Welcome to the United States of Disruption. From his ‘Winter White House’ in Mar-a-Lago, Florida, Donald Trump has been busy lobbing hand-grenade cabinet appointments in the direction of Washington and watching on happily as each one blows up in a variety of stunning ways. Explosiveness is the point.
‘Personnel is policy,’ Trump’s transition team like to tell reporters with a wink. What they mean is that the second administration is setting itself up to be even more radical and incendiary than the first. The outsiders are in, the insiders are out, and the old world is driving itself mad trying to figure out what’s going on.
It’s a mistake to interpret too much method in Trump’s improvisational madness
Last week, the President-elect announced that he had chosen Matt Gaetz for attorney general, Tulsi Gabbard as director of intelligence, Pete Hegseth as secretary of defense, Robert F. Kennedy Jr as secretary of health and human services and Kristi Noem as head of homeland security. ‘These figures all have some kind of axe to grind against the systems into which they are being put,’ says one insider. ‘I think that’s a very good thing.’
Gaetz, Kennedy and Gabbard, to take just three, believe that terrible conspiracies have been carried out through the government departments they have now been selected to run. Attorney-general designate Gaetz is adamant that the Department of Justice has undermined the MAGA movement, whether by waging lawfare against Trump or by helping the Democratic party to ‘steal’ the 2020 presidential election. RFK Jr has accused the health agencies he would oversee of conducting a ‘coup d’état against western democracy’ during Covid. And Gabbard thinks that the CIA ruptured the Nord Stream pipelines in 2022 and the FBI helped the Democrats confect the Trump-Russia ‘hoax’ in 2016.
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