The presidential transition is a curious ritual. Obviously, the stakes are high. Personnel is policy: Cabinet and staffing picks signal the administration’s real priorities. And yet because these decisions take place during the interregnum, an uncanny period when the outgoing president is still in office (in body, if not in mind), a sense of pageantry and weightlessness attends the whole thing, as if the incoming president were merely casting a film about the White House.
This effect is enhanced, of course, when the incoming president is Donald Trump. He has fully internalized Saul Bellow’s maxim “Anyone who wants to govern the country has to entertain it.” Trump selects candidates for top jobs who look the part and doubts those who don’t; he memorably didn’t hire John Bolton because he despised Bolton’s slovenly mustache. Trump promised this second transition would be “as smooth as it can get.” Instead, it has been a captivating mix of chaos, vitriol, backstabbing, and deviance. Trump’s nominee for attorney general, then–Florida congressman Matt Gaetz, withdrew from consideration amid allegations of drug use and sleeping with an underage prostitute. Trump’s pick for secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, has been accused of sexism, problem drinking, and rape. (Gaetz and Hegseth have denied wrongdoing, and neither has been charged with any related crimes.) At the end of November, Trump ordered an investigation of his own close ally Boris Epshteyn for allegedly selling influence in the transition. (Epshteyn has denied this.) And Trump withdrew his nominee for Drug Enforcement Agency administrator, Florida sheriff Chad Chronister, after a conservative revolt against Chronister’s zealous handling of COVID lockdowns. Finally, three weeks after naming veteran GOP attorney Bill McGinley as White House counsel, Trump replaced him with David Warrington, a 2024 campaign lawyer. Epshteyn, the alleged double-dealer, had backed McGinley; Warrington would now investigate Epshteyn.
In short, the circus is back in town. But unlike in 2016, when Trump was forced to fill his administration hastily with a mix of incompetent allies and experienced antagonists, Trump now draws from a wide pool of credentialed ideologues. His insurgency within the Republican Party has succeeded; MAGA is the Establishment and vice versa.
Like the conservative Establishment it succeeded, MAGA contains competing ideological factions and centers of power. In the past, it has been useful to divide these contenders into three broad groups: (1) pro-business Reaganites who care most about tax cuts, deregulation, and stock-market dynamism and tend to be more comfortable wielding American geopolitical power; (2) a national-populist wing invested in trade protection, restraint in foreign affairs, immigration restriction, trust-busting, and worker-friendly industrial policy; and (3) what I call the MAGA misfit toys: fiercely loyal donors, grifters, and hangers-on — Mar-a-Lago members and business-world cronies — who wield power by dint of their access to Trump and capacity to flatter. Their redoubt is arguably the America First Policy Institute, helmed by Brooke Rollins — a savvy operator whose Bush-era politics have not interfered with her precipitous rise in MAGA world. AFPI kept a low profile during the campaign, unlike its rival, the Heritage Foundation, whose “Project 2025” initiative became a liberal punching bag. As reward, AFPI chair Linda McMahon was named co-chair of the transition; she has since been selected for secretary of Education. Rollins, once a contender for chief of staff, has been picked for secretary of Agriculture.
And there’s another node that didn’t quite exist in 2016: (4) Trump’s Silicon Valley acolytes. Led by Elon Musk, these reactionary futurists are dedicated to free speech (where it suits them), anti-wokeness, and shrinking the government (except where their own contracts are concerned). Their financial interests align most with the Reaganites, but they are engaged in a class war of sorts: not against the rich but against the professional managerial class, the knowledge workers and corporate middle strata perceived as enforcers of bien-pensant liberalism.
All of these factions exhibit some degree of social conservatism and religiosity. The Reaganites believe in Protestant upward mobility via capitalist growth. The nationalists — especially those huddled around Vice-President-elect J. D. Vance — inflect their populist economics with Catholic teaching and the neighborly piety of small-town America. And at least some of the MAGA misfits are prosperity-gospel Jesus freaks who see Trump as an instrument of God. Even the tech nerds, if less sincerely pious than their counterparts, have largely outgrown the militant atheism and New Age woo of earlier eras in Silicon Valley. (Perhaps artificial intelligence is the Second Coming!) At the least, believing in God has become another way to scandalize the libs.
It’s worth noting, however, that the Christian right proper — as a distinct political force — may wield less influence over Trump’s second term than it did his first. From the president-elect’s perspective, overturning Roe fulfilled his obligations there. He has since refused to support the most restrictive state abortion measures and vowed to veto a federal ban. During the campaign, Trump resented Christian groups for tarring him with their unpopular positions on abortion and contraception. And while MAGA is aligned on opposing transgender rights, Trump’s appetite for crusading against modernity has waned and may wane further. Already, he has named a married gay man, Scott Bessent, to one of the government’s highest posts (Treasury). Trump has always been more a ’90s libertine than a ’50s family man. Conservatives may have to wait for J. D. Vance’s presidency to ban pornography or reinstitute blue laws.
As it stands, none of these factions — Reaganites, nationalists, MAGA grifters, or dorks — is winning the transition outright. Each is getting a slice of flesh: No one is fully satisfied; no one is left hungry.
On trade, the nationalists would have preferred tariff wizard Robert Lighthizer, the architect of Trump’s first-term trade policy, at Treasury, but Trump’s other economic picks have inspired cautious optimism. Bessent — a hedge-fund titan who used to manage billions for George Soros — and Commerce Secretary nominee Howard Lutnick, the CEO of legacy financial firm Cantor Fitzgerald, are both creatures of Wall Street but seem somewhat sympathetic to aggressive trade maneuvers.
On antitrust, the nationalists see incoming FTC chair Andrew Ferguson and (especially) Assistant Attorney General Gail Slater, a onetime Vance policy hand, as allies when it comes to regulating big-tech monopolies. But Ferguson, a former counsel to Senator Mitch McConnell, is not likely to take a trust-busting posture more broadly — a relief to the Reaganites (and to Jeff Bezos). In a win for the dorks, Trump named venture capitalist David Sacks as AI and cryptocurrency czar, a strong signal that scrutiny of those industries will subside.
By far the biggest win for the populists — insofar as their pro-worker rhetoric is sincere — was Trump’s nominee for Labor secretary, Oregon representative Lori Chavez-DeRemer. Chavez-DeRemer was one of only three House Republicans to co-sponsor the Protecting the Right to Organize Act. While Vance, an avatar for pro-labor conservatism, likely welcomed the pick, Chavez-DeRemer’s nomination appears to be almost exclusively the product of machinations by Teamsters president Sean O’Brien, who spoke at the RNC and withheld his union’s endorsement from both parties — a bet that paid off. Whether Chavez-DeRemer will be empowered to do much of anything remains to be seen. Most Republicans remain hostile to unions and other worker protections. Business groups have already attacked Chavez-DeRemer and sought assurances from the transition that Trump will remain a greater friend to employers. They may have little to worry about; Trump is expected to sack Jennifer Abruzzo, the fiercely pro-union general counsel at the National Labor Relations Board, and reorient its priorities in favor of the bosses. On the trade front, Bessent and Lutnick may be talking the tariff talk, but if markets revolt, I have little faith they’ll keep walking the tariff walk. JPMorganChase CEO Jamie Dimon, who privately backed Kamala Harris, has said his industry is “dancing in the street.”
On foreign policy, the outlook is even harder to parse. For secretary of State, Marco Rubio was a shrewd pick: He has moved in a populist direction on domestic policy but is still a hawk on the international front. Neither the nationalists nor the neocons are revolted or thrilled. Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s pick for director of national intelligence, favors nonintervention and is seen as an ally of the nationalists. Meanwhile, national security adviser Michael Waltz is a staunch Iran hawk who opposed withdrawal from Afghanistan. Elise Stefanik, Trump’s pick for U.N. ambassador, is a pedigreed neoconservative and Trump sycophant; she can be relied on to complain about the international community’s treatment of Israel — which is mostly what that job entails. Keith Kellogg, Trump’s pick for Russia-Ukraine envoy, is a retired Army lieutenant general and former Mike Pence aide who, despite hawkish statements, supports bringing the conflict to a close through a negotiated settlement (Trump’s plan).
Fox News personality Hegseth’s nomination for Defense was apparently a surprise even to those in Trump’s circle. Before joining Fox & Friends, Hegseth helmed two different veterans’ organizations, one more hawkish, the other more restraint-minded. His chief political intervention has been defending American servicemembers accused of war crimes and decrying wokeness in the military. Restrainers hope his bellicosity is like Trump’s: more bark than bite. As to why Trump picked him: First, he’s Ivy League educated and looks like a movie star (neither of which Trump can resist), and second, while the rest of Fox News Channel was having its whirlwind romance with Ron DeSantis, Hegseth remained a Trump guy and said so on TV over and over.
Possibly the site of greatest policy alignment in the new administration will be immigration. Trump and his allies believe they have a mandate for “mass deportations” of undocumented migrants. While it remains to be seen how far they can go without Congress, and while steering clear of judicial injunctions, they will no doubt make a big show of Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids. To orchestrate this spectacle, Trump has named Santa Monica nativist Stephen Miller (as deputy chief of staff) and former ICE director Tom Homan (for border czar). Some immigration hard-liners were less enthusiastic about Kristi Noem for Department of Homeland Security because Noem, despite her anti-migrant zealotry, is not from a border state. Regardless, there will be no dovish voice on immigration.
The dork beachhead, of course, is Trump’s new Department of Government Efficiency, run by Musk and fellow billionaire Vivek Ramaswamy. This makes theoretical sense. The tech right has consistently complained that the government has become sclerotic and error-prone like a computer program larded with junk code — wasteful initiatives, bureaucratic choke points, counter-productive norms (like DEI). DOGE, in principle, empowers two crusading coders to force a hard reset. In reality, however, DOGE has no statutory authority. It’s effectively a blue-ribbon committee, and it will likely be ignored or stymied by Congress, like many similar committees before. If DOGE takes its remit seriously, it may also come into conflict with national populists in the White House who don’t just want to cut spending but would like to use revenue to help working people. For some in Trump’s orbit, the advantage of DOGE was that it allowed chief of staff Susie Wiles to stash Musk and Ramaswamy far from the West Wing, in largely fake jobs, where nobody would have to deal with their bullshit. That being said, Musk invested bigly in Trump 2024; he has accumulated a serious quantity of political capital. And playing computer mechanic at DOGE may not be how he intends to spend it.
What to make, then, of the overall shape of Trump 2.0? The ideological picture is fragmented, contradictory, and divided against itself. The spoils are being parceled out. But it would be foolish, I think, to assume Trump is deliberately composing a team of rivals or seeking to build consensus by rewarding each faction. As many have noted, the only consistent criterion for his appointments thus far is loyalty.
This approach accounts for some of Trump’s more outlandish selections: people like Kash Patel, a QAnon supporter, for FBI director; Hegseth for Defense; Gaetz (RIP) for Justice; RFK Jr. for Health and Human Services; and Gabbard for DNI. Not only have these figures proved their loyalty, they could never get such a high-level job from another president. Heterodoxy, a lack of credentials, an unsavory past — these things may hinder their Senate confirmations, but damaged goods make for loyal foot soldiers. Trump’s generosity, his protection is a guarantee of their future reliability. (It’s the same reason Don Corleone does favors at his daughter’s wedding.)
But is loyalty enough? It has been said many times that Trump runs his White House more like a mafioso than an executive. His mode of rule, as the sociologist Dylan Riley has pointed out, is patrimonial: The state is his private affair. You’re either in the family or you’re out, a made man or an enemy. Rats who betray the Don, of which there are many — Bolton, John Kelly, Bill Barr, James Mattis, Chris Christie, and on and on — get concrete slippers (metaphorically speaking). The problem Trump faced in his first term was that this way of doing business, which writer John Ganz has called “gangster gemeinschaft,” was not compatible with the task of running an enormous, modern, rational machine like the federal government. The bureaucracy reacted to Trump’s patrimonialism like a pathogen to be expelled.
This time, they’ll solve the problem by expanding the family. More of the government will be composed of Trump’s vassals, especially if Russ Vought — nominated for the Office of Management and Budget — can reclassify a significant portion of the permanent bureaucracy as hire-and-fire appointees. But what about relations within the family? Trump has fortified himself against outright betrayal. But there will be conflict between the libertarians and the populists, the restrainers and the neocons, the traditionalists and the accelerationists. Trump’s court is full of sincere ideologues, grifters, and arrivistes with irreconcilable goals.
In the past few weeks, I’ve talked to conservative operatives who believe Trump will champion the working class; I’ve spoken to others who say he’ll inevitably defer to the stock market. I heard Trump was committed to tariffs and that he doesn’t give a damn. I heard his distaste for war-making is sturdy and that he’ll cow the world’s tyrants with his personal belligerence. This can’t all be true at once. Trump excels at inspiring others to hear what they want. And if he could swing it, I suspect he would love to be everything to everyone. But he can’t. Trump 2.0 will be plagued by the same problems as Trump 1.0: Rivals will compete for his favor. He’ll remain capricious and self-obsessed. The only thing we can count on is uncertainty. As Trump guaranteed before January 6, 2021, it “will be wild.”
