Trump hoped his Cabinet picks could escape serious vetting

In a normal presidential transition, the president-elect spends weeks carefully considering candidates for the most important jobs in his Cabinet. Potential nominees undergo rigorous private vetting by trusted aides and lawyers, then by the FBI. It’s a painstaking process that often consumes the entire three months between the election and the inauguration. But when has Donald Trump ever recognised any value in traditional norms? He refused to authorise the FBI to begin its customary background checks, because he hoped to do without them or because he didn’t trust the G-men, or both. Instead of waiting for investigations, he announced most of his nominees in three weeks — apparently imagining that the tsunami would force the Senate to confirm them quickly.

He even proposed skipping the constitutionally required step of Senate confirmation entirely, pushing to fill his Cabinet through the back door of “recess appointments.” He was apparently surprised when otherwise loyal GOP senators quietly refused to roll over for that audacious power grab. His nominations set a new record for speed, if not for quality. The outcome was predictable. His most controversial nominees — picked apparently with little or no private vetting — were followed by a parade of skeletons streaming out of closets. (Some of the skeletons had been strutting in public for years.) The ensuing media leaks were embarrassing. They made the second Trump administration look just as chaotic as the first. But there were substantive political effects as well.

Most presidents use their transition, and the honeymoon period that normally follows, to build public support for their policies and programs. But Trump must now spend most of his time jawboning GOP senators to back his nominees.

Opinion polls show that his support in the public hasn’t grown since election day; he’s still stuck at the 50-50 mark in favorability. And it was all avoidable. “When the Senate confirmation process works properly, it’s in the best interest of the president — even though presidents are usually annoyed by it,” said Gregg Nunziata, a former Senate Republican aide who handled dozens of nominations. “There’s an existing protocol to handle allegations confidently and discreetly. If that protocol isn’t followed, the interest (in a nominee’s background] is going to spill out into other channels” — mainly the news media.

That’s what’s happening now. The vetting of Trump’s Cabinet is being done after the fact, mostly by the news media. The results have not been pretty. Matt Gaetz, the former Florida congressman Trump proposed for attorney general, somehow thought he could skate past the House Ethics Committee’s evidence that he had paid a 17-year-old for sex. (The New York Times reported that Trump chose Gaetz impulsively after a meeting with Gaetz and Tesla founder Elon Musk aboard the president-elect’s private jet.) Eight days after the nomination was announced, CNN reported that Gaetz had a second illicit encounter with the girl. His nomination was finished by nightfall. Next up was Pete Hegseth, the Fox News host known for his opposition to women in combat roles and his war on “woke” generals. Trump proposed Hegseth for secretary of Defense, a job that entails managing almost 3 million people and an $849-billion budget, even though he had never run anything remotely comparable. At first, the National Guard veteran looked headed for confirmation, as GOP senators fell into line. Then a whistleblower told Trump aides that a woman had accused Hegseth of raping her in a Monterey hotel in 2017, and the story promptly leaked. (Hegseth said the encounter was consensual.) Two days later, it emerged that Hegseth had paid the accuser in exchange for a nondisclosure agreement.

Skeletons continued their march. The New York Times reported that Hegseth’s mother had sent him an email scolding him for abusing women. (She disavowed the message and denounced the newspaper for revealing it.) The New Yorker reported that Hegseth’s former employees at a veterans’ organization said he had been intoxicated and disorderly at company events. NBC quoted his former Fox News colleagues saying he drank there, too. (“I never had a drinking problem,” said Hegseth, who promised to stop drinking.)

Hegseth’s support among Republican senators began to erode, with many saying he needed to undergo a full FBI investigation. Last week, Trump mused to aides that he might replace Hegseth with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. But by Friday, the president-elect turned defiant on social media: “Pete is a WINNER, and there is nothing that can be done to change that!”

So the Hegseth battle will continue — at a potential further political cost.

“His confirmation hearings are going to be completely brutal,” a Republican strategist warned. “There will be weeks of coverage on cable TV, which is a medium Trump cares about. How much stomach does he have for that when he’s about to take office?” Hegseth isn’t the only nominee who faces a struggle. Some GOP senators have expressed concern about Tulsi Gabbard, the former Democrat designated for director of national intelligence. Kash Patel, his nominee for FBI director, will have to defend his goal of using the law enforcement agency as a weapon of retribution against political opponents. And Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will need to explain his long-proclaimed belief that no vaccine is safe.

The scrutiny of those nominees has barely begun. Now Trump faces an unpalatable choice: long, bruising and public fights to put controversial nominees into office, or quick decisions to cut failing candidates loose as he did with Gaetz.

It isn’t unusual for incoming presidents to lose a Cabinet nominee or two. If they fail quickly, the damage is rarely great. Who remembers that President Biden couldn’t win confirmation for his first nominee as budget director, Neera Tanden, or that Trump couldn’t get his first-term nominee as Labor secretary, Andrew Puzder, confirmed?

But Trump has made a potentially irreparable mistake. By proposing so many nominees with flagrantly weak qualifications beyond political loyalty, he has turned their confirmations into zero-sum tests of his ability to compel obedience from prideful senators. With only a 53-47 majority in the chamber, the loss of any four could mean defeat.

Even before his inauguration, the president-elect has already failed in two respects. His abortive proposal to finagle nominees into office without Senate confirmation alienated legislators whose help he will need over the next four years. And he may have thought he could get the jump on his opponents by announcing his nominees early — yet another miscalculation. He merely gave the news media enough time to subject them to the scrutiny they deserved from the beginning.