President Donald J. Trump walks across the South Lawn of the White House Thursday, Sept. 24, 2020, to board Marine One en route to Joint Base Andrews, Md. to begin his trip to North Carolina and Florida. (Official White House Photo by Tia Dufour)
What is a President’s cabinet supposed to look like? According to Ben Domenech in The Spectator, the traditional cabinet is “most often drawn from a pool of experienced politicians with lengthy résumés, earned from decades of service in varied capacities and concentration in their particular area.” But, Domenech explains, Trump’s nominees are “communicators, not administrators.” He continues:
The skillsets they bring to their new roles are less about the unsexy business of corralling bureaucrats, they’re about being experienced advocates to a public audience on behalf of Trump’s agenda, or their own. Imagine a cabinet entirely built around the idea that the people named all need to possess the capability not just to testify before Congress, run a press conference or do a media hit — but to go on longform podcasts as effective faces of the Trump 47 agenda. Nearly all of them have already done so, repeatedly, in the past few years. Some even host podcasts themselves — and there’s probably no reason for them to stop now.
A pattern is emerging in all of this: pair a figure from central casting, loyal to Trump but perhaps lacking in subject matter experience, with solid deputies expected to do the tough behind the scenes work of upending the administrative state. The latter will have the tougher task, given the fact that much as the “resistance” effort is muted this time around, it still exists and thrives within the bureaucracies opposed to the president-elect’s dramatic promises of reform and redirection. But having the face matters, too, particularly in increasing the confidence of the American people in his policies.
If your assumption about the second Trump administration is that what he most cares about is less about achieving distinct ideological goals and more about becoming an incredibly popular president, it’s hard to judge this as anything but a smart shift in the way you choose a cabinet. Leave policy making to the nerds; pick the people with the capability to make the best case for it, whatever it turns out to be.
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