By David French / The New York Times
That was quick.
Donald Trump is planting the seeds of his own political demise. The corrupt, incompetent and extremist men and women he’s appointing to many of the most critical posts in his Cabinet are direct threats to the well-being of the country, but they’re also political threats to Trump and to his populist allies.
To understand why, it’s important to remember a cardinal reality about Trump’s political career. He has now won two general elections when he was the only alternative to an unsatisfactory status quo, and he lost the one when he was the unsatisfactory status quo. If he can’t govern well, his populist partisan realignment will come apart before it can truly begin.
One of the most maddening aspects of the 2024 election is the extent to which so many voters viewed Trump as a mostly normal political candidate. MAGA Republicans see Trump as a singular figure, but an immense number of voters thought the talk about Trump was overheated, in both directions.
If you’re like most Americans and don’t follow the news closely, it’s easy to see why you would see Trump in more conventional terms. A Politico analysis of the Trump campaign’s ads showed that “the single most-aired ad from his campaign since the start of October is all about inflation, Medicare and Social Security — arguing that” Kamala Harris “will make seniors already struggling with high prices ‘pay more Social Security taxes,’ while unauthorized immigrants receive benefits.”
That is a normal, conventional political message. Trump’s ads attacking Harris’ past support for taxpayer-funded transition surgery for people in prison and immigration detention were also an appeal to the mainstream, an effort to label Harris as extreme.
One of the challenging realities of American politics is that while vast numbers of Americans participate in presidential elections, only small minorities of voters actually stay engaged. And the priorities of the two groups are not the same; far from it.
The majority is focused on the things that directly affect their lives: prices, crime, peace. How much do concerns about democracy matter if they don’t feel safe on the streets? Or if they’re struggling to keep a roof over their heads? The minority, by contrast, follows politics closely and can focus on issues that can feel more abstract or niche to the majority.
Because the majority votes and then checks back out, politicians hear almost exclusively from the most engaged minority. My colleague Ezra Klein, has written, for example, about the power that “the groups” — progressive activist organizations — exercise over Democratic policy. They demand that politicians focus on issues that might be important but that are often not matters of majority concern. Or, even worse, they demand political fealty to positions that majorities reject.
In many administrations, this dynamic results in a kind of tug of war between the activists who demand attention to their pet causes and the political realists who grab the candidate’s arm and tap the sign that reads, “It’s the economy, stupid.”
And then, every few years, the majority steps back in, determines whether politicians have taken care of prices, crime and peace, and then ruthlessly punishes failure; regardless of whether the activists got what they wanted and even if they might agree with the activists’ concerns.
With Trump, the dynamic is different. He’s so consumed with his grievances and his base’s grievances that rather than there being a tug of war between activists and pragmatists for the politician’s attention, the activists and the politician are both aligned against the pragmatists.
That was the clear direction of Trump’s first term. At first he surrounded himself with serious people. Think of the contrast, for example, between Jim Mattis as secretary of defense and Pete Hegseth, or between Alex Azar, the secretary of health and human services for most of Trump’s first term, and an anti-vax conspiracy theorist like Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
But the serious people told him no. They tried to block his worst instincts. So they were purged.
Throughout the campaign, Trump ran with two messages. On the airwaves, he convinced millions of Americans that they were electing the Trump of January 2019, when inflation was low and the border was under reasonable control. At his rallies, he told MAGA that it was electing the Trump of January 2021, the man unleashed from establishment control and hell-bent on burning it all down.
But here is his fundamental problem: The desires of his heart and the grievances of his base are ultimately incompatible with the demands of the majority, and the more he pursues his own priorities, the more he’ll revive his opposition. He’ll end his political career as an unpopular politician who ushered in a Democratic majority yet again.
The reason goes deeper than ideology (many of his nominees are extremists) or scandal (Kennedy, Hegseth and Matt Gaetz each has his own histories of alleged sexual misconduct, for example). Ultimately, it goes to competence: Can you do the job we ultimately hired you to do?
Yes, the covid pandemic highlighted problems at Health and Human Services, but does one improve a health care bureaucracy by hiring a person who has said, “There’s no vaccine that’s safe and effective?” Is a man who claims that “Covid-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese” qualified for the job? One wonders how long a populist movement would survive a surge in preventable childhood diseases.
Hegseth is a Fox host who has never managed an organization of any size. Gaetz is a partisan political gadfly who has barely practiced law. Again, putting aside ideology and scandal, are they even capable of leading two of the nation’s most vast — and vital — bureaucracies with any degree of competence? If Trump was running on mounting an effective national strategy to control crime, does anyone think that Gaetz is the best man for the job?
Gaetz is, however, the best man for the job Trump wants him to do. As a Trump adviser told Marc Caputo of The Bulwark, “None of the attorneys had what Trump wants, and they didn’t talk like Gaetz.”
“Everyone else looked at AG as if they were applying for a judicial appointment,” the adviser said. “They talked about their vaunted legal theories and constitutional bulls***. Gaetz was the only one who said, ‘Yeah, I’ll go over there and start cuttin’ [expletive] heads.’ ”
Sen. Roger Marshall of Kansas defended the Gaetz pick, saying, “Trump was elected to turn this place upside down.” That’s what Trump thinks. That’s what MAGA thinks. But MAGA should beware. If Trump’s Cabinet picks help him usher in the chaos that is the water in which he swims, then the question won’t be whether voters rebuke MAGA again, but rather how much damage it does before it fails once more.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times, c.2024.
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