Donald Trump has announced his first high-level appointments, including some surprising choices. Pete Hegseth, best known for his Fox News appearances, was nominated as Secretary of Defense. Matt Gaetz, who waged an intraparty feud against fellow Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, has been put forward as Attorney General. Tulsi Gabbard, a former Democrat and acerbic critic of the intelligence community, has been named Director of National Intelligence. These nominees, among others Trump has offered, have generated tremendous consternation, in some cases running across party lines. Trump’s nominees have been called unqualified, partisan, and even threats to national security. But a significant and unnoticed thread unites the team that Trump is assembling around himself—their age, or rather, their youth.
Hegseth is 44. Matt Gaetz is 42. Tulsi Gabbard is 43. Vice President-elect J. D. Vance is 40, as is Trump’s proposed U.N. Ambassador Elise Stefanik. Lee Zeldin, Trump’s pick to run the Environmental Protection Agency, is 44. Vivek Ramaswamy, who will work with Elon Musk in non-official, nongovernmental effort nevertheless named the Department of Governmental Efficiency, is 39. Other major appointees are slightly older: proposed Homeland Security nominee Kristi Noem is 52, and Secretary of State nominee Marco Rubio is 53, as is Musk. But it’s clear that Trump’s Cabinet-level staff skews young. In this respect it marks a departure from the Cabinet that Trump picked in 2016, when he chose an older, more conventionally qualified team. The average age of his picks for Defense, State, and Justice eight years ago was 67; the average age for those same roles today is 46.
Many formulas exist for assembling a Cabinet. In April 2021, Joe Biden’s office posted a photograph of his team captioned, “A Cabinet that looks like America.” That picture—rather depressingly and tellingly—shows 25 people wearing black surgical masks and standing at appropriate social distance from one another, but the key message was that Biden had appointed a racially and sexually diverse group. Pete Buttigieg was hailed as the “first openly gay Cabinet secretary,” while Deb Haaland was the “first Native American to serve as a cabinet secretary,” which is technically true, though Charles Curtis, Calvin Coolidge’s vice president, was Native American and ex officio a member of the Cabinet. Lloyd Austin was the first black Secretary of Defense, and Janet Yellen was the first woman Treasury secretary. Biden had vowed, of course, to name a black woman as his running mate, and so Kamala Harris became the first woman vice president. Clearly, “diversity” was the driving consideration behind Biden’s Cabinet picks; it became the defining characteristic of much of his policy agenda, too.
Much was made in 2009 of Barack Obama’s collection of a “team of rivals” to form his Cabinet. The term was borrowed from Doris Kearns Goodwin’s political history of Abraham Lincoln’s presidency, during which he appointed three of his opponents in the 1860 election to serve in his administration. Obama, who self-consciously presented himself as Lincoln’s heir, embraced the idea of gathering a group of deep thinkers whose conflicts would produce sparks of inspiration. Obama famously named Hillary Clinton, his 2008 opponent in a hotly contested primary, as his Secretary of State, and initially named Bill Richardson—who made a short run at the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination, too—as Commerce chief. The “team of rivals” concept didn’t add up to much in the long run, but it was a prevalent theme during Obama’s presidential transition.
Donald Trump is clearly breaking with how he did things last time around, when he entered the White House as a political novice. In his October podcast appearance with Joe Rogan, Trump explained that he had found himself responsible for making 10,000 appointments, some directly, most through his appointees. “How did you know who to appoint?” Rogan asked. “Well, I didn’t,” Trump answered. “I had no experience, you have to understand.” As a result, Trump’s first Cabinet was fairly conventional, made up of respected industrialists and financiers like Rex Tillerson, Wilbur Ross, and Steve Mnuchin, establishment politicians and Washington insiders such as Jeff Sessions and Elaine Chao, and four-star generals like James Mattis.
Some of Trump’s appointees are certainly “designed to shake up Washington,” in the words of CNN’s Scott Jennings. Trump is naming committed reformers to help him “empty the swamp,” in the language of his 2016 campaign. But their relative youth also suggests that Trump, unlike most politicians, may be looking toward the future at his inevitable replacements. Trump has already reconfigured American politics and changed the complexion of the Republican Party, but a persistent question remains regarding the centrality of his personality to the current realignment: Can such shifts as we have seen extend after he’s gone? It appears that Trump is making an effort to ensure the continuity of his movement by building a bench of like-minded officials, giving them experience that can’t be bought and effectively forming a team of presidential contenders for elections to come.
If so, it is commendable that Trump is looking forward, past his own second term in office and to a time when he has passed from the scene. One may disagree with his policies, but his choice of younger men and women to staff the highest levels of his administration demonstrates a sense of care for the nation not often seen among the leadership class.
Photos: Roy Rochlin/Getty Images (left) / Andrew Harnik/Getty Images (center) / Justin Sullivan/Getty Images (right)