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AFTER DONALD TRUMPTVfbifbiNATOMAGA-undogemagamagaUS Your browser does not support the element. won the presidential election in 2016—when he was a former television star rather than a former president—he managed the as if he was staging his reality show, “The Apprentice”. Aspiring cabinet members arrived at the tower that bears his name in New York and walked past cameras. That series was drawn-out, with celebrity appearances, including by Kanye West. This time Mr Trump is directing a tighter show: deliberating at his estate at Mar-a-Lago away from cameras and issuing his hiring verdicts over social media at a much faster pace. Unfortunately, the outcomes are hardly saner.The most alarming choices came in a 24-hour period. On November 12th Mr Trump announced that , a Fox News personality who served in the National Guard, would be defence secretary. Mr Hegseth is one of the few who defended Mr Trump’s statement that there were “fine people on both sides” of protests against a white-supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017. He is preoccupied by the scourge of wokeness in the army but has no experience in government.Mr Trump also announced that Tulsi Gabbard, a conspiracy-minded Democrat-turned-Republican who is so free-spirited that she met Bashar al-Assad, Syria’s murderous dictator, and declared him “not the enemy of the United States”, would be director of national intelligence. Worse, he decided that Matt Gaetz, a flamboyant Florida congressman, would be his attorney-general. The , over which the attorney-general has supervisory control, had probed allegations that Mr Gaetz sex-trafficked a minor. It brought no charges, but Mr Gaetz later faced an investigation by the House Ethics Committee. (He denies any wrongdoing.) He is an ultra-loyalist, who last year pledged that if the and other agencies “do not come to heel” they should be abolished or defunded.All of these are sensitive positions in which Mr Trump felt that he had been previously betrayed. His past attorneys-general acted with too much independence and too little like his consigliere; top intelligence officials attracted his ire for probing his links to Russia; his past defence secretaries and senior generals kiboshed his ideas. With these selections, Mr Trump indicates that he does not plan to tolerate such dissent this time. Those suspected of disloyalty (or disguised neoconservatism) are not welcome. Choices this bizarre may face difficulty being confirmed by the Senate, even one with a Republican majority. Perhaps that’s the point. Four defecting Republican senators would be sufficient to reject them, but blocking all three picks would be uncharacteristically defiant.Mr Trump’s other appointments—at departments that he perhaps does not feel personally wronged by—are more conventional. Marco Rubio, a Florida senator, is his selection to be secretary of state. This would be an encouraging pick for America’s allies: Mr Rubio co-sponsored a bill to make it harder for the president to pull America out of . As the Republican Party has moved in a different direction he has too, embracing Trumpism while keeping some of his old instincts. He has made supportive statements about Ukraine (yet voted against the most recent bill to arm it, citing the need to prioritise border security). Mr Rubio, the child of Cuban émigrés, has a hereditary anti-communism that has been redirected at China.Other foreign-policy appointments have similar views and credentials. , a former Florida congressman, is to be national security adviser. Like Mr Rubio, he sides with the “prioritisers” in land such as J.D. Vance, the incoming vice-president, who argue that taking the Chinese threat seriously requires reducing commitments to European security and to Ukraine. Elise Stefanik, the choice to be ambassador (the sixth woman in a row to hold this position), is a congresswoman from New York who has distinguished herself as one of Mr Trump’s most enthusiastic fans in the House. She is best-known for obliterating college presidents in hearings on campus antisemitism. This seems a solid résumé for someone to represent an administration which mistrusts multilateralism in the world’s highest-profile multilateral forum.And then there are the weirder appointments—for departments that do not yet exist. Mr Trump announced that he would tap Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, to run a new commission with Vivek Ramaswamy, an entrepreneur and former Republican-primary opponent, to reduce government waste and cut red tape. This is a worthy aim, but, as often with Mr Musk, it is hard to know whether to take him literally. He is calling it the Department of Governmental Efficiency (), named after his preferred cryptocurrency, which itself started as a joke. Yet his aims are grandiose: Mr Musk has called for $2trn of cuts to federal spending (nearly a third of the budget), which is impossible to reconcile with Mr Trump’s campaign promise not to touch Social Security or Medicare or raise the retirement age.Even before Congress applies its checks, it is clear that this cabinet will differ starkly from Mr Trump’s previous one. In Trump One, Mike Pence, the former vice-president, helped fill the first cabinet with Reaganite Republicans. They vied for influence with acolytes, who scoffed at conservative pieties about small government, robust internationalism and free trade. The lines of this fight often blurred, and each side claimed some victories. One former Trump adviser said the president-elect was a moderate in his own movement. This time the true believers have the upper hand.
