President-elect Donald Trump.
Credit: Reuters Photo
By Timothy L. O'Brien
Avengers, assemble.
Or something like that, and something quite obviously not.
Either way, you could be forgiven if President-elect Donald Trump’s recent round of nominees for senior White House roles reminds you of a casting call for a bad, troubling knockoff of a Marvel superhero movie — populated by B-list actors.
Trump has always thought of himself cinematically (which I first noted on this site in early 2016 and which, I’m sorry to say, remains fundamentally and inalterably true today).
He briefly pondered attending film school as a young man, gobbled up gossip about the careers of Hollywood moguls, modelled his trademark squint, I suspect, on Clint Eastwood’s much more authentic tough-guy glare, and has a deep fascination with the emotional and symbolic power of movies and celebrity.
Trump certainly envisions himself as Captain America. And in the reality distortion field he calls life, he is forever scripting, producing and directing a movie that features him as its star.
He routinely assesses people he wants to associate with or hire based on their looks. Over the years, he has also repeatedly said he likes teams that are right “out of central casting.”
So you may have noticed that skin-deep values seem to have governed many of Trump’s recent picks for cabinet and other senior advisory posts (which is consistent with how he selected staff for his first White House tour).
Square jaws, flowing locks and good photogenic potential are musts for posters promoting this blockbuster before it premieres on Inauguration Day. If looks don’t always cut it, then a willingness to go into battle on Trump’s behalf also can win important parts in the show.
The trouble lurking inside Trump Studios, though, is that every new production usually features a cast that the director has chosen because he and many of his actors prize loyalty above competence, atmospherics above expertise and performance art above sophistication.
The public usually doesn’t get to enjoy the box-office returns from these shows. But Trump does.
Trump has nominated Representative Matt Gaetz to oversee the Justice Department as his attorney general. When Trump was president, Gaetz was investigated by the Justice Department and the FBI for possible sex trafficking and obstruction of justice, a probe that ended in 2023 without any charges. That led Gaetz, who denied any wrongdoing, to call for the FBI to be dissolved.
The House Ethics Committee is also reviewing allegations that Gaetz “engaged in sexual misconduct and illicit drug use, accepted improper gifts, dispensed special privileges and favours to individuals with whom he had a personal relationship, and sought to obstruct government investigations of his conduct.”
Gaetz has also disputed those allegations, and when members leave Congress, as Gaetz is doing to pursue the attorney general spot, ethics investigations are dropped.
Gaetz, I’ll confess, doesn’t possess movie-star looks, but he is always willing to step in front of cameras in Washington and raise hell on Trump’s behalf.
Besides, Trump himself was the target of two Justice Department investigations linked to the Jan. 6, 2021, siege at the US Capitol and the possible improper possession of classified documents. Those cases are going away because Trump was elected president, but he can sympathize with Gaetz’s legal miseries.
Having Gaetz atop the Justice Department also gives Trump someone who can memory-hole possibly embarrassing or incriminating evidence it houses, chase out prosecutors and investigators who aren’t MAGA-friendly and help weaponize the agency against Trump’s long list of real and perceived enemies. What’s not to like? He gets the part.
Senator Susan Collins of Maine, a Republican, said she was “shocked” that Trump nominated Gaetz, who still faces a Senate confirmation hearing. “I’m sure that there will be many, many questions raised at Mr. Gaetz’s hearing, if in fact the nomination goes forward,” she said. Trump may be floating Gaetz as a trial balloon so he can insert an even more capable and dedicated alternative once Gaetz’s shock effect wears off, but you never know.
Trump put Fox News personality Pete Hegseth, who is also an Army veteran, into contention as defence secretary. He has never run a large bureaucracy or war-gamed at scale.
“You’re telling me Pete is going to oversee 2 million employees?” one of his Fox co-hosts marvelled. (The Pentagon, one of the world’s largest employers, actually has nearly 3 million workers.) Hegseth, who sports tattoos of a Jerusalem cross and “Deus Vult” among others, has joked that he prefers to leave his hands unwashed because germs aren’t real and said he doesn’t believe that women should serve in combat. His nomination also sent shock waves around Washington, but he has the Trump look and loyalty, so he gets the part.
Trump has also nominated Governor Kristi Noem of South Dakota to be his homeland security secretary, a role for which she has scant experience. She has looked convincing parading around in videos and on TV with a rifle, though. Trump seems to like that enough to ignore the backlash that arose when Noem disclosed that she had shot one of her puppies for misbehaving. She gets the part.
Former Representative Tulsi Gabbard, who once served in the Hawaii National Guard, got Trump’s nod as the director of national intelligence — despite the fact that she has no experience in intelligence gathering or management. She has offered spirited defences of US adversaries — such as the presidents of Russia and Syria — and is an apologist for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
All of this makes her a possible national security threat. The Washington Examiner, a conservative, Trump-friendly publication, called Gabbard’s selection “the worst possible choice” Trump could have made. He doesn’t care. She’d look great in the movie’s highlights, and she’ll follow orders. She gets the part.
Stephen Miller, certainly no matinee idol, is, however, wildly adept at delivering rousing monologues denigrating immigrants and extolling Trump’s virtues. He’s also an ardent MAGA insider who has promoted white nationalism. Trump is making Miller his deputy chief of staff for policy. When he served in the previous Trump administration he advocated for separating immigrant children from their families in detention centers.
He also relied on executive orders to try implementing policies like a travel ban aimed at visitors from majority-Muslim countries. Miller plans to use his new White House powers to advise Trump on how best to round up as many as 11 million undocumented immigrants in the US and house them in tent cities in Texas before deporting them.
Many of those immigrants are also workers who fuel farms, hotels, restaurants, health care, delivery services, domestic services, a variety of small businesses, the construction trade and other sectors — and their forced departures could cause the economy to wilt. So? Miller does what he’s told to do. He gets the part, too.
To be sure, not everyone Trump has on the playbill is unprepared or obviously unqualified. Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, whom Trump once derided as “Little Marco,” is in contention to be secretary of state.
Rubio is a senior member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and serves on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. He has held traditional conservative foreign policy and national security views and is likely to skate through his confirmation hearing with little controversy.
Trump also chose Representative Michael Waltz of Florida, a former Green Beret, to be his national security adviser. Waltz has served on the House’s Armed Services, Intelligence and Foreign Affairs committees and has strong national security credentials. Added bonus: He also looks the part.
It would, perhaps, be more reassuring to the world if all of Trump’s picks had Rubio and Waltz’s bona fides. They don’t, however, and more appointments are on the way.
Trump is camped out at his Palm Beach club, Mar-a-Lago, making these choices with guidance from several confidants embedded there, including Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and a Tony Stark stand-in. Musk has an agenda, of course, as does most everyone else circling Trump.
But Trump typically heeds his inner movie director and nobody else when making final casting decisions. He also doesn’t enjoy sharing the spotlight with others for very long, which could spell the end of the affair for some of his advisors — including Musk.
Anyone else who is concerned about Trump’s revenge tour as president, or the prospect of a federal government steered in the service of Trump’s narrow interests, might take a bit of comfort in some of this. After all, the thought was that Trump 2.0 would be populated by cabinet members much savvier or Trump-focused than the grab bag that made up Trump 1.0.
The Oval Office was shambolic enough back then that sheer incompetence occasionally reined in some of Trumps’ worst instincts. Public-minded advisers also kept Trump at bay from time to time.
The thinking has been that Trump has drawn lessons from his first term and would seed his administration this time with more effective and unwavering smarties. Instead, we’re being treated to a lineup that includes lots of rodeo clowns. They may be so inept that they wind up doing little, or at least less, damage.
On the other hand, there might just be enough collective willfulness, resentment, focus and purpose among the nominees that the coming Trump extravaganza is a sequel that burns down the house. In that world, Trump is no Captain America. He’s Homelander in the hit TV show The Boys, a superhero based on Trump.
Homelander possesses an array of potent superpowers and markets himself as an altruist who looks after public safety. Beneath the surface, though, he’s a troubled narcissist who is prone to fits of rage — particularly when he feels misunderstood or unappreciated.
Congress and the courts should choose their tickets and stars wisely for this show as it plays out. I’ll see you at the movies.