on the Joe Rogan Experience earlier this month.
“I picked a few people that I shouldn’t have picked,” he reflected. “Neocons or bad people or disloyal.”
Trump continued to reminisce during the interview, calling Kelly “a bully, but weak,” and labeling Bolton as “an idiot.” He explained his Cabinet decisions came because he “wasn’t a Washington guy. I was a New York guy.”
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“I was a New York builder, and I built buildings in New York, and I knew that whole world, but I didn’t know the Washington world, too. And all of a sudden, you’re supposed to be appointing top people,” the president-elect continued, saying he made his Cabinet choices based on advice from insiders he barely knew.
Before suspending his independent presidential campaign in August to endorse Trump, Kennedy, now slated to head the incoming Republican administration’s HHS, often criticized the former president for choosing Washington insiders and corporate lobbyists to head executive departments in 2016. Slamming Trump for anointing “coal Lobbyist” Andrew Wheeler to run the EPA and “pharma Exec” Alexander Azar to head the HHS in 2016, Kennedy argued the picks contradicted the Republican leader’s promises to “drain the swamp.”
Remarking on conversations he’s had with Trump about past Cabinet decisions, Kennedy recently said Trump had promised him he wasn’t going to repeat the “mistakes” he made during his first term. Kennedy pointed to several changes Trump has made to his transition process that have influenced his decision-making process for Cabinet appointments and given him confidence that “this government is going to be different than any government we’ve ever seen.”
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Saying Trump’s move to assemble his own transition team three months early without the help of the Government Accountability Office was “something no other presidents done before,” Kennedy said the former president “got private donors to fund it,” during a town hall with Gabbard last month.
“I can tell you this, which is unique,” he said. “There are no corporate lobbyists on that campaign, on that transition and usually it’s 100% corporate lobbyists. Oh, it’s very, very different, and it gives me lots of hope. And this government is going to be different than any government we’ve ever seen.”
