President-elect Donald Trump was blessed by the gods when his nominee for Attorney General withdrew from consideration – he should use this as an opportunity to level set.
Matt Gaetz, a disgraced former congressman who is widely loathed by his former colleagues on Capitol Hill and is mired in allegations of affairs with teenagers and sex trafficking, did Trump a favor by withdrawing his name.
Gaetz was always going to be a tough sell in the Senate. He would have created unnecessary friction with senators whose support Trump will need over the next four years and his candidacy was already a distraction for Trump with extensive media coverage of the allegations – and all for a guy who would almost certainly suck at the job.
Up to this point, Trump has made some strong picks, who satisfy at least one of three criteria: requisite experience, policy expertise or leadership abilities.
Susie Wiles, a steady Republican campaign operative who has helped Trump since 2016, was picked for chief of staff (the first woman to hold the position).
Congresswoman Elise Stefanik, a Republican Leslie Knope who has probably been playing model U.N. since elementary school, was picked for U.N. Ambassador.
Sen. Marco Rubio, a senior member on both the Foreign Relations and Intelligence Committees, was picked for Secretary of State.
North Dakota Gov. Doug Bergum has both the policy expertise and the requisite experience to be Interior Secretary.
Linda McMahon, a business titan and prior cabinet member, is more than qualified to helm the Department of Education.
Trump has big plans to reorganize many federal bureaucracies and trim the proverbial fat. He’ll need people like McMahon, who have the leadership qualities to guide a department through massive reforms.
These picks should have no real problems in the Senate (Wiles doesn’t require confirmation), but they will also likely do a very good job implementing Trump’s ambitious plans, and Trump has made many others equally sensible and qualified.
But some of the picks range from odd fits to totally absurd.
Gov. Kristi Noem was selected to lead the Department of Homeland Security. As governor of South Dakota, she has experience running a bureaucracy and would have made a lot of sense as Secretary of Agriculture, or Interior, or maybe even Energy. But heading one of the agencies focused on border security and terrorism makes less sense.
If this was as bad as it got, everything would be fine. But it wasn’t.
Fox News Host Pete Hegseth was selected to run the Department of Defense, which has a nearly $2 trillion budget that includes the military… like the whole thing.
I didn’t know anything about Hegseth when I first heard the news, so I read his book The War on Warriors, which helped me greatly. It’s a good book and I recommend it. His personal mission is to rid the military of DEI programs and woke generals and ideologically this fit makes sense.
But the job requires more than ideology. Hegseth served in the Army, rising to the rank of Major, and has leadership potential. He also has several Ivy League degrees and wants to reverse the trend of declining military enrollment.
These are all great things, and he’d probably be great at the Veterans Administration and maybe even as some kind of strategic advisor. But Defense Secretary is a stretch.
Would you trust him in the Situation Room? It feels like a gamble, but maybe his combat experience gives him a base from which he can grow.
But would you trust him to effectively manage a department of around 3 million people? This is a sobering thought.
Like Gaetz, Hegseth is dogged by allegations of sexual assault, which he denies. But as the nomination progresses, his past misdeeds, alleged or real, will receive 24-hour coverage in the media. Because of his limited qualifications, he is also a strange choice (it’s also possible his name is withdrawn by the time the column publishes).
Though Gaetz was a truly awful idea, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. for the Department of Health and Human Services might be the worst choice yet. Kennedy has neither the experience nor the expertise to lead the department, which has a $2.8 trillion budget (the largest of the departments).
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MAGA loves Kennedy because of things like his distrust of vaccines and processed foods. But HHS oversees healthcare policy, Medicare and Medicaid, National Institutes of Health and the Food and Drug Administration. It’s impossible to go a day without encountering this department’s influence in our lives.
Kennedy has never run a large organization. He has no background in medicine or public health. He promises to shake things up, and maybe we need a little of that at HHS, but shouldn’t we at least find someone with some sort of academic backing for their contrarian opinions?
Picks like Gaetz, Kennedy and Hegseth put Senators in a bad position and threaten to derail Trump’s agenda before it even gets off the ground. What’s the point?
There are many people who are aligned with Trump ideologically and temperamentally who would probably be competent cabinet members.
Presidents have the right to choose who they want (and Senators have the right to accept or deny anyone they choose). But eventually the nominees have to do the job.
Noem and Hegseth might surprise me. Kennedy will not.
If Trump wants to accomplish even half of what he campaigned on, he will need to choose more wisely going forward.
Matt Fleming is a columnist for the Southern California News Group. Follow him on X @FlemingWords