By Jack Butler
Thursday, February 13, 2025
Donald Trump is getting his cabinet. Today, the Senate confirmed Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as
secretary of health and human services. Yesterday, it confirmed Tulsi Gabbard as director of
national intelligence. Trump has now welcomed into his administration the two
nominees who represent the most dramatic departures from the kind of appointee
one would expect from a Republican president. This was by design. Supporters of
these picks made two broad arguments in their favor: that the parts of the
government atop which they would sit needed a skeptic overseeing them, and that
they both brought new voters into Trump’s coalition by endorsing him and
deserved some kind of reward upon his victory.
Concerning Gabbard and Kennedy specifically (and not the
broader case for skeptical actors overseeing the bureaucracy, to which I am
sympathetic), the second argument was more persuasive. Both were
Democrats until quite recently, and they may well have tipped a close election
in Trump’s favor by activating their idiosyncratic constituencies. One could
reasonably describe both as existing in the “horseshoe” of our politics. It is
a heterogenous and hard-to-define region. But it is a generally anti-elite and
anti-establishment place that has understandably grown in stature as elites and
the establishment have lost popular favor.
Gabbard and Kennedy also until quite recently (and
perhaps still) have views that more align them with the Left. This introduced
an initial uncertainty into their confirmations. For a time, it appeared that
some Republicans would be skeptical of the skeptics because of their left-wing
records, and that some Democrats would support them for the same reason. That
is not how things shook out. All Democrats opposed both nominees. Kennedy
endured the amusing spectacle of having Rhode Island Senator Sheldon Whitehouse,
his former roommate (talk about elite
chumminess), harangue him during his confirmation hearings. And all Republicans
except Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell supported both nominees.
The Constitution established the Senate deliberately at
some remove from the momentary undulations of public opinion. But partisanship,
rather than institutional design, is the better guide to understanding these
nominations. Republicans under Trump’s transactional influence proved willing
to subdue objections they may otherwise have had to Kennedy and Gabbard, and
swallowed the horseshoe. Democrats, responding to Trump, proved more willing to
deprive him of a win than to extend favor to people who until recently were
(and perhaps still are) their fellow-travelers; they spat the horseshoe out.
For now, it is Republicans, not Democrats, who are flexible enough to
accommodate a coalition of the unconventional.
One significant test of this new environment remains at
the cabinet level: Lori Chavez-DeRemer, Trump’s pro-union secretary of labor nominee. Republicans’
willingness to subordinate principle to their perception of the demands of
Trump and his new coalition will likely face other tests in the future as well.
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