On “Meet the Press” last Sunday, Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyo., told me Senate Republicans were looking forward to “moving quickly” on President-elect Donald Trump’s Cabinet picks so Trump “can hit the ground running come Jan. 20.”
Barrasso wasn’t kidding.
Just this week alone — more than 60 days before the inauguration — Trump has already announced his picks to lead the State Department (Marco Rubio), Justice Department (Matt Gaetz), Defense Department (Pete Hegseth), Department of Health and Human Services (Robert F. Kennedy Jr.), Interior Department (Doug Burgum) and other positions like director of national intelligence (Tulsi Gabbard).
That’s a significant departure from Trump’s first term, when he was still weighing his Cabinet options at this same point in 2016. (Remember those interviews at Trump Tower from eight years ago?)
Another difference from eight years ago is how many of the establishment Cabinet picks back then — think James Mattis at the Pentagon, John Kelly at the Department of Homeland Security and even Jeff Sessions as attorney general — have been replaced by outsiders such as Hegseth and RFK Jr.
But what hasn’t really changed is the frenzied news cycle and the deluge of announcements via social media that come with Trump’s return to office. They’re just happening much earlier than they did eight years ago.
When it comes to his current picks, Trump is absolutely stress-testing whether Republican senators will break with him over some of his more controversial selections, like Gaetz and RFK Jr.
And while there has been some GOP backlash to Gaetz, for example, it’s a move that’s exactly in line with what Trump signaled he’d do on the campaign trail, where he talked about overhauling the Justice Department.
Former Trump adviser Steve Bannon told me this week that what Trump wants is to take a “blowtorch” to the Justice Department, and he sees Gaetz as that “torch.”
And this is important: While a number of lawmakers have expressed skepticism about Gaetz, no Republican senator has explicitly said they won’t vote for him — at least not yet.
