The winning Republican coalition that propelled President-elect Donald Trump to a landslide Electoral College win, a victory in the national popular vote, and a clean sweep of the battleground states and gave the GOP a three-seat majority in the Senate was the definition of a big tent movement. Traditional center-right Republicans, conservatives, populists, libertarians, and disaffected Democrats had all seen quite enough of the Biden-Harris doctrine and the inflation, war, and unrest that followed it.
The incoming president’s Cabinet nominees reflect his electoral coalition perfectly. Of course, there is plenty to criticize, regardless of where you happen to stand, but Trump gave just about every corner of his coalition something to celebrate.
The former president’s foreign policy is all over the map, both in terms of rhetoric and in how he governed during his first term, and his heterodox positions regarding the military and foreign intervention are reflected in his related Cabinet nominations. Trump’s choice of Fox News host and combat veteran Pete Hegseth to lead the Department of Defense is a perfect fit to achieve his goal of “de-wokefying” the military.
His choice of Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), who has long been a hawk on foreign policy, as secretary of state, paired with the far more dovish Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence, makes sense, as the tension between those two ideologies was a staple in the first Trump administration. Surely Rubio and Gabbard fans have plenty of valid criticisms of the other side, but the Trump doctrine has always fallen somewhere in the middle.
Inflation was the No. 1 concern for voters via exit polling data. Trump bested Vice President Kamala Harris largely because people trust the former president to fix the economy. Reflecting the contrasting schools of economic thought within the Republican Party, Trump’s picks have wildly different prescriptions on how to achieve that goal.
Libertarians and fiscal conservatives are happy to see Trump empower Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy and their yet-to-be-created Department of Government Efficiency in their goal of identifying waste, fraud, and abuse in the federal budget. Those same economically literate voters are less than thrilled at Trump’s nomination of Rep. Lori Chavez-DeRemer (R-OR) as labor secretary.
Chavez-DeRemer is a pro-union Keynesian who was one of three Republican votes in favor of the PRO Act, which would crush economic growth and force workers to pay union dues against their will. However, after Teamsters President Sean O’Brien spoke at the Republican National Committee in July, it should have been expected that his cronies would get something out of a possible Trump Cabinet as well.
Gov. Doug Burgum (R-ND) for secretary of the Department of the Interior, Gov. Kristi Noem (R-SD) for the Department of Homeland Security, businessman Howard Lutnick for the Department of Commerce, America First Policy Institute CEO Brooke Rollins for the Department of Agriculture, and former congressman Sean Duffy for transportation secretary are your “normie” picks: qualified, Trump-aligned professionals who should sail through the confirmation process.
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Of course, Trump is a showman, and a couple of goofball picks were to be expected. Those materialized in the form of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead Health and Human Services and now-former congressman Matt Gaetz (R-FL) for attorney general. Gaetz apparently flew too close to the sun, or more accurately, too close to the age of consent, and was promptly replaced by former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi. Kennedy, who faces a tough confirmation battle in the Senate, is a vaccine skeptic and has spoken and written extensively against the COVID-19 vaccines and Operation Warp Speed, both of which are still championed by Trump. Of course, at face value, his nomination to head HHS seems out of place, but that tension exists within the MAGA movement and the Republican Party at large, so why not?
Trump’s winning coalition saw Teamsters join with hard-line libertarian economists and neoconservatives ally themselves with noninterventionists. The Republican Party has never been so ideologically diverse, and Trump’s Cabinet looks like it will accurately reflect that diversity. The 45th and 47th president received his long-awaited mandate on Nov. 5, and most agree, including a host of all-important sitting senators, that the president deserves the Cabinet he wants.
Brady Leonard (@bradyleonard) is a musician, political strategist, and host of The No Gimmicks Podcast.
This article was originally published at www.washingtonexaminer.com
