Daily Times

In staffing his incoming administration, President-elect Donald Trump has so far veered from the conventional to the confounding. But his choices all seem to have one thing in common: A bond with Trump himself.

From his chief of staff to those he’s tapped to lead the Justice Department, the Pentagon and Department of Homeland Security, Trump is picking people who have been familiar faces at his campaign rallies, frequent visitors to his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida or reliable defenders of him on TV.

It’s a sharp contrast from his first go-round in the White House, when Trump, then a neophyte Republican politician, ended up with members on his team with whom he had no prior working relationship and no level of trust.

For Trump 2.0, the president-elect is rewarding his staunchest allies with plum roles. Some have almost no relevant experience for their positions, and a few could face a difficult Senate confirmation process even with a Republican majority. Trump has tapped Pete Hegseth, a Fox News personality with no administrative experience, to oversee the sprawling Pentagon; nominated Matt Gaetz, a longtime conservative provocateur who lacks a law-enforcement background as attorney general; and asked the governor of rural South Dakota, Kristi Noem, to be the nation’s top Homeland Security official.

He also has tasked billionaire Elon Musk and former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, Trump rally mainstays, with streamlining the federal bureaucracy although neither has ever worked in government.

The picks suggest that Trump, as is his style, prefers the hammer to scalpel, and wants to show his political base that he is following through on his campaign pledges to deport millions of migrants, investigate his political adversaries and rid the military of “woke” policies on gender and diversity.

“It’s noteworthy that the people that he’s selected for the most prominent positions tend to be people who are, I would say, good on television, so they’re good on the sort of public-facing side of those jobs,” said David Lewis, a professor at Vanderbilt University who has written a book on presidential appointments.

“I think there (are) some questions about whether the folks that he has selected have the experience managing large bureaucracies and have all of the substantive expertise they need to do those jobs,” Lewis added. Trump’s choices of Hegseth and Gaetz were among those that were met with skepticism and surprise among some leaders in Washington.

Various administration hopefuls have been steadily making their way to Palm Beach to meet with Trump’s transition team at Mar-a-Lago and to try to steal a moment with Trump himself.

“Sometimes you just need to catch him on the patio,” said one source close to Trump’s team.

A Trump donor said the president-elect and his allies have huddled in a room with TVs and pictures of prospective appointees. “I hear Trump is watching a lot of TV clips,” the donor said, “looking at: How will these people defend me on TV?”

After Trump’s 2016 win, he called upon strangers such as Rex Tillerson, the former CEO of ExxonMobil, to helm the State Department, and Jim Mattis, a retired general, to head up the Pentagon. He named an outsider, Reince Priebus, who was chair of the Republican National Committee, as his chief of staff.

Trump eventually became disillusioned and replaced Tillerson and Mattis, and cycled through four chiefs of staff during his first term. This time around, he seems determined to avoid similar missteps. Trump has had four years to learn the job of chief executive and better understand what he wants from his appointees.