Government by Bro

It used to be that the perfect cabinet pick was a steady, behind-the-scenes expert who wouldn’t take too much attention away from the president.

Think James Baker III, the Princeton-educated lawyer who played tennis with George H.W. Bush, became Ronald Reagan’s Treasury secretary and was later named Bush’s secretary of state. Or Condoleezza Rice, who spent her career in government and academia before becoming a stalwart in the cabinet of George W. Bush.

That era ended this week, its demise encapsulated by a single word: “doge.”

With his early selections for cabinet and other high-level posts, President-elect Donald Trump is taking the bomb-throwing, hyper-macho and preternaturally online energy that infused his campaign and seeking to inject it directly into Washington’s veins.

He has asked Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to lead an initiative to cut government waste named for the elder statesman of online memes, Doge. He has chosen Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whose skepticism of basic measures like vaccines has haunted public health officials for years, to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, a $1.6 trillion agency charged with ensuring the “well-being of all Americans.” And he wants former Representative Matt Gaetz, a chest-thumping Trump loyalist who has been investigated on suspicion of sex trafficking and accused of showing colleagues nude photos of women on the House floor (and who has denied both accusations), to be his attorney general.

What Trump is proposing could bust norms, pave the way for his promises of retribution and make the institutions that stood in his way during his first term more pliant. It’s effectively government by bro — and it seems that the more you’ve trolled the establishment, the better your chances are of being invited by the president-elect to join it.

POTUS, U.F.C.-style

Trump’s presidential campaign was a celebration of masculine kitsch. It created multiple opportunities for Hulk Hogan to rip off his shirt in front of the president-elect’s most devoted followers and ended with the Ultimate Fighting Championship chief executive Dana White taking the stage as Trump declared victory.

“This is karma, ladies and gentlemen. He deserves this,” White said, before taking a moment to thank denizens of the Trump-boosting online manosphere, including Adin Ross, the Nelk Boys, Theo Von and Joe Rogan.

All of those men host online spaces where men will be men and controversy is the point, and there, his message fit right in. What’s less clear is how — and whether — that approach will work in Washington, and whether the half of the country still reeling from watching a female presidential candidate defeated for the second time in eight years will embrace any of it.

Some of his choices were a stark departure from any administration that has come before, including his own. In 2016, he chose James Mattis, a retired general who had the professional qualification of actually having been a general, to run the Department of Defense. Mattis later resigned in protest of Trump’s rejection of the nation’s overseas alliances.

This time, Trump has chosen a figure to lead the Pentagon who he seemingly believes will be more loyal: Pete Hegseth, a Fox News host and a veteran of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan whose history of controversy may well be seen as a feature, not a bug, of his candidacy for the role.

As my colleague Helene Cooper wrote this week, Hegseth has been an outspoken champion of service members who have been accused of war crimes. In his book “The War on Warriors: Behind the Betrayal of the Men Who Keep Us Free,” Hegseth asked whether General Charles Q. Brown Jr., the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, would have gotten his job as the highest-ranking military officer in the country if he were not Black. He has said that women should not serve in combat roles.

Trump shied away from none of this controversy in selecting Hegseth, and made a point of mentioning the book when he announced his intent to nominate him in a statement on Tuesday.

“The book reveals the leftwing betrayal of our Warriors, and how we must return our Military to meritocracy, lethality, accountability, and excellence,” Trump wrote.

‘God-tier-level trolling’

Mario Cuomo, the former governor of New York, once said that political figures campaign in poetry and govern in prose. Trump’s twist on that maxim: Campaign in combat, and govern in combat, too.

Some of Trump’s cabinet picks have hewed somewhat more toward the conventional: Take Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, whom Trump intends to nominate to be secretary of state. Or Jay Clayton, the former Securities and Exchange Commission chair, whom Trump has chosen to be the top federal prosecutor in the Southern District of New York.

Yet many of his picks suggest that he values the willingness to be combative online and in the media — to tick people off deliberately — more than he does the ability to be wonky behind the scenes.

He does not seem to care that Tulsi Gabbard, the former Hawaii congresswoman and erstwhile Democrat whom he has chosen for the role of director of national intelligence, said publicly that his administration had not provided justification for killing the Iranian general Qassim Suleimani in 2020.

And then there is Gaetz, a figure who has deeply frustrated many in his own party by stirring up drama after drama in the House of Representatives. Trump’s choice of Gaetz for attorney general — a selection that came together during a roughly two-hour flight from Washington to Florida — landed like a cannonball in Washington, which seems to be exactly its intention.

“I would describe it as God-tier-level trolling,” Senator John Fetterman, a Democrat, told reporters this week, adding that the Gaetz pick was too unserious to merit a real freak-out. “No one’s going to confirm him.”

Several Republican senators have expressed deep doubts about Gaetz’s chances, indicating there is a limit to their willingness to abet governance by trolling. Trump, however, has demanded that they give up their role in vetting his nominees if they cannot muster enough support to confirm his picks.

This weekend, the president-elect will scratch his itch for male-dominated combat one other way. According to a person familiar with his schedule, Trump is planning to head to Madison Square Garden tomorrow, my colleague Michael Gold tells me. Cabinet meeting? Nah. He’s going to watch a U.F.C. fight.

What went wrong, according to Bernie Sanders

As Democrats sift through the wreckage of their losses last week, they’ve offered up competing explanations over just what, exactly, caused them to lose the White House and the Senate while also failing to take back the House.

One explanation that’s getting a lot of attention comes from Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, an independent who caucuses with the Democrats and a two-time presidential candidate. He says the Democratic Party has lost touch with the working class.

In an interview posted this morning, he told my colleague Michael Barbaro that President-elect Trump had offered Americans a clear explanation for their anger, although he did not agree with it.

So what happened in this campaign is, Donald Trump said to the American people, ‘You’re angry, you’re really pissed off, and I know that, and you’re right.’ Then, he gave his explanation. And his explanation — which was obviously nonsense and false and racist, et cetera — was that millions and millions of undocumented people were coming across the border. They were invading America — we’re an occupied country. They were taking your jobs, taking your benefits, eating your cats and your dogs. That is why you are hurting. Now, that is a crazy explanation, but it is an explanation. Now, you tell me what the Democratic explanation was.

Democrats, he said, had told a story about their accomplishments that did not leave room for that anger. He contrasted their campaign message with Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s second inaugural address in 1937, when he acknowledged the continuing pain of the Great Depression four years into his presidency.

What Roosevelt did, he said: ‘Look, we’re making progress. But I look out all over this country, and I see tens of millions of people who are hurting.’ Instead of doing that, the Democrats said, ‘Well, we passed the Inflation Adjustment Act, and the economy is pretty good, and Donald Trump’s a bad guy, and we all defend the women’s constitutional right to an abortion.’ There was no appreciation — no appreciation — of the struggling and the suffering of millions and millions of working-class people. And unless you recognize that reality, and have a vision of how you get out of that, I think you’re not going to be going very far as a political party.

Sanders added this:

The point that I am making is that ordinary people are not stupid. They see what’s going on in their own eyes, and if you’re not even talking about the reality of what is going on — the reality of their lives — they’re going to say: ‘Hey, no change is going to come. Why would I want to vote for a group of people who don’t even acknowledge the reality?’

Listen to the rest of the interview here.

AND ONE MORE THING