The difficulties at the start of Trump’s second term are a predictable consequence of the president’s getting whom he wanted in his administration.
When Donald Trump’s administration runs aground, an almost clichéd response from his disappointed supporters is that “the president is getting some very bad advice.” That bit of blame-shifting exonerates Trump from the consequences of his decisions and lays responsibility at the feet of whichever cabinet member or top staffer has Trump’s ear at any given moment. Trump cannot fail; he can only be failed.
With that said, every president needs a good team around him, and the fact that the buck stops with the president doesn’t mean that he isn’t getting bad advice and marching into box canyons because of that advice. Trump made a lot of unorthodox picks for his cabinet, and now he’s living with the consequences.
It appears that a significant factor in the difficulties at the start of Trump’s second term is a predictable consequence of the president’s getting whom he wanted in his administration.
- Whatever you think of our ever-changing tariff policies, it’s clear that top trade adviser Peter Navarro, National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick have dramatically different ideas about what the aim of the tariff policies is and cannot align their arguments in justification of those policies. Earlier this month, Navarro was on a Sunday show insisting that the tariffs were not a negotiating tactic, while Hassett was on another contending that one benefit of the tariffs was that other countries were now ready to negotiate. According to the Wall Street Journal, Bessent and Lutnick managed to persuade Trump to lower the tariffs on most countries because Hassett was keeping Navarro occupied in a different part of the White House. And this isn’t even getting into Elon Musk’s publicly calling Navarro a “moron.”
- Whatever you think of Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, the best-case scenario is that his first choices for the team around him were a bunch of leakers. A worse scenario is that internal personal and petty rivalries got a bunch of people fired over false accusations.
- Whatever you think of the president’s foreign policy, any credibility from the likes of Secretary of State Marco Rubio or National Security Adviser Mike Waltz is undermined by the confusing and contradictory public statements made by Steve “maybe Hamas duped me” Witkoff, who is technically the president’s special envoy to the Middle East but seems to be running the show on negotiations between Russia and Ukraine, between Israel and Hamas, and over Iran’s nuclear program.
On several of the administration’s top priorities, it’s not clear that everyone’s oar is in the water and rowing in the same direction.
And this isn’t getting into other minor headaches, such as Education Secretary Linda McMahon’s repeatedly referring to “A1” in America’s schools when she meant “AI” (artificial intelligence), or Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s feeling a need to hold a rifle while making a public statement at a deportation raid in Arizona. These are just the formal cabinet members and White House staffers; somehow nutjob influencer Laura Loomer ended up getting six officials of the National Security Council replaced.
Doris Kearns Goodwin famously described President Lincoln’s cabinet as a “team of rivals,” and Cliff Sims — who came back to work on Trump’s transition team — described Trump’s first-term staff as a “team of vipers,” obsessed with conflicts and jealousies and vendettas and constantly undermining each other to the detriment of the administration’s agenda.
The short-lived nomination of Matt Gaetz as attorney general demonstrated that Republican senators could derail a bad cabinet pick by quietly (or not so quietly) communicating their concerns to Trump and Susie Wiles. But for a lot of other cabinet picks and other top posts, GOP lawmakers didn’t object too loudly. The country, and the president, now live with the consequences.