The robotic portrait of the Trump Government: white, young, ultra-rich man from Florida | International
The formation of the Government of the new president of the United States serves, every four years, for him to return favors, reward loyalties and set new priorities such as, for example, the incentive of cryptocurrencies. Also for the new tenant of the White House to send a message with the mirror he places in front of the society he is preparing to govern. In the case of Donald Trump, who will be sworn into office tomorrow Monday and in the last two months has announced a hundred signings, that mirror returns the image of an Administration whose robot portrait could be drawn as that of a white, ultra-rich, younger man. than his predecessors, with a face familiar to viewers of the Fox News network and, if possible, from Florida.
In such a large group of collaborators there is, moreover, (almost) everything, although if something unites them it is their proven loyalty to the boss in the four years that their journey in the desert has lasted after the defeat at the 2020 polls. , while plotting his revenge. This time, they are all his peopleand that is much more than could be said of those he named after winning in 2016. It was such an unexpected victory and his political experience was so little that he had to hastily surround himself with a team of collaborators who in many cases I barely knew. He fired several of them after a few months.
Eight years later, that has also changed: some 25 of Trump 2.0’s hires worked in his first Administration. This is the case of the two main architects of his immigration policy: Tom Homan, the “border czar,” and Stephen Miller, a young Rasputin who successfully advised the candidate to toughen his xenophobic discourse during the campaign. Also repeating are Linda McMahon (Secretary of Education), a professional wrestling businesswoman whom Trump knows from her flirtations with that show that is somewhere between violent and circus, or Peter Navarro, who will be a Commerce Minister after spending four months in jail for a crime. of contempt of Congress for refusing to testify before the bipartisan commission investigating the assault on the Capitol.
In addition to loyalty, these are other traits that define those who will have access to Trump’s Oval Office starting Monday:
Diversity, what diversity?
Trump has made history by appointing for the first time a woman, Susie Wiles, as chief of staff, perhaps the most powerful position in the White House, and a Latino, Marco Rubio, as secretary of state. For the rest, this Government will not be characterized by its diversity. Of 98 signings, only 16 are women. Among cabinet-level appointments (16 positions with power similar to that of a European minister, including the vice president), the proportion is higher: five women (including Pam Bondi, attorney general) compared to 11 men.
In that select group, whites are the overwhelming majority, except for Rubio, the Secretary of Labor, the Hispanic Lori Chavez-DeRemer, and Scott Turner, one of the two African Americans chosen by Trump (the other, also a former American football star , is Herschell Walker, and will serve as, ahem, ambassador to the Bahamas). On the broad payroll there are fifteen people who are not white; among them, the Samoan Tulsi Gabbard (director of National Intelligence), and a notable representation of new senior officials from Indian immigration, with the ultra-Trumpist Kash Patel (director of the FBI) and billionaire Vivek Ramaswamy, who will lead the newly created Department of Government Effectiveness with Elon Musk, at the helm.
None of these percentages can be surprising. The first Trump Administration was already predominantly male and white. And this time he built a campaign with misogynistic and xenophobic overtones with the promise of ending the Diversity, Equality and Inclusion policies that have governed American life in recent decades. These policies are the devil in the universe of Trump, who accused his rival, Kamala Harris, of having prospered thanks to them. For Musk, the most influential of his new collaborators, they are at the origin of the worst evils; This week he even blamed them for the devastation of the Los Angeles fires.
The new Government also succeeds the most diverse in history, formed by Joe Biden in the heat of the anti-racist protests that followed the murder of George Floyd and under the influence of the Me Too movement. Four years later, Trump has won the election with the support of young men who feel threatened by feminism, and those sudden realizations seem a thing of the past. The president-elect, found responsible by a jury for sexually abusing and defaming journalist E. Jean Carroll, also persists in his support of Fox News host Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense, despite the fact that he has been accused of rape and creating a hostile work environment for women.
GRAEME SLOAN (EFE)
The Government of the ultra-rich
Biden used his last speaking turn as president this week to warn of “the dangerous concentration of power in the hands of very few ultra-rich people.” He did so in his farewell speech, and he was referring to the extraordinary presence of great fortunes in the Administration of his successor, a billionaire himself. Trump already surrounded himself with rich people in his first round, but this time he has pulverized all brands.
He would have done it only with one of his collaborators, Musk, owner of the largest fortune in the world, estimated this Saturday at almost 434,000 million dollars, has a huge advantage over the rest of his colleagues in the White House at the top of the wheel of fortune. It can be argued where the line is between the rich and the ultra-rich, but not that a dozen of Trump’s appointments, from Ramaswamy to the secretaries of the Treasury (Scott Bessent) and Commerce (Howard Luttnick), fall into the second category. . With some logic, eight of his signings were also major donors to the presidential campaign. And there, again, Musk stands out from the rest, with a record contribution of more than 260 million dollars.
The Florida quarry… and Fox News
Ron DeSantis, the politician who for a brief moment in 2022 seemed capable of turning the page on Trump for the Republican Party, launched his failed presidential campaign with the publication of a political memoir that was intended to serve as a letter of introduction to the rest of the country and a slogan: Make America Florida. His candidacy came to nothing, but the idea of bringing the conservative ideals of Florida to the United States also serves to define another of the keys in the appointments of the man who swept him in the primaries.
After his defeat in 2020, Trump retired to his Mar-a-Lago retreat, in Palm Beach, a wealthy Florida city that has become the epicenter of his presidential transition since his electoral victory and the place to which they lead all MAGA paths (acronym of its motto: Make America Great Again), as well as in the fate of a handful of great technological entrepreneurs, such as Jeff Bezos, of Amazon, or Mark Zuckerberg, of Meta, more or less enemies in the past, who have gone to kiss the ring of the president-elect. Musk has practically moved into the new president’s golf club mansion, and at least a dozen of his signings have participated or hosted, according to The New York Times, of events at Mar-a-Lago.
The Florida youth team has served him to fill a dozen diplomatic positions, from the ambassador to Spain, Benjamín León Jr., to the ambassador to Panama, Kevin Marino Cabrera, both from Miami. Among the most prominent appointments with roots in Florida are Wiles, a well-known veteran of state politics (decisive in the fall of DeSantis); Rubio (son of Cuban immigrants); National Security Advisor, Mike Waltz; or Bondi, who was the second choice for attorney general after the end of Congressman Matt Gaetz, who resigned harassed by the scandal of an alleged relationship with a minor.
Waltz also meets the requirement of his connection to Fox News, a conservative news network on which he regularly appeared as an international politics analyst. He is not the only one: among Trump’s signings there are a dozen people close to the channel, some as much as Hegseth, host of the weekend edition of the program Fox & Friends and employee of the company since 2014.
The oldest president and the youngest cabinet
When he takes office tomorrow, Donald Trump (78 years and 7 months) will surpass Joe Biden as the oldest president in history at the time of taking office. Of course, he will have the youngest cabinet in decades. If the average age (54.1 years) of the six most important positions is taken – vice president, chief of staff, attorney general and secretaries of State, Treasury and Defense – it would be (provided the Senate approves these signings) the oldest low since the formation of the George HW Bush Administration in 1989.
You never know with Trump, but the American media attributes this to a desire to ensure the future of the MAGA movement and to contradict the fact that the law prevents him from being president again. Hence his decision to name JD Vance, 40, as vice president. He is the third youngest in history, and, although it is very early, also the unofficial Republican candidate for the White House in 2028.
