WASHINGTON — Somehow disruption doesn’t begin to cover it. Upheaval might be closer. Revolution maybe. In less than two weeks since being elected again, Donald Trump has embarked on a new campaign to shatter the institutions of Washing-ton as no incoming president has in his lifetime.
He has rolled a giant grenade into the middle of the nation’s capital and watched with mischievous glee to see who runs away and who throws themselves on it. Suffice it to say, so far there have been more of the former than the latter. Trump has said that “real power” is the ability to engender fear, and he seems to have achieved that.
Trump’s early transition moves amount to a generational stress test for the system. If Republicans bow to his demand to recess the Senate so that he can install appointees without confirmation, it would rewrite the balance of power established by the founders more than two centuries ago. And if he gets his way on selections for some of the most important posts in government, he would put in place loyalists intent on blowing up the very departments they would lead.
He has chosen a bomb-throwing backbench congressman who has spent his career attacking fellow Republicans and fending off sex-and-drugs allegations to run the same Justice Department that investigated him, though it did not charge him, on suspicion of trafficking underage girls. He has chosen a conspiracy theorist with no medical training who disparages the foundations of conventional health care to run the Department of Health and Human Services.
He has chosen a weekend morning television host with a history of defending convicted war criminals while sporting a Christian Crusader tattoo that has been adopted as a symbol by the far right to run the most powerful armed forces in the history of the world. He has chosen a former congresswoman who has defended Middle East dictators and echoed positions favored by Russia to oversee the nation’s intelligence agencies.
Nine years after Trump began upsetting political norms, it may be easy to underestimate just how extraordinary all of this is. In the past, none of those selections would have passed muster in Washington, where a failure to pay employment taxes for a nanny used to be enough to disqualify a Cabinet nominee. Trump, by contrast, has bulled past the old red lines, opting for nominees who are so provocative that even fellow Republicans wondered whether he is trolling them.
The message to Washington is simple, according to Roger Stone, the longtime Trump friend who relishes his own reputation as a political dirty trickster. “Things are going to be different,” he said by text.
To say the least. “There is something in this city, in the imperial capital, that’s changed over the last 48 hours,” Steve Bannon, the self-styled agitator and former Trump White House strategist, said on his podcast last week. “It is a sense that there’s been a seismic shift in the political culture. And, hey, I think they know we’re not going back.”
At least some in Washington fooled themselves into assuming that Trump would not go as far as his campaign trail rhetoric. They sighed in relief when he named Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., to be secretary of state instead of Richard Grenell, a combative conservative who argued earlier this year that it was necessary to have “a son of a bitch as the secretary of state.”
But then came the nominations of Matt Gaetz for attorney general, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for secretary of health and human services, Pete Hegseth for defense secretary and Tulsi Gabbard for director of national intelligence. Republicans gasped out loud at news of Gaetz’s selection. Even the editorial board of Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post called Kennedy “nuts on a lot of fronts.” And the Trump camp was surprised to learn that Hegseth paid a woman who accused him of sexual assault as part of a settlement agreement, although he insists it was a consensual encounter.
David Marchick, a co-author of “The Peaceful Transfer of Power,” a history of presidential transitions, and dean of the Kogod School of Business at American University, called the collection of choices unlike any before.
“This is like the ‘Star Wars’ bar scene of nominees,” he said. Trump’s camp has made clear, he added, that “it’s a serious strategy to blow out the government as an institution because of their belief that it’s become too big, too powerful and represents the deep state.”
Don Baer, a former White House communications director under President Bill Clinton, said Trump was challenging the foundations of the American system. “This is a huge moment for Washington, in all sorts of ways,” he said.
Trump, he added, is amplifying the populist resentment that has grown since the days of the financial crash of 2008 rather than trying to ameliorate it. The eruption in Washington is a goal as he tries to tear down the system, not something to tamp down. “What he’s doing now with these appointments is, ‘You all jump up and down and tear your hair out, but you know what? These are the people I’m going to do it with, and I like that it aggravates you,’” Baer said.
Amid all the hair-tearing-out, other consequential moves by Trump have attracted less attention. In tapping Elon Musk to head a new Department of Government Efficiency along with Vivek Ramaswamy, Trump has handed vast influence over the federal government to a billionaire who profits from billions of dollars in government contracts.
And while heads turned at Gaetz’s nomination, Trump tapped three of his own defense lawyers from his various criminal cases to take other top Justice Department positions, pretty much guaranteeing that he never has to worry about scrutiny from federal prosecutors over the next four years.
It is a mark of how much has changed since Trump’s first term that appointees who once generated uproar are now slipping by without much protest. He has learned how to move the spectrum of outrage.
When Trump first tried to appoint John Ratcliffe, a Texas Republican congressman, as director of national intelligence in his previous term, Senate Republicans deemed him too partisan and forced him to withdraw. Trump responded by making Grenell the acting intelligence director, which horrified establishment Republicans so much that they eventually confirmed Ratcliffe after all. Now Ratcliffe has been chosen for CIA director and is seen as a relatively reassuring pick compared with the others.
Indeed, some Republicans assume that Trump put forward some of the more contentious nominees to draw attention from the others, making Gaetz, for instance, a possible sacrificial lamb who can be blocked while the rest slip through. Gaetz has denied wrongdoing, but he hopes to prevent the release of a House Ethics Committee report into his past.
“Gaetz won’t get confirmed. Everybody knows that,” former Speaker Kevin McCarthy, the Republican from California toppled last year by Gaetz and other GOP insurgents, said on Bloomberg Television on Friday. He added that “it’s a good deflection from others.”
Others disagreed. “That’s not what’s happening,” Sarah Matthews, a former deputy White House press secretary for Trump who broke with him, said on MSNBC. “He is drunk on power right now because he feels like he was given a mandate by winning the popular vote.”
In fact, it is not much of a mandate. While Trump won the popular vote for the first time in three tries, he garnered just 50.1% nationally, according to the latest tabulation by The New York Times, just 1.8 percentage points ahead of Vice President Kamala Harris. When the slow-counting blue giant of California finally finishes tallying its votes, that margin is likely to shrink a bit more. The Cook Report already calculates that his percentage has fallen below 50%, meaning he did not win a majority.
One of Trump’s superpowers, however, has been acting as if he were more popular than he really is. Despite his modest margins, he has exhibited more dominance of his own party than any president in modern times. And his Senate recess demand will test just how far that dominance will go.
The recess appointment power in the Constitution was designed to let a president temporarily fill vacancies while Congress was out of town in an era when it took weeks or months to travel to Washington. But Trump wants to use the power to sidestep the Senate’s constitutional duty to advise and consent to appointments.
At any the other time, it would be hard to imagine the Senate voluntarily surrendering power to a president like that, even one from the same party. But Senate Republican leaders did not rule out the idea after Trump broached it, and it may be the only way to get Gaetz and some of the others through. Even if senators do not agree, some conservatives have warned that Trump may try to employ a little-used provision in the Constitution allowing him to force a recess.
“Trump has promised to be a dictator on Day 1 but has already started before Day 1,” said Tom Daschle, a former Senate Democratic leader from South Dakota. “This is a major test to our system of checks and balances. The Congress must demonstrate its commitment to its constitutional role. And it is critical that it does it now. Failure to do so is an acknowledgment that the president’s promise will become the reality.”
Under the rules, a recess appointee can stay in place until the end of the next congressional session, meaning until December 2026, or almost two years. Given Trump’s historically short patience with appointees, that means he could have people in key departments for as long as he typically might have them without ever being subjected to Senate confirmation.
According to figures from Marchick, the average tenure for a Cabinet secretary in Trump’s first term other than Treasury, Commerce and Housing and Urban Development was 1.8 years. For the key security agencies — Defense, Justice and Homeland Security — the average term was 10.5 months.
“None of these candidates, I’m sure, were vetted,” Marchick said of the latest nominees. “It’s all just spontaneous decisions by Trump and then announcement by tweet. No process, no interviews, no vetting, just chaos. He had a mandate to deal with the price of eggs. The question is: Did the mandate extend to this craziness?”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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