The Patriot Post® · In Brief: Trump 47 Is Transforming What a Cabinet Means
Donald Trump has certainly made hay with his picks for Cabinet posts. His choice for attorney general, Matt Gaetz, withdrew yesterday, but otherwise, he’s churning ahead. The Spectator’s Ben Domenech makes an interesting overarching observation about Trump’s strategy.
What’s emerging now is a clearer picture of what Trump 47 has as an idea of his cabinet — and it’s far more consistent, and potentially transformative, than some observers currently seem to appreciate.
Cabinets and top officials are most often drawn from a pool of experienced politicians with lengthy résumés, earned from decades of service in varied capacities and concentration in their particular area. The biggest donors and bundlers have their targeted jobs, as do the influence peddlers and those politicians mindful of the board jobs they want after they depart their role. The number of truly transformative cabinet members over the years is small in number; in recent terms you were more likely to see political hacks with little in the way of policy experience granted major roles.
Yet here’s what’s different with Trump:
Look across the range of nominees and it’s obvious what nearly all of them have in common: they are communicators, not administrators. The skillsets they bring to their new roles are less about the unsexy business of corralling bureaucrats, they’re about being experienced advocates to a public audience on behalf of Trump’s agenda, or their own. Imagine a cabinet entirely built around the idea that the people named all need to possess the capability not just to testify before Congress, run a press conference or do a media hit — but to go on longform podcasts as effective faces of the Trump 47 agenda. Nearly all of them have already done so, repeatedly, in the past few years. Some even host podcasts themselves — and there’s probably no reason for them to stop now.
A pattern is emerging in all of this: pair a figure from central casting, loyal to Trump but perhaps lacking in subject matter experience, with solid deputies expected to do the tough behind the scenes work of upending the administrative state. The latter will have the tougher task, given the fact that much as the “resistance” effort is muted this time around, it still exists and thrives within the bureaucracies opposed to the president-elect’s dramatic promises of reform and redirection. But having the face matters, too, particularly in increasing the confidence of the American people in his policies.
Domenech sums up the strategy this way: “Leave policy making to the nerds; pick the people with the capability to make the best case for it, whatever it turns out to be.”