Before Donald Trump’s victory, making detailed predictions about how his second administration would govern seemed like a fool’s errand — there were too many multitudes within the Trumpian tent, too many promiscuous promises to voters, to say for sure what forms of Trumpism would end up expressed in a second four-year whirl.
It did seem, at least, that the appointments to Trump’s cabinet might help us make plausible statements about the trajectory of his administration. But now, with most of the major names put forward — and retracted and replaced, in one case — I’m still not sure how best to generalize about where this particular cast of characters will take us.
That Trump has picked more loyalists than last time is true, inevitable and not especially useful in terms of figuring out how exactly (apart from never appointing a special prosecutor to investigate the boss!) those loyalists are likely to occupy themselves. That some of his nominees are eccentric or unfit-seeming and others are more conventional is likewise to be expected. Neither observation gives us a general theory of Trump 2.0.
Instead, let’s consider three subtheories of how this cabinet might actually work. First, as the climate journalist Matthew Zeitlin suggested, you could see his picks as making up an American version of a European-style coalition government, where small parties join with a bigger party and receive various ministries in exchange for their support.
The choices of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard, especially, fit this model: Trump’s big anti-progressive tent requires him to make a variety of very different worldviews feel represented, which means giving the health ministry to Kennedy’s Green MAGA Party (I’m swiping that moniker from the sociologist Holly Jean Buck) and a foreign policy job to Gabbard’s Antiwar Party, even as other jobs like secretary of commerce and secretary of state go to members of the actual Republican Party.
Likewise with Lori Chavez-Deremer, the pick for labor secretary, an unusually pro-union Republican whose appointment looks like a reward to Trump’s union supporters: You might call her a tacit representative of the Populist Party or the Teamster Tories. You could fit Pete Hegseth, the pick for defense secretary, and Mike Huckabee, the ambassador to Israel, into that frame as well, since their particular style of evangelical Christian hawkishness (I would call it the Christian Nationalist Party if the term “Christian nationalist” were not so much abused) is often a worldview unto itself.
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