The best thing about President-elect Donald Trump’s nominees is that few of them are considered qualified by the expert Washington, D.C. governmental establishment.
With a few exceptions, these progressive experts have been in control for a century. But over that time, Gallup polls have demonstrated the accompanying long decline in public support for progressive policies — especially regarding domestic issues but recently also on foreign policy. Today, six in ten Americans have little or no confidence in how their government works.
This dissatisfaction pretty much decided the 2024 election in favor of President Trump and a Republican Congress. In the past, including 2016, incoming presidents have mostly chosen their Cabinet and other top officials from longtime D.C. Ivy League experts. Incoming President Trump wisely decided a century was enough and has now nominated outsiders.
Not surprisingly, mainstream media and their chosen elites are upset with the results. Among others, Politico headlined that only three “people of color” had been nominated. But the text itself spent the rest of the article inadvertently recording the minorities actually nominated.
The Wall Street Journal’s Gerard Baker noticed three Hindus, two Hispanics, the first female White House chief of staff, and the highest-ranking cabinet office for a gay man. More importantly, the nominees represented traditional conservatives, nationalist populists, libertarians, Democrats, foreign-policy hawks and doves, and many others across the political spectrum. Indeed, this diversity was so varied that Baker was not confident that such a Right coalition could “remain [even] half-attached” to traditional conservativism; or whether only Trump himself would count, governing “by whim” alone.
It is true that most of the nominees do not have high executive branch or bureaucratic experience. But even those who did, like Department of Education nominee, Linda McMahon, who previously headed the Small Business Administration, were criticized. She was disparaged for not having experience in education, ignoring her service on the board of trustees at Sacred Heart University and the Connecticut State Board of Education. (RELATED: Controversial Appointees, Clay Pigeons, and Successful Governmental Politics)
Indeed, there is no question that Trump’s appointees without government managerial experience will be walking into another world where nothing works like they think, including the former members of Congress. The hard fact is that government bureaucracy does not work like the private sector and success there misleads the unwary. After heading the U.S. budget office, the successful co-founder of Litton Industries, Roy Ash, warned many years ago about the difference:
Imagine that you were the chief executive officer of your company and that the board of directors was made up of your customers, your suppliers, your employees, and your competitors, and that you required a majority vote on everything. Wouldn’t you conduct your business in a different way than you do now? Going from the private to the public sector is not going from the minor leagues to the major leagues in baseball: it is like going from softball to ice hockey.
Dean Sayre of Columbia University summarized it this way: “There are many similarities between public and private administration — all of them trivial.” If one needs a more philosophical or administrative understanding of bureaucracy see the more detailed explanations of Ludwig von Mises or yours truly.
Knowing how government really works, the Washington establishment types know that the secret to political success is to understand that any change from the bureaucracy’s status quo will be reported immediately to the media, with complaints that it will destroy the essential health, education, welfare and national security of the U.S. in some way or another. The story will begin in the Washington Post and be picked up nationally and beyond. And the targets seeking change will look foolish with no supporters beyond family. That is why the secret to political ascendancy in government is not to do anything but to follow the herd and be considered a success by all.
All presidents want loyalty but also expect that appointees will have the skills and courage to confront the bureaucratic state. But as Ronald Reagan’s first director of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, I can report that those appointees who did the best, who were the most courageous, were the first to be run from D.C. That is why Trump was so wise to identify nominees with courage over resumes, and to do so early, learning from his previous experience.
To a great degree President Trump himself will and should be in charge of executive policy. But what about Baker’s worry about his dominance? My experience is that Trump does listen to arguments from his agency heads and is willing to change when confronted with sound arguments.
As far as Baker’s concern for the historic conservative coalition, Ross Douthat has identified two forces within the Trump orbit as possibly portending its future. There is a dynamic libertarian-type leader in the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, and a more traditionalist populist type in Vice President-elect JD Vance. Douthat notes that they differ, but also finds that both agree on aspects of the other’s positions: “Musk has moved in a populist direction on immigration, while Vance has been a venture capitalist.”
He continues:
So you can imagine a scenario, in Trump’s second term and beyond, where these convergences yield a dynamist-populist fusionism — a conservatism that manages to simultaneously aim for the stars and uplift and protect the working class, in which economic growth and technological progress help renew the heartland (as Musk’s own companies have brought jobs and optimism to South Texas) while also preserving our creaking social compact. That’s the potential Musk-Vance synthesis. But the potential tensions here are also important, as are the ways in which each man’s worldview can fail.
Douthat’s pragmatism leads him to warn that “a dynamism that imagines itself capable of waving a magic wand over the government and making much of the welfare state somehow disappear will end up meeting the same fate as the Tea Party” promoting “an unrealistic libertarianism.”
But what his analysis recalls to this Reaganite is how similar Douthat’s fear is to the one raised against Reagan’s successful synthesis between the libertarian and traditionalist aspects of his time. Without him making any historical connection, consider the terms Douthat seems forced to utilize — “fusionism,” “synthesis,” “tension,” and “social compact” — are all concepts right from Reagan himself. To me, that is a prospect more for hope than for concern.
READ MORE from Donald Devine:
Controversial Appointees, Clay Pigeons, and Successful Governmental Politics
What Are Serious Conservatives to Do About the Presidential Election?
What Cracked Up Conservatism in the 1990s, and What Can Recover It Today?
Donald Devine is a senior scholar at the Fund for American Studies in Washington, D.C. He served as President Ronald Reagan’s civil service director during his first term in office. A former professor, he is the author of 11 books, including his most recent, The Enduring Tension: Capitalism and the Moral Order, and Ronald Reagan’s Enduring Principles.
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