Donald Trump's Rogue Cabinet: A Round Up

Our new and recent coverage on the incoming administration

Dear Readers:

Donald Trump is assembling an administration chock-full of ideological extremists and kooks. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who thinks vaccines cause autism and that pandemic restrictions were as bad as Holocaust policies, is his choice for the Department of Health and Human Services. And Kash Patel, who channels completely unhinged QAnon conspiracy theories, is his pick for the FBI.

Check out my latest videos about this comical, if dangerous, duo on our YouTube channel —and don’t forget to subscribe! And, just so that you get the full picture of Trump’s dream team in one stop, we are also re-upping

Robert Tracinski

’s brilliant piece discerning the method behind Trump’s cabinet madness and

Cathy Young

’s insightful account of who Pete Hegseth, Trump’s man for the Department of Defense, really is based on his own writings.

Watch and read. And laugh and weep.

Landry Ayres
Senior Producer

Kash Patel

RFK Jr.

Pete Hegseth

In Pete Hegseth’s Totalitarian Vision, Opponents of Christian Nationalism Are Commies and Political Enemies

Cathy Young:

President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, is in trouble. While initial reactions to his nomination focused on the absurdity of this former Fox News anchor being elevated to second in command of the military, the main obstacles to Hegseth’s confirmation remain his various problems with women: a sexual assault allegation from 2017, disparaging comments about women in the military, and a newly surfaced 2018 email from his mother berating him for habitual mistreatment of the opposite sex.

But even more alarmingly: Hegseth is an ideological extremist who views political opponents as “the enemy” and political differences as war by another name. Worse, he’s a Christian nationalist of the stridently militaristic kind, which raises disturbing questions about his potential willingness to misuse the U.S. military for political purposes. This is not a characterization pieced together from the odd soundbite or two—Hegseth himself tells us who he is in his books. The image of Hegseth that emerges from The War on Warriors (2024), Battle for the American Mind (2022), and American Crusade (2020), is of a militant Christian extremist who is obsessed with the Crusades and whose highest aspiration is redesigning the U.S. military into his ideological mold.

The central idea of American Crusade is that the survival of the United States as a free country requires a “holy war” to achieve “a single paramount objective: the categorical defeat of the Left.” Hegseth accuses the left—by which he doesn’t just mean an extremist fringe but the Democratic Party and its supporters in general—of seeking the “utter annihilation” of true patriots. “We are two Americas; a house divided,” he declares, and the other half is full of people whose “ignorance and ideologies threaten America’s very survival.” …

Besides Hegseth’s quasi-totalitarian demands for complete fealty to the right and intensely held animus toward the left in the culture war, there is also the troubling question of just how literally he takes the “war” part. American Crusade, after all, explicitly invokes the medieval Crusades as a model for the fight against “the Left.” …

Hegseth quite literally treats political opponents as domestic enemies and seems disturbingly comfortable with the idea that the culture war against the left could escalate into more literal warfare.

In other words, if Trump were planning to turn his presidency into an authoritarian regime, Hegseth is exactly the sort of person he’d pick as Secretary of Defense.

Trump Administration 2.0 and Tulsi Gabbard

The Trump Administration Will Be the Government’s Evil Twin

Robert Tracinski:

For his Director of National Intelligence, Trump has chosen former Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii. More than just an “antiwar” gadfly, Gabbard has expressed sympathy for a variety of foreign dictatorships. She made a secret trip to Syria to meet with its president, Bashar al-Assad, and then sponsored a bill to cut off U.S. funding to rebels against his brutal regime. She has defended Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and has been “parroting fake Russian propaganda,” in Mitt Romney’s words, about imaginary “biolabs” in Ukraine. The main debate about Gabbard is whether she is merely a Russian dupe or whether her connections to Russia run deeper. For its part, Russian state TV has declared her to be “Putin’s agent”—and now she will be put at the center of our intelligence agencies.

Remember that the Director of National Intelligence was an office created after 9/11 to ensure information would be shared and coordinated across intelligence agencies. But how much intelligence will these agencies share if they have reasonable doubts about the director’s loyalty? How much intelligence will our allies share with us if they suspect it will find its way to the Kremlin? …

Although Americans were warned—including by this publication—that President-elect Donald Trump would staff his administration with loyalists, few expected the shock of his calamitous selections for top positions in his administration. The common theme is that he is constructing a kind of anti-government—not in the sense of being for smaller government, but in the sense of being government’s evil twin. Every appointee is selected as a deliberate negation, even a mockery, of the function of government he or she will be in charge of.

© The UnPopulist, 2024