The New York Times has a solid article on why Trump’s picks will prove unpopular (at which point Trump will probably abandon some of them).
Excerpt:
My colleague Ezra Klein, has written, for example, about the power that “the groups” — progressive activist organizations — exercise over Democratic policy. They demand that politicians focus on issues that might be important, but that are often not matters of majority concern. Or, even worse, they demand political fealty to positions that majorities reject.
In many administrations, this dynamic results in a kind of tug of war between the activists who demand attention to their pet causes and the political realists who grab the candidate’s arm and tap the sign that reads, “It’s the economy, stupid. And then, every few years, the majority steps back in, determines whether politicians have taken care of prices, crime and peace, and then ruthlessly punishes failure — regardless of whether the activists got what they wanted, and even if they might agree with the activists’ concerns.
With Trump, the dynamic is different. He’s so consumed with his grievances and his base’s grievances that rather than there being a tug of war between activists and pragmatists for the politician’s attention, the activists and the politician are both aligned against the pragmatists.. That was the clear direction of Trump’s first term. At first he surrounded himself with serious people. Think of the contrast, for example, between Jim Mattis as secretary of defense and Pete Hegseth, or between Alex Azar, the secretary of health and human services for most of Trump’s first term, and an anti-vax conspiracy theorist like Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
But the serious people told him no. They tried to block his worst instincts. So they were purged. Throughout the campaign, Trump ran with two messages. On the airwaves, he convinced millions of Americans that they were electing the Trump of January 2019, when inflation was low, and the border was under reasonable control. At his rallies, he told MAGA that it was electing the Trump of January 2021, the man unleashed from establishment control and hellbent on burning it all down.
But here is his fundamental problem: The desires of his heart and the grievances of his base are ultimately incompatible with the demands of the majority, and the more he pursues his own priorities, the more he’ll revive his opposition. He’ll end his political career as an unpopular politician who ushered in a Democratic majority yet again.
The reason goes deeper than ideology (many of his nominees are extremists) or scandal (Kennedy, Hegseth, and Matt Gaetz, each have their own histories of alleged sexual misconduct, for example). Ultimately, it goes to competence: Can you do the job we ultimately hired you to do?
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