Last week Trump announced the first dozen nominees to his Cabinet and other high level positions in what will surely be a reactionary, anti-worker government. Since then another half dozen have been publicly named.
Robert Kennedy Jr. will be nominated for Secretary of Health and Human Services. Kennedy is yet another opportunist who was willing to bow down and kiss Trump’s ring after his own comically silly campaign for President failed. He is one of the many public voices who spread misinformation and discouraged people from getting Covid-19 vaccines. He recently said that he wanted to “empower” individuals to make their own choices on health. What this means is he doesn’t actually want to run a public health department, but rather, he wants everyone to just fend for themselves. He has made unfounded comments that Jews and Chinese had greater immunity to Covid, and truly idiotic assertions that certain chemicals may be making children gay or transgender and making boys more feminine and girls more masculine. He and Trump will get along just fine.
Mehmet Oz will be Trump’s choice to head the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. A once respected surgeon who devolved into a talk-show celebrity who peddles snake oils and other untested health products, Oz became rich playing on people’s individual health fears and desires. He will now be put in charge of the two massive government-run health care programs that ensure at least some level of health care for more than 140 million of the elderly and very poor. But on his talk show, he repeatedly promoted Medicare Advantage health plans, which are not part of Medicare, but are actually privately run, for-profit plans. It is likely that he will work to carry out the longtime Republican goal of cutting, destroying and privatizing these programs, particularly Medicaid, as much as possible.
Howard Lutnick will be nominated to become Trump’s Secretary of Commerce. Lutnick is a billionaire Trump friend who made his money through Cantor Fitzgerald, the Wall Street financial services firm. He will be most directly responsible for implementing the trade and tariff policies that Trump has so aggressively pushed. At the infamous Madison Square Garden rally, he actually argued that we should go back to the time before World War I, when “our economy was rocking.” (It must have just slipped his mind that during that period millions of working people in the U.S. struggled just to survive, workers worked nearly unlimited hours per week, children worked in coal mines and textile factories, and because there were no safety regulations, hundreds died in preventable workplace fires and accidents.)
Doug Burgum will be nominated to head the Department of the Interior. A former software and real estate company executive, and yet another billionaire on the Trump team, Burgum has been Governor of North Dakota, where he has allowed oil companies free reign to drill and to continue destroying our environment. He is expected to continue in that role as the head of the Interior Department, where he will likely follow Trump’s order to “drill, drill, drill.”
For Secretary of Education, Trump is nominating Linda McMahon. This might go without saying, but McMahon has no experience in education whatsoever, other than serving one year on the Connecticut Board of Education. She is yet another billionaire and longtime Trump friend, and she and her husband made their money from the company they co-owned, World Wrestling Entertainment. Normally, we might worry that making up fake and absurd wrestling storylines wouldn’t be a good qualification for running the Department of Education, but if Trump sticks to his previous assertions, her job will really only be to promote parental “choice” and anti-woke, patriotic education, and to oversee as many cuts to the department as possible.
Sean Duffy is to be nominated for Secretary of Transportation. Duffy became a public figure by being a cast member on MTV’s Real World reality show, is a former Congressman from Wisconsin and most recently a host on Fox Business. Despite showing his fealty to Trump by introducing a bill to expand Trump’s ability to impose tariffs, his appointment may actually be the least dangerous
Tulsi Gabbard will be Trump’s Director of National Intelligence. Gabbard, originally a Democratic Congressperson from Hawaii, is actually not a billionaire capitalist, but is instead a political opportunist and self-promoter. While she has rightly critiqued U.S. interventions and foreign policy worldwide, she did so by defending authoritarian rulers like Bashar al-Assad of Syria and Vladimir Putin of Russia. Her opportunism is best shown by her support for the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign in 2016, followed by her shift to supporting Trump as Trump’s popularity grew in recent years.
Brendan Carr will be appointed Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission. Carr actually authored a section of Project 2025 on freedom of speech and big-tech and may be a potentially dangerous appointment in an often ignored position. He is right to be critical of big tech, but when political operatives on the right criticize big tech, it is usually because they want more ability to lie with impunity, and therefore are critical of big tech for imposing any limitations whatsoever on what can be said through their media (think Elon Musk and Twitter/X). Under Trump, he will most likely allow misinformation and outright lies to flood media outlets. It is even possible that he will consider revoking operating licenses for media outlets that Trump targets. Carr’s appointment could mean that our already low-quality and limited sources of news and information get even worse, making it more and more difficult for us to get the accurate and comprehensive news that we need to understand the world. This is, of course, exactly what Trump wants.
Like last week’s Trump appointees, this group is also filled with self-promoting opportunists looking to inflate their egos and advance their stalled political careers, and billionaires looking to further their dominance of the U.S. political-economic system and grow even richer. Both types will advance their interests at our expense.
