Ride or die in team Trump

Alex Hannaford asks who, if anyone, can stop the incoming president from wreaking serious havoc in his second term

- Alex Hannaford

After he was elected president of the United States for the second time in November, Donald Trump’s announcements of his nominees to head-up his various government departments have caused more than a few eye rolls across America. And with just a few weeks to go, people are bracing themselves for the potential chaos the new personnel could bring.

There’s Pete Hegseth, a Fox News personality who CBS News points out is “facing headwinds over allegations of sexual misconduct, financial mismanagement and alcohol abuse”. Robert F Kennedy (RFK) Jr, a scion of the famous political dynasty and Trump’s pick for secretary of health and human services, is a notorious vaccine sceptic and wants to remove fluoride from drinking water. Then there’s former Representative Tulsi Gabbard, who Trump wants as his director of national intelligence, but who faces scrutiny for a “factfinding” visit she paid to Syria in 2017 to meet since-ousted dictator Bashar al-Assad.

Rachel Bitecofer, Democratic political strategist and author of Hit ‘Em Where It Hurts: How to Save Democracy by Beating Republicans at their Own Game, says Trump’s cabinet picks are a big indication as to the direction his four years in office.

“He’s picking all of the 15 cabinet heads on one thing only,” Bitecofer says. “And it’s not party loyalty. It’s personal loyalty”, she says. “Other people who have done that went on to establish autocracies. And to those who say, ‘well, he can’t do that because that’s against the law,’ I’d say: have you not just watched Trump run roughshod over the rule of law and get away with it? We have a bias towards optimism in our human psychology, and we’re making a lot of assumptions that we’re going to still have the basic laws and constitutional system that we have now.”