As President-elect Donald Trump’s cabinet and the timbre of his governing methodology comes into focus, four competing sets of priorities seem to be in play.
The first priority might be termed vengeance/retribution politics. It is based around preposterous picks for filling critical offices of state: in nominating to head the Department of Justice Matt Gaetz—formerly under investigation by the Justice Department for sex-trafficking and, until he resigned, by his colleagues in the House for links to drug-fueled orgies—Trump all-but-declared-aloud that he wanted personal and total control over the Justice Department. Why else would Trump nominate a clown whose own colleagues detest him, other than to establish a Mafia boss-style level of control over the sycophantic underling? You scratch my back, Matt, I’ll scratch yours.
When the Gaetz nomination for Attorney General went down in flames, Trump recalibrated not by hewing to the center but by putting forward Florida AG Pam Bondi, who has explicitly called for those who prosecuted Trump to themselves be prosecuted. He also nominated several of his private defense attorneys to fill out other senior positions in the department. None of this augurs well for the likelihood of the DOJ prioritizing the rule of law ahead of the vengeful whims of the president.
In putting forward Tulsi Gabbard, who has long expressed sympathies for the like of Vladimir Putin and Syria’s Bashar Al-Assad, to be Director of National Intelligence, Trump showed a willingness to reshape American foreign policy in an entirely transactional direction. You scratch my back, Vladimir, I’ll scratch yours.
And in nominating Fox News anchor Peter Hegseth, a defender of war criminals, purveyor of the idea that the military will have to take sides in an upcoming civil war, alleged white supremacist and alleged sexual assaulter for Secretary of Defense, Trump has put his authoritarian cards most fully on the table: when it comes to the agencies that can be bent to aggressively target “the enemy from within” Trump has identified, including through invoking the Insurrection Act to allow the deployment of US military groupings against political protestors, criminal gangs, immigrants, and even political opponents, he wants people such as Hegseth who will go along with whatever ghastly, and potentially unconstitutional, plans Trump orders.
The second, related, Trump 2.0 priority is to shake pretty much everything up to appeal to the most MAGAfied of his base, and use chaos to shatter institutional norms. What better way to do this than, say, put Robert Kennedy Jr. in charge of public health? The base should be entertained by poking a thumb in the eye of vaccine proponents and those who favored proactive public health measures to counter the COVID-19 pandemic. How about Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, and Trump shill Vivek Ramaswamy in charge of a much-publicized effort to cut red tape and downsize the federal footprint? No matter if, in the process, basic government services and vital government agencies that provide food, healthcare, worker safety protections and so on to tens of millions of people, get eviscerated. Won’t it thrill the MAGA base to elevate to positions of high influence people who believe in locking down the border, no matter the economic cost, and rounding up millions of undocumented immigrants, potentially at gunpoint and backed by military force? They will relish the chance to witness the resurrection to power of extreme ideologues such as Stephen Miller and Sebastian Gorka, both of whom will be brought in as senior advisers to the White House. See, too, the rise of Tom Homan, who will head up what the incoming administration is touting as the largest deportation effort in US history, and what Trump has promised will play out as “a bloody story.” For Trump’s team, the sadistic abandonment of the country’s long-standing commitments to asylum-seekers and refugees isn’t an unfortunate byproduct of toughening up immigration policy, it’s a central facet.
The third set of priorities, however, largely flies in the face of the first two chaos-inducing priorities, and that is “business as normal.” Despite Trump’s promise to use tariffs as a cudgel with which to bludgeon economic and political foes, in fact MAGA-man has turned to old friends in the world of business and high finance to fill several top cabinet positions, and he seems to be hoping for a quick stock market surge both as a measure of his success and as a force to camouflage the scale of corruption that he is likely to unleash. There’s billionaire hedge-fund superstar Howard Lutnick at Commerce, and billionaire financier Scott Bessent at Treasury. Then there’s billionaire businessman Doug Burgum at the Department of the Interior, and billionaire World Wrestling Entertainment cofounder Linda McMahon at Education. I doubt there’s ever been a cabinet and set of inner-circle advisors—including Trump’s previous cabinet—so stacked in favor of the super-wealthy.
These billionaires, with the signature exception of the mercurial Musk and his burn-it-all-down rhetoric, may want to curtail government regulations and spending, but they certainly don’t have the same bomb-throwers’ instincts as do the bring-out-the-military-and-round-up-the-enemy-within brigades.
The fourth set of Trumpian 2.0 priorities, however, also sits most uneasily with the billionaire agenda. It involves sending at least some policy scraps to the millions of workers—and, most noticeably, of unionized workers—who flew Trump’s banner in 2024. This is seen with the nomination of a pro-union Labor Secretary, Lori Chavez-DeRemer, backed by Teamsters leader Sean O’Brien. It is a nomination that speaks to the ambitious political realignment Trump is attempting—forging a strong-man leadership backed not only by corporate titans but at the same time by a sizable chunk of the working class. In this sense, Trump’s looming presidency resembles the sort of governing style favored by Argentina’s mid-century strongman Juan Peron (of Evita fame) more than seventy years ago. These four priorities won’t—indeed can’t—work together smoothly. Which ones prevail, and how, will largely determine the direction and durability of American democracy in the coming years.
Sasha Abramsky is a freelance journalist originally from England, who is currently western states correspondent for the Nation, with credits in the Atlantic Monthly, New York magazine, Rolling Stone, the Guardian and the New Yorker online.
He writes twice a month for SFR
