Trump’s Cabinet Picks: Loyalty Over Experience

Hey everybody. Peter Zeihan here coming to you from the home office in Colorado. I’ve received a small flood of requests for me to do a video on what I think of Trump’s, cabinet appointees and who some of these guys are doozies. I mean, we’ve got a guy who’s supposed to be the top health authority in the country who thinks that WiFi causes cancer. 

The person who’s supposed to manage the military is a culture warrior, and the guy who is supposed to lead up national law enforcement. While his only past experience with law enforcement is being the subject of an investigation into sex trafficking of minors. So, you know, we got some real winners here. But rather than go on a blow by blow, I think it’s better for use of everybody’s time to talk about the Trump relationship with the government, especially at the top people he picks and how that is kind of taken in an interesting direction. 

So first off, the nature of the cabinet secretaries that Trump is selecting here, the primary job of the people who lead the departments in the US government is not necessarily to implement policy. I mean, that’s obviously on their to do list, but it’s mostly to generate a degree of awareness for the president. The US is a big place. 

The world is a bigger place, and there’s a lot going on, and no one can be aware of any of everything. And no one can be an expert in everything. So it’s primarily the job of the cabinet secretaries to become experts on their topic and use their departments to generate a series of briefings on context and awareness, to present to the president so that the president always has the best information available and can always make decisions in an informed manner. 

A couple problems here. When it comes to Donald Trump, number one, he insists on believing that not only his is he always the smartest person in the room, but he’s always the smartest person in the room on any given topic. So from his point of view, the cabinet secretaries are not there to generate awareness because that’s not necessary. 

The cabinet secretaries are there to be servile, to basically rubberstamp and congratulate him on everything that he does. If you remember back to for his Trump term, most of the cabinet meetings opened with everyone talking about how wonderful Trump was. It was almost like a cult meeting. Now, when you insist that you live in an echo chamber and you get to choose your own people, an echo chamber tends to be what you get. 

So I urge you to not pontificate over what this person or that person’s appointments are, that this or that department happens to be, because that’s not really the point of what Trump is doing here. He’s building an inner circle that will not be entrusted with leadership, but are simply designed to tell him that his leadership is really what everybody needs. 

If you’re interested in policy, for whatever reason, you’re better bet. Rather than looking at tweets appointing is to look at his appointment schedule, because Trump tends to do whatever the last person to flatter him once. That was a much better guide in his first term, and I see no reason for that to be different in this. 

True. So it’s really hard for me to get excited over this or that Trump appointee, whether it’s somebody I like or someone I despise because they’re really not there to do the normal job, they’re there to be toadies. And if they were competent at doing their job and telling the president what he needs to hear. Well, as we saw in his first term, he just fires them. 

And so they don’t have to tell him. No, they just have to tell him. Yes, but could you can also consider and that’s enough. Remember that Trump went through more cabinet level appointees than any U.S. president in history, because anyone who tried to do their job got axed. So second, a far more illuminating thing to ruminate on is to find out just how far gone the Republican Party really is. 

And we’re going to get an answer to that question before the end of January. The Republican Party used to be known as the party of adults. There were three factions at the core of it the national security community, the fiscal conservatives who wanted to balance the budget and the business community. And if there’s one thing that these three factions agreed upon, it’s it’s successful leadership required a degree of organization or delegation, two words that are not ones that Trump uses a whole lot. 

So Trump purged those factions, all of them. He relied upon them heavily in his first term because he was new to the field. But when they didn’t match his personality, then fired him pretty quick. So he purged them from the entire system, starting with his administration, then moving on to the Republican Party as an institution, and then even going after their champions in Congress. 

Then he spent most of his time in the political wilderness ensuring that these three factions could never come back, leading us with an institution of the Republican Party that has basically been gutted, of what used to make it the Republican Party and reducing it to what it is today, which is a Trump echo chamber. Or if you want to use that technical term, a cult of personality. 

Now, what is wrong with Trump’s cabinet picks is not going to be a secret. Normally the process goes like this. The president elect selects his people. He submits them for security checks to groups like the CIA and the FBI and all that good stuff. And they come back to him with a report of what kind of skeletons are in their closets. 

And considering that one of these nominees, likes to drop off dead bears in Central Park or chop off whale heads on beaches, we can imagine. And, we cracked the skeletons. We’re going to fight anyway. Once he has his report in hand, he can change his mind about whether this is the person he really wants to be in his administration. 

But if he decides it’s all okay, the report isn’t squashed. It’s handed over to the Senate. Who has to do the ratification. And even if the Senate decides to confirm an appointment, that might be a little. Whoops. Some version of that report will ultimately be released to the public. So we’re going to find out everything there is to know about some of these people. 

And some of these people are seriously sketchy, but it’s the Senate that’s the key factor in all of this, because while Trump has basically co-opted the Republican Party, the Senate’s kind of like the last cluster of holdouts, if that’s the right term. You see, in, in the Republican Party itself, it’s a non-elected institution. So Trump and Trump’s people can basically go through there and bit by bit, use, advocates and party activists and his real core supporters to just basically flood through the whole system and kick out the people they don’t want. 

And that has been done in spades. And then the House of Representatives has elections every two years. So again, it’s very vulnerable to the political whims of the moment, especially if your party leader wants something done. But the Senate’s different. Only one third of those seats are up for election every two years. So it takes six years to get your first flush, if that’s the right term. 

And so while Donald Trump has now been at the top of the American conservative pile for the last eight years, and so he has just been through his fifth consecutive period of being able to shape the House to his own norms. She hasn’t even been through two full cycles for the Senate. So there’s a number of senators still ascribe to the old Republican ideals of the business community, national security issues and fiscal jurisprudence. 

And so if there are people who are going to oppose Trump, that is where they’re going to be clustered at the moment. And it’s the Senate that confirms presidential appointees. And so Trump is attempting to get the Senate to do something called a recess appointment. In the Constitution, there’s a clause that says that if the Senate is not sitting for an extended period of time, then the president can just appoint people he wants and they don’t have to go through the confirmation process at all. 

Well, the time limit established by the Supreme Court is ten days. So Trump is basically asking the Senate to not even do their job, not even short to work for the first two weeks so that all of his appointments could just flow right through. Now, normally, I wouldn’t give this any credence at all, because it would be an unprecedented surrender of congressional power and would basically gut the Senate as an institution. 

But there’s a lot about Trump that is unprecedented, and he has already made the request. And so the question is whether it will be acceded to agreement. And if the Senate does meekly accede to Trump’s demands, then the Republican Party, as we once knew it, is well and truly dead. We might as well just take down all the bunting and the labels and the bumper stickers and label it MAGA, because that’s that would be what it is that. 

Third, there are two Trump appointments that don’t kind of match this pattern. And they are worth of a deeper look. The first one is Robert Lighthizer. Now, Robert Lighthizer served as the US Trade Representative under the first Trump term. And he was one of the very, very few people that any policy autonomy and actually served the entirety of his four year term. 

Now, Trump has already approached him about taking his old job back, and apparently Lighthizer and Trump were in negotiations over the specifics of what this role would look like, whether or not it’s just the US, a TR position, or more of an oversight position, that would all be over the office of the Trade Representative as well as the Commerce Department, in order to have more overarching authority over trade policy. 

Now, Lighthizer is somebody who has earned repeatedly the respect of the business community. He’s been in and out of trade law and in the administration level ever since Reagan. And he’s very, very good at what he does and the trade deals that were negotiated under the Trump administration, NAFTA to Korea, Japan, all of these were done by Lighthizer personally and their deals that greatly increased, America’s authority over trade law on a global basis. 

He’s a solid choice, and he is definitely worthy of the position. If Trump will have him back, the only question at this point seems to be the details over the level of authority that he would have. We should have an answer to that within days. And if he was appointed, I have no doubt that he would sail through the Senate. 

The second person is on the other side of the equation. That’s Tulsi Gabbard. She used to be a, representative in the House of Representatives from Hawaii. She was a Democrat. She, switched teams to MAGA. Not too long ago. And, who, the job she’s been nominated for is the director of national intelligence. Now, there are over a dozen arms of the US government that have some sort of intelligence capability or central intelligence. 

Obviously, the FBI, the DEA, Homeland Security, the Defense Department, and the DNI, whose job is to basically ride herd over all of them and collaborate and manage all of the agency so that no one is working across purposes and that in a single person, you can have somebody that is so wired and so aware that the president has a one stop shop when they need information. 

Now, Tulsi Gabbard has never been in a managerial position ever. Not even a fast food restaurant. She’s never run an agency. She’s never managed people. She’s never managed multiple agencies. She has no background in intelligence, as an operative, as an analyst, as a manager. And that’s before I start saying the bad things about her. She’s an active cult member, not the mega cult. 

She has her own culture. You. Can you be a member of two cults? I’m really not sure. She’s a conspiracy theorist. She’s a friend of the Syrian government. And it’s the general opinion of most of the American intelligence community that she’s been an active Russian agent for years. All of this will come up in her vetting document. Gabbard is the singularly least qualified person who has ever been nominated for any cabinet position, and we have had some real bozos in years past, being pushed into big chairs. 

She couldn’t pass a security check to work in a daycare center, and DNI has to pass the most rigorous security check of any American ever, because they are literally the nerve center for all secret information that the United States captures and manages. Now, unfortunately for all of us, Trump’s cabinet picks really don’t matter much. Because he’s not picking people for competence or to help him govern. 

They just don’t have much authority over him day to day policy. And in doing so, it means that they just aren’t going to have much of an impact, for better or for worse. So whether you love him or hate him, whether you love or hate the picks, I. I’m afraid to say that it really doesn’t matter too much. 

The one exception, of course, is Gabbard. In that position, this person could do an immense amount of damage, and I know for certain that the Russians are sour, waiting at the possibility of having their girl at the heart of the US intelligence system.