As president-elect, Donald Trump has acted almost as if he is already the incumbent president. He’s been courted by foreign leaders and is courting them. He has populated his administration at what must be a record clip, drawing attention and controversy. With minimal public appearances, he has remained the dominant public figure.
Trump is filling his Cabinet fast. But can he fulfill his promises?
The president-elect’s personnel decisions raise questions about whether his true priorities square with the people who voted for him.
December 15, 2024 The Washington Post
Analysis by Dan Balz
But in the 5½ weeks since he won the 2024 election, there have also been hints about how he could stumble in a second term. Overall, his personnel decisions raise questions about whether his true priorities square with those of the people who voted for him, not to mention whether they have the skills and expertise to govern effectively.
Trump been far from clear about how he will make good on some of his most significant campaign promises, whether on the economy or cutting the size of government. His appointments suggest a major upheaval in health-care policy, which he rarely talked about during the campaign.
His demand for speedy confirmations threatens to strain relations with Senate Republicans, some of whom are being threatened with primary challenges if they don’t support some of his picks.
Trump recently hedged on one campaign promise, which was to lower prices, inflation having been one of the most important issues that doomed Vice President Kamala Harris’s candidacy. He told Time magazine, whose editors named him “person of the year,” that “it’s hard to bring things down once they’ve gone up.” His second term will not be a failure if he isn’t successful on that pledge, he said.
Trump believes he was elected principally because of unhappiness over immigration. One of his first priorities will be to deport millions of undocumented immigrants, a massive and controversial undertaking with many unanswered questions.
Mass deportations would mean sending many undocumented migrant agricultural workers back to their home countries. Asked in that same Time interview if doing so would raise food prices sharply, he replied, “No, because we’re going to let people in, but we have to let them in legally.” That non sequitur is an example of the disconnect between Trump’s rhetorical flourishes and reality.
Trump has not suggested that he will seek any legislation to better secure the U.S.-Mexico border, preferring to operate through executive orders and administrative action. Part of his strategy has been to threaten significant tariffs on products coming in from Mexico (and Canada) unless the Mexican government acts more aggressively to prevent border crossings. Tariffs would mean higher prices on imported products, which Trump often claims would not happen.
Trump said another of his Day 1 priorities will be to “drill, baby, drill,” which he’s said is a path to lower energy prices. The United States already is producing more oil than it ever has. U.S. Energy Information Agency figures show that as of September, the United States was producing about 13,200 barrels of crude oil per day. When Trump left office in January 2021, the figure was about 11,150 barrels per day.
Scott Bessent, Trump’s nominee for treasury secretary, has suggested that he would like to see an increase in production of 3 million barrels a day. Many questions surround that goal, from whether that target is crude oil only or includes other energy sources such as natural gas, and what pressure that might put on prices and hesitation it might cause among energy producers.
Trump was asked by Time whether he would push for legislation in his first year. He said he would, but the only item he mentioned was legislation to extend the tax cuts that were approved during his first term and skewed toward the wealthiest Americans.
His Republican coalition in a political party that he has revamped now includes significant numbers of working-class Americans. Trump has called for eliminating taxes on tips for service workers and abolishing taxes on Social Security benefits. Changing tax laws under Social Security would probably require 60 votes in the Senate, meaning support from some Democratic senators. Eliminating those taxes also would cause further financial problems for the retirement security system.
Health-care policy was not a topic of much conversation by Trump during the campaign. But health care is one of the key chapters in Project 2025, the conservative blueprint for Trump’s second term. The president-elect has said he did not read the document, but many people he’s bringing into his administration were involved in its production.
What Trump has in mind for, say, the Affordable Care Act, is not clear. Republicans tried unsuccessfully to repeal the act during his first term. Republicans want to see changes to Medicaid. Trump has said Social Security and Medicare should be off limits. So, lots of questions here.
Key Trump appointees have been sharply critical of the current health-care structure and policies. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., nominated as Health and Human Services secretary, is a vaccine skeptic. Trump’s nominee to head the National Institutes of Health, Jay Bhattacharya, was highly critical of lockdowns during the covid-19 pandemic and has sparred with many in the scientific community. The person tapped to oversee Medicare and Medicaid is celebrity doctor Mehmet Oz. His mandate from Trump includes cutting waste and fraud from within the agency.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky), who contracted polio as a child, said Friday that anyone seeking confirmation should “steer clear” of any efforts to undermine confidence in the polio vaccine, a clear warning to Kennedy and perhaps others Trump has nominated.
The government Trump is assembling is a mixed collection of billionaires, business executives, MAGA (Make America Great Again) devotees, friends and family, Republican officeholders and a few strays. They are not ideologically homogenous (in the ways that Trump is not, either). Nor are they uniformly experienced. A few lack obvious qualifications for the positions to which they’ve been nominated. They share one important trait: loyalty to the president-elect. He didn’t have that in his first term and learned to regret it.
Many of his key personnel decisions point to an obvious goal of his second term: to disrupt the status quo for the sake of disruption. He will deploy loyalists to shake up federal agencies and policies. He also appears intent on making good on his pledge to seek retribution against those he believes went after him unfairly the past four years. Perhaps this will be an idle threat, but for now, a threat to be taken seriously.
One person named last week that drew immediate criticism was Kari Lake, the Arizona Republican who has lost contests for governor and Senate in two consecutive elections. A former television anchor, Lake has been tapped to be director of the Voice of America, a unit with a mandate for objective and independent reporting to counter propaganda from foreign governments. There are fears that Lake, an election denier and a critic of much in traditional news coverage, will not follow that mandate.
There are others whose selections have raised alarms, among them Kash Patel, Trump’s choice to head the Federal Bureau of Investigation (Director Christopher A. Wray announced last week that he would resign under threat of being fired), who has talked in the past about targeting Trump critics; Tulsi Gabbard, selected to be director of national intelligence, who has expressed sympathies with Russian President Vladimir Putin and deposed Syrian President Bashar al-Assad; and Pete Hegseth, a combat veteran and weekend anchor on Fox News with no significant managerial experience and who faces allegations of sexual misconduct, as the nominee for Defense secretary.
Trump is setting up early battles with the Senate over confirming his picks. Republicans will have the majority in the coming Congress, but not a commanding majority. Where Trump will demand loyalty, some Republican senators will seek to preserve a semblance of independence for Congress as a separate branch of government. How far is he prepared to push without triggering a backlash that could affect the underlaying dynamic between the two?
Trump’s goal is obviously to run over all his opposition. That’s why he’s floated the idea of using recess appointments to avoid lengthy confirmation battles. That’s why he is expected to arrive in the Oval Office with fists full of executive orders to signal a new direction after four years of President Joe Biden.
No one expects an orderly transition or an orderly second term with Trump. He campaigned on the opposite. But he also campaigned on policy pledges that will require more sober decision-making and execution. Trump will have considerable latitude at the start of his presidency, but in a country where a majority have been dissatisfied with government through multiple administrations, he will be expected to deliver.