- President-elect Donald Trump is wasting no time planning his second administration.
- He already has unveiled more than half a dozen Cabinet-level picks.
- His early selections show how much he prizes loyalty and personal ties.
President-elect Donald Trump is wasting little time staffing his second administration. His early picks show he prizes loyalty after a tumultuous first term filled with Cabinet secretaries who either resigned or were dismissed for defying Trump too often.
As of Wednesday afternoon, Trump has vastly exceeded the pace he rolled out nominations following his 2016 upset win. He has already announced the intent to nominate seven Cabinet-level positions, including his Defense secretary (Pete Hegseth); White House chief of staff (Susie Wiles); Homeland Security secretary (Gov. Kristi Noem of South Dakota); and EPA administrator (former Congressman Lee Zeldin).
“There is emphasis on alignment with the president both personally and policy-wise, so people who have taken the effort to publicly back the president-elect personally,” David E. Lewis, a Vanderbilt University political science professor who studies presidential appointments, told Business Insider.
Lewis added that Trump, no longer a political neophyte, now has a “deeper pool” of allies to draw on.
“One of the problems he had in the first term was that people he selected wouldn’t do the things he wanted them to do in the administration for a variety of reasons, and I think he has learned this go around how to avoid that,” Lewis said.
Wiles, who co-led Trump’s 2024 campaign, has decades of political experience and will make history as the first woman to serve as gatekeeper to a president. She has never served in Congress or senior White House roles before, something virtually all of her predecessors had their resumes.
Chris Whipple, who wrote a book about White House chiefs of staff, said Wiles is a “logical choice” who brings some strengths. Whipple has been unsparing in his criticism of Mark Meadows, Trump’s final chief of staff, whose “sycophantic” nature exacerbated Trump’s worst impulses.
“She has demonstrated that she can work with, I would never say manage Donald Trump, but she can work with him without getting fired,” Whipple told Business Insider. “She has demonstrated that she is able to tell hard truths from time to time.”
Whipple said the one drawback with Wiles is her lack of experience. Most of Trump’s top picks thus far lack conventional experience for their roles.
Zeldin served in the House for eight years but never sat on committees overseeing environmental policy. Noem’s entire state has a budget ($7.3 billion) eight times smaller than the sprawling Homeland Security Department (over $60 billion), which includes more than 230,000 employees. Hegseth, a decorated veteran, has never led anything near the size of the Defense Department, which is the nation’s largest employer and boasts over a $800 billion budget.
Rep. Michael Waltz of Florida brings arguably the most experience to his role as national security advisor with nearly six years in Congress, a brief stint at the Pentagon, and time in the Bush administration. In announcing Waltz’s elevation, Trump indicated he would make the current congressman a Cabinet-level official.
Waltz showed the extent of his loyalty to Trump by co-sponsoring legislation to rename Washington, D.C.’s DC’s Dulles International Airport after Trump.
A different second term
Trump has said he would staff his administration differently this time.
“The advantage I have now is I know everybody. I know people. I know the good, the bad, the stupid, the smart,” Trump told Time Magazine in April. “I know everybody. When I first got to Washington, I knew very few people.”
Turnover during the first Trump administration was especially prevalent at the Pentagon, which saw five different leaders in either acting or full capacity in four years.
With this lens, Hegseth’s forthcoming nomination stands out. Hegseth, a Fox News host, served in the Army National Guard after graduating from Princeton. His lack of ties to the national security establishment is one of his supporters’ biggest selling points.
“The times are perilous, and our national-security establishment needs a jolt to its system,” John Noonan, conservative commentator and former top advisor to Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas, wrote in The National Review. “I think Pete can be that jolt.”
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