Donald Trump has long boasted about how much he likes winners and how much he likes winning.
Lately, though, he seems to prefer losing — at least when it comes to staffing his cabinet.
The president-elect is assembling a second administration chock-full of Republicans who have found just about every way imaginable to lose an election, whether it be to him, to Democrats or to one another.
Trump has chosen people whom he demolished, personally and professionally, in Republican primaries, including Senator Marco Rubio of Florida and Gov. Doug Burgum of North Dakota. He has selected figures who lost critical seats for the G.O.P., such as Mehmet Oz, who lost a Pennsylvania Senate race in 2022. He has chosen people whose races seemed a bit doomed from the start, such as Linda McMahon’s two unsuccessful Senate runs in blue Connecticut. And he has chosen people whose losses were low-profile, down-ballot affairs, such as his pick for C.D.C. director, a former congressman who lost a race for a seat in the Florida Legislature this year — in the primary.
This week, Trump chose Harmeet Dhillon, who lost her 2023 bid to lead the Republican National Committee, to run the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division. He picked Representative Dan Bishop, who lost the race for attorney general in North Carolina last month, for an O.M.B. post. And that was just Monday and Tuesday.
It’s a surprising development for a political figure who has long deployed the word “loser” as an insult, and who tried to overturn the 2020 election rather than admit he lost it. But some of these Republicans lost their races in part because of their support for Trump — which means losing can make for winning politics in Washington when loyalty to Trump is the coin of the realm.
In the halls of the Capitol on Tuesday, I asked Senator Mitt Romney, Republican of Utah, about all this. He’s certainly no fan of Trump; on Tuesday, he knocked the president-elect for stocking his cabinet with billionaires. But he seemed to be speaking for all Republican also-rans and channeling his own loss to former President Barack Obama in 2012 when he said, “As someone who’s lost elections, I think we’re highly qualified.”
I asked the retiring senator what he learned from losing a big election that helped him in government going forward.
His answer was crisp: “Don’t lose again.”
Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, a Trump ally and former Trump critic, said fidelity to Trump trumped a winning record.
“I think they’ve been loyal to the president and he believes they got more public service in them,” he said.
The Georgia loyalty calculus
No Trump appointees illustrate this dynamic better than his picks from Georgia, all of whom put allegiance to him above everything else and are seemingly now being rewarded.
The two Republicans who lost Georgia Senate runoff elections in early 2021 and cost their party control of the Senate as they indulged Trump’s false claims about his 2020 loss were picked to be part of his administration. Trump plans to appoint Kelly Loeffler, a wealthy Georgia businesswoman who lost to Senator Raphael Warnock, as the administrator of the Small Business Administration. He also intends to make David Perdue, the former senator who lost re-election to Jon Ossoff and then mounted a failed primary challenge against Gov. Brian Kemp, the ambassador to China.
As if that wasn’t enough, Trump intends to nominate Doug Collins, a former Georgia congressman who tried to primary Loeffler in 2020 by branding himself as an even closer Trump ally, to run the Department of Veterans Affairs.
Some of Trump’s choices have actually won their races. Gov. Kristi Noem of South Dakota, his pick for secretary of homeland security, cruised to election and re-election with his support. Representative Elise Stefanik of New York shed her onetime identity as a Trump critic and rose through the ranks of the House; she is expected to sail to confirmation as his ambassador to the United Nations.
Of course, Trump world doesn’t see any pattern of losing in his picks, and doesn’t like using the L-word very much anyway.
It’s not all that unusual for a president to appoint people who haven’t been successful in electoral politics. To run a race and lose often means someone is tested, and maybe a little toughened up. Obama appointed Hillary Clinton to be his secretary of state after he beat her in the 2008 Democratic primary, and President Biden made Pete Buttigieg the secretary of transportation after Buttigieg, the former mayor of South Bend, Ind., bowed out of the Democratic primary in 2020. But the sheer number of incoming Trump administration officials with a history of not winning at the ballot box is eye-opening.
The upside of losing
Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana, a Republican who mounted two unsuccessful Senate bids before he won his seat in 2016, said he did not think Trump was intentionally picking people who had lost, but he added that losing “humbles you.”
“It’s good to be knocked down a little while,” he said.
I asked if that meant Trump’s government would be stocked with humility.
He paused. Ever the optimist, he replied, “I hope so.”
Some of Trump’s appointees will serve as a direct reminder of his own power. Mike Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor who was an early 2016 primary dropout, is Trump’s choice for ambassador to Israel. Vivek Ramaswamy, the 2024 also-ran, has been tasked with working with Elon Musk on government efficiency. Then, of course, there’s Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard, who bowed out of Democratic presidential primaries and ultimately aligned themselves with him.
On Monday night, at the Department of State, I saw another side of the issue: Washington is still a place where losers get to write history.
The agency unveiled a portrait of John Kerry. He lost the 2004 presidential race to George W. Bush and went on to spend more time in government, first as Obama’s second secretary of state, and then as an international climate envoy for Biden.
“It’s been said that being president of the United States is the toughest job in the world,” Kerry said in his remarks Monday night. “I wouldn’t know.”
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