Playing musical chairs at Mar-a-Lago

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.

Trumpists hold these conspiracies to be self-evident. In their minds, the more the “system” — i.e. the federal bureaucracy — reacts against any appointment, the more it reveals the extent of its corruption. And the more Congress seems unwilling to accept a cabinet nominee, the more it appears to validate Trump’s faith in him or her.

The nomination of Gaetz, a born troublemaker and MAGA darling, caused the most violent conniptions on Capitol Hill. Several Republican senators informed Team Trump that Gaetz has little chance of making it through the confirmation process thanks to a an ethics committee report, which is said to include allegations that Gaetz paid at least one seventeen-year-old girl for “sexual favors.” Gaetz says the whispering campaign against him is a deep-state plot to prevent him eviscerating the Department of Justice. Crucially, that’s what Trump thinks, too.

“He’s dead set on Gaetz,” said a Trumpworld source on Tuesday. “Because Matt is the person who has paid most attention to all of the perceived political persecutions of Trump over the last decade. Because also he has been a lawyer and because he’s obviously an out-and-out loyalist, Gaetz has no real rivals in the potential AG-sphere.”

Trump spent Monday and Tuesday directly lobbying senators to back Gaetz. While he led the charm offensive, Steve Bannon and others threatened elected Republicans to support the nomination or face the prospect of being “primaried” or otherwise abandoned by the party faithful and its donors. “Gaetz will be our Hammer of Justice,” added Elon Musk on Tuesday.

On Wednesday afternoon, Gaetz pulled out. Even Trump and Musk can’t always get what they want.

Trump spent Monday and Tuesday directly lobbying senators to back Gaetz. While he led the charm offensive, Steve Bannon and others threatened elected Republicans to support the nomination or face the prospect of being “primaried” (voted out at the next available opportunity) or otherwise abandoned by the party faithful and its donors. “Gaetz will be our Hammer of Justice,” added Elon Musk on Tuesday.

Even Trump and Musk can’t always get what they want. Last week, the two men believed their support would make Rick Scott the Senate majority leader, but the Senate instead chose John Thune, from South Dakota, who represents a more establishment wing of the Republican Party.

Thune is not, however, an obstacle to Trumpism in the mould of his predecessor Mitch McConnell. “I’m sorry but Congress plays second fiddle,” says another source. “The business interests within the party have had to accept that Trump has won the election. He is entitled to his nominees. If they are unconventional, well, it was an unconventional election.” For a similar reason, it’s said, Washington’s best-paid lobbyists have all but resigned themselves to RFK Jr., even though he has effectively declared war on Big Pharma and the food industry. “Kennedy is seen as someone they can work with or find ways around,” says another insider.

Gabbard’s confirmation might prove the most challenging of all. Her links to Iran, Assad’s Syria and her popularity among Russian propagandists are already being levied against her and the Washington gossip is that her colorful past might haunt her in the confirmation hearings. Trump announced her nomination just after he had declared that Marco Rubio, an old friend of NATO, would be his secretary of state, a move that experts read as a bid to calm the frightened horses of the national security elite.

But it’s a mistake to interpret too much method in Trump’s improvisational madness. Another reason he may have elevated Rubio is that he wants Lara Trump, his daughter-in-law, to take Little Marco’s Florida senate seat. It’s also said that Trump offered Ric Grenell, his former director of intelligence, who had been in the running to lead the state department, the role of FBI director as a sort of consolation prize. (Grenell dismissed the idea.) And the Trump transition team has been struggling to find a treasury secretary who “loves tariffs yet calms markets.” The billionaire co-chair Howard Lutnick was in the running, having allegedly nixed Scott Bessent, George Soros’s former man in London. On Tuesday night, however, Trump named Lutnick as his commerce secretary. Hours later, his other plutocratic co-chair, Linda McMahon, the former World Wrestling Entertainment executive, was given the role of education secretary. “We’re sending education BACK TO THE STATES,” declared Trump, the capital letters signaling redundancy for thousands of federal employees.

Trump is always silly yet serious, obvious yet somehow utterly unpredictable at the same time. It’s futile, then, to over-analyze the influence of various factions over his cabinet selections, whether it be the MAGA loyalists, Republican machine operators or Musk and the Silicon Valley gang. “It’s much more of a pick-by-pick thing,” says another source. “And that’s exactly how Trump likes it.” It’s a game of musical chairs for some of the most powerful jobs in the world — and the Donald is calling the tune.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s UK magazine. Subscribe to the World edition here.