There is a pattern in President-elect Donald Trump’s appointments.
To understand why he has picked Pete Hegseth as the secretary of defense, Tulsi Gabbard as the director of national intelligence, Matt Gaetz as the attorney general and Robert F Kennedy Jr as the secretary of health and human services, go back to Trump’s perceived experiences with these institutions. Add to it the American electorate’s views on these institutions – partly due to Trump’s rhetoric but partly due to real lived experiences – and then juxtapose it with an election mandate that has given his insurgent political movement the authority to cause systemic rupture.
It is these three features that explain why Trump has made a range of extraordinarily controversial and, from the point of view of many Americans, even dangerous choices. Examine this in the context of the broad areas of defense, intelligence and legal system, and public health.
The world of defense
It is ironic that a leader who projects himself as a fierce American nationalist and who comes from the far-right tradition of American politics is so deeply contemptuous of the civilian bureaucracy and military leadership at Pentagon.
This contempt stems from Trump’s perception that this constituency was not personally loyal to him during his first term. It also stems from Trump’s belief that the military establishment is responsible for pushing America into unnecessary wars and was nudging him in the same direction, despite his personal resistance and his movement’s fierce opposition to these external entanglements.
But what has enabled Trump to act the way he did in picking a junior army officer turned Fox News host to be in charge of a department that had 2.8 million personnel and a budget of $900 billion is the discomfort that his supporters have also felt with the defense establishment. There is of course respect for veterans. But ever since Dwight Eisenhower warned Americans about the military industrial complex in his farewell address, Americans have known that this complex has an interest in wars. Trump represents a post-9/11 generation which has seen America go into Iraq on baseless grounds, enter Afghanistan and stay on for close to two decades only to see the vanquished return as victor and American troops withdraw in disgrace, and then seen the U.S. spend extraordinary resources in Ukraine.
The world of law and intelligence
It is ironic that a leader from a conservative political tradition that one would instinctively associate with having a higher comfort level with the state’s most covert and secretly coercive arms is the most uncomfortable with it.
This discomfort comes from Trump’s own experience. During his first presidential run and in the first few years of his first term, America’s investigative agencies found clues that suggested Russian involvement in Trump’s campaign, links between Trump’s advisors and Moscow, and Russian efforts to boost Trump’s prospects especially through social media. Trump entered office with this stain and had to live with an investigation from a special prosecutor who eventually gave him a partial clean chit. Through it all, Trump developed a deep suspicion of the Department of Justice (DOJ) and sacked the head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The then attorney general and a majority of DOJ’s lawyers refused to play along with Trump’s conspiracy theories on the 2020 election. They prosecuted those involved in January 6 attack on the US Capitol. And in the past four years, DOJ has been actively pursuing cases against Trump on charges ranging from illegally retaining classified files to pressuring state officials to change electoral results to obstructing the certification of presidential results.
But what has enabled Trump to pick Gaetz — the most extremist House Republican, a subject of a House ethics investigation, a far-right maverick and a relentless critic of DOJ — as attorney general, and Gabbard — among the fiercest political critics of America’s “deep state” and its role in dragging US to wars, an individual who many of these agencies suspect of having links with regimes adversarial to America — as head of national intelligence, is the wider discomfort that many Americans feel with the legal state and intelligence state. And like in the case of the military-industrial complex, here too, the Right has benefited from the critique liberals and the Left have made of the American surveillance state, of the covert role of U.S. agencies in ousting and propping up foreign regimes, of the selective use of domestic laws against actors, of the hounding of actors such as Edward Snowden who exposed the scale of U.S. national security surveillance.
The world of health
It is ironic that the leader who actually sanctioned the funding and approvals for the quickest rollout of Covid-19 vaccines to beat the pandemic is now deeply uncomfortable with America’s health establishment.
This discomfort comes from Trump’s own interpretation of what went wrong for him in 2020. Convinced that he would have comfortably won a second successive term as president but for the wrong advice he was given on the pandemic, Trump believes that lockdowns were a mistake, that vaccines alienated his base, that school shutdowns were excessive, and that big pharma was working in conjunction with Democrats. As health officials saw it, this was just baseless. Lockdowns were the only way out at that stage, and even then America only imposed partial restrictions. The country still suffered the highest number of deaths in the world. They hold Trump’s failure to warn the country and prepare systems in time, his erratic, inconsistent and unscientific medical advice, and his irresponsible calls to open up the economy as reasons that aggravated the crisis. And few doubt that vaccines were the only way for normalcy to return and vaccine scepticism, fueled by Trump’s base, was almost criminal.
But what has enabled Trump to pick RFK Jr, a vaccine skeptic, a conspiracy theorist on health, is the wider discomfort that many Americans feel with how U.S. health policy has shaped up. Once again, it was those on the Left and a segment of liberals who exposed the role of big pharma in U.S. in the health crises, including in creating the opioid epidemic, or of big corporates who managed to play loose with regulatory agencies to push approvals for unhealthy products for kids.
Donald Trump has opted to combine his anger, the general anger in American society, and a mandate for disruption to overhaul American defense, intelligence, justice and public health institutions. It is a political experiment that Americans may well live to regret.
