Trump picks more loyalists and campaign donors for administration positions

In the second week since the election, President-elect Donald Trump has continued to name candidates to serve in his administration. His picks include wealthy campaign backers, television personalities, contributors to the controversial Project 2025 plan, and individuals with a history of ethical and sex scandal allegations, and most of them lack any relevant experience for the positions.

After Trump repeatedly disparaged the people he appointed during his first term as “incompetent” and “morons,” his initial choices for positions in his administration included loyalists former Florida Republican U.S. Rep. Matt Gaetz to be attorney general, Fox News host Pete Hegseth to be defense secretary, and wealthy backers Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to lead a new government efficiency department.

He has since announced more appointments.

Doug Burgum for secretary of the interior and energy czar

Burgum, a wealthy software executive and two-term Republican governor of South Dakota, unsuccessfully ran in the 2024 GOP presidential primary against Trump. After dropping out, he served as a Trump campaign energy adviser and liaison to fossil fuel executives. 

He has advocated for corporate tax cuts and deregulation; backed increased drilling for gas on public lands; and opposed a move to electric vehicles. His record also includes sending a letter with other Republican governors demanding Congress repeal the Affordable Care Act, commonly known as Obamacare, and signing a near-total state abortion ban in 2023.

Brendan Carr for chair of the Federal Communications Commission

Carr, a Musk-alligned member of the Federal Communications Commission and an opponent of net neutrality rules, echoed Trump’s calls for a crackdown on large tech companies and news outlets he deems political enemies. In a Nov. 13 letter to the CEOs of Alphabet, Apple, Meta, and Microsoft, he accused them of having “participated in a censorship cartel that included not only technology and social media companies but advertising, marketing, and so-called ‘fact checking’ organizations as well as the Biden-Harris Administration itself,” and promised to investigate them. 

On Nov. 19, he told Fox News, “There’s also a news distortion complaint at the FCC still, having to do with CBS, and CBS has a transaction before the FCC, and I’m pretty confident that that news distortion complaint over the ‘60 Minutes’ transcript is something that is likely to arise in the context of the FCC review of that transaction.” Trump has falsely claimed the program misleadingly edited an interview with Vice President Kamala Harris and demanded the network lose its broadcast license as punishment. 

Though Trump spent much of his campaign denying any ties with Project 2025, a blueprint created by the right-wing Heritage Foundation for his transition, Carr is one of several of his current picks who contributed to that project. 

Doug Collins for secretary of veterans affairs

Collins, a former Republican U.S. representative from Georgia who unsuccessfully ran for the Senate in a 2020 GOP primary, is known for defending Trump in his position as the top GOP member of the House Judiciary Committee. When the committee in 2019 charged Trump with abuse of power and obstruction over attempts to pressure Ukraine to dig up dirt on his political opponents, Collins dubbed it a “sham impeachment.” 

He has a record of voting against reproductive rights and co-sponsoring federal abortion bans. In 2020, Roll Call reported that he had seemingly violated House ethics rules by reposting anti-abortion language from his official website in campaign materials. Collins never served on the House Veterans Affairs Committee and, according to Military.com, did not focus on veterans’ issues during his eight years in Congress.

Sean Duffy for secretary of transportation

Duffy, a Fox News personality and former Republican U.S. representative from Wisconsin, has negligible experience in transportation policy, although he did once appear as a contestant on MTV’s “Road Rules: All Stars.”  

During his time as a CNN contributor in 2019, he faced criticism from colleagues for what they said was anti-immigrant bigotry after he repeated conspiracy theories about a missing Democratic National Committee computer server being in Ukraine and baselessly accusing then-National Security Council official Alexander Vindman of disloyalty.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for secretary of health and human services

Kennedy, a prominent anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist who ran as a Democratic and then as an independent presidential candidate in 2024, endorsed Trump in August after reportedly offering to endorse Harris in exchange for a Cabinet appointment.

He has repeated the false claims and conspiracy theories that vaccines cause autism, that AIDS is caused by gay men using alkyl nitrate (commonly known as poppers) during sex, that COVID-19 may have been bioengineered to spare Jewish and Chinese people, that fluoride in water may cause cancer, and that airplanes are used to disperse dangerous trails of chemicals and biological agents as they fly. Public health experts have lined up against his nomination, calling his record of false claims dangerous. 

Kennedy reportedly apologized in July to a former family babysitter who accused him of sexual assault, texting, “I have no memory of this incident but I apologize sincerely for anything I ever did that made you feel uncomfortable or anything I did or said that offended you or hurt your feelings.” Asked if more stories of sexual misconduct might come out later, he told the Boston Globe, ”We’ll see what happens.”

Howard Lutnick for secretary of commerce

Lutnick, a Wall Street billionaire who contributed millions of dollars in support of Trump’s 2024 campaign, has spent his entire career in the private sector. 

At a Trump campaign rally in October, he suggested that the nation was better off in 1900: “At the turn of the century, our economy was rocking. This was 125 years ago. We had no income tax, and all we had was tariffs.” 

Linda McMahon for secretary of education

McMahon, the billionaire co-founder of World Wrestling Entertainment and Trump’s former Small Business Administration administrator, contributed at least $15 million to support Trump’s 2024 campaign. 

Her most relevant experience was a one-year stint on Connecticut’s state Board of Education from 2009 to 2010, though she resigned after the Hartford Courant discovered that she had falsely claimed to have a bachelor’s degree in education when she filled out a board questionnaire.

In October, Rolling Stone reported that five former employees who had worked as WWE ring boys as teens in the 1980s had filed a lawsuit against McMahon and her husband Vince, charging that they “knew or should have known” about a staffer who allegedly sexually abused them. An attorney told the Washington Post on Nov. 19 that the McMahons are separated and that the lawsuit was baseless.

National Education Association president Becky Pringle opposed McMahon’s nomination in a Nov. 19 press release, likening her to Trump’s former Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, who backed public funding for private and religious schools: “The Senate must stand up for our students and reject Donald Trump’s unqualified nominee, Linda McMahon. Our students and our nation deserve so much better than Betsy DeVos 2.0.” 

Mehmet Oz for administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services

Oz, the unsuccessful 2022 Pennsylvania Republican U.S. Senate nominee and television host, has a long history of repeating false medical claims and promoting unproven “miracle” treatments. An opponent of reproductive rights, he suggested during the Senate campaign that decisions about abortion should be made by “women, doctors, local political leaders.” 

He has pushed for expansion of the Medicare Advantage program, a partially privatized version of Medicare that costs the government more while delivering comparable levels of care to traditional Medicare, and has suggested that all veterans be forced to get health insurance through private health insurance exchanges. 

Trump appointed Oz to the President’s Council on Sports, Fitness & Nutrition, an unpaid advisory committee, in 2018. He was fired by President Joe Biden in March 2022 after announcing his Senate candidacy, an apparent violation of the Hatch Act, which prohibits members of advisory committees from running in partisan elections during their tenure.

Trump endorsed Oz’s 2022 campaign, citing his success as an entertainer: “You know when you’re in television for 18 years, that’s like a poll. That means people like you.”

““Even putting aside the raft of alarming pseudoscience Dr. Oz has previously endorsed, it is deeply disappointing to see someone with zero qualifications being announced to head up such a critical agency,” Senate Appropriations Committee chair Patty Murray, a Washington Democrat, said in a Nov. 19 press release. “This is a pattern of Donald Trump pushing forward people he likes watching on TV for hugely consequential jobs in government, and it’s going to lead to more chaos and bad outcomes for regular people — as we saw last time when Trump’s health care sabotage sent the uninsured rate skyrocketing. ”

Chris Wright for secretary of energy

Wright, a wealthy fossil fuel company CEO, has no government experience. He supports the continued use of oil and gas energy, which is causing climate change, saying on a 2023 podcast: “I don’t care where energy comes from, as long as it makes people’s lives better. It’s reliable, affordable and secure.”

Forbes reported that Wright has opposed action to curb greenhouse emissions, writing in his book “Bettering Human Lives,” “Climate change is a global challenge but is far from the world’s greatest threat to human life.” He wrote that eliminating “energy poverty” by 2050 is more important than getting to net-zero carbon emissions.