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what Trumps' cabinet picks indicate about the future of the GOP
Compare this group with virtually any other Republican White House or cabinet, and you’ll see a team with shockingly little governing experience and almost no connection to the institutional Republican Party outside of donations made to affiliated political action committees. Trump is not picking from within the broad universe of the Republican Party; he has no interest in most of the politicians, policy entrepreneurs and experienced bureaucrats who make up most Republican administrations. He is interested, more or less, in people he sees on TV.
What he wants, as is clear to most observers, are deputies and subordinates who will show a special and specific loyalty to him, above and beyond everything else. Put a little differently: Trump is less concerned here with the health of the Republican Party, less concerned with building out the next generation of Republican leaders, than he is with serving his narrowest interests. The Republican Party could wither and die, and Donald Trump would not care, provided it did not disrupt his ability to enrich himself and his family. This dynamic — a president who does not care about his party — sets up an interesting tension. What happens when the interests of the president and the interests of the party diverge?
This dynamic also underscores one of the most important — and yet underremarked on — elements of the Republican Party in the age of Trump: its fundamental political impairment. Like its rival, the Republican Party is, to use a recent term of art, hollow. “At the heart of hollowness lies parties’ incapacity to meet public challenges,” Daniel Schlozman and Sam Rosenfeld observe in “The Hollow Parties: The Many Pasts and Disordered Present of American Party Politics.” And for the Republican Party, this looks like a party that moves through American politics in the form of a “shambolic, lumbering and decidedly dangerous mess” whose incapacity is “not just the absence of a common public purpose but, more ominously, the inability to control dangerous tendencies located ever more centrally inside the party.”
The institutions of the Republican Party — the establishment, as it were — have no capacity to influence, shape or discipline any of the people who operate under the Republican umbrella. This has been true for some time — it is a large part of how Trump could execute a hostile takeover in the first place — and it is especially true at this moment, when the party is little more than a patronage network centered on the personalist rule of an American caudillo and his billionaire allies, whose money can be deployed to circumvent party structures as much as bolster them. That Elon Musk could decide to run the Republican campaign apparatus and then subsequently make himself Trump’s unofficial co-president is evidence enough of the problem.
What he wants, as is clear to most observers, are deputies and subordinates who will show a special and specific loyalty to him, above and beyond everything else. Put a little differently: Trump is less concerned here with the health of the Republican Party, less concerned with building out the next generation of Republican leaders, than he is with serving his narrowest interests. The Republican Party could wither and die, and Donald Trump would not care, provided it did not disrupt his ability to enrich himself and his family. This dynamic — a president who does not care about his party — sets up an interesting tension. What happens when the interests of the president and the interests of the party diverge?
This dynamic also underscores one of the most important — and yet underremarked on — elements of the Republican Party in the age of Trump: its fundamental political impairment. Like its rival, the Republican Party is, to use a recent term of art, hollow. “At the heart of hollowness lies parties’ incapacity to meet public challenges,” Daniel Schlozman and Sam Rosenfeld observe in “The Hollow Parties: The Many Pasts and Disordered Present of American Party Politics.” And for the Republican Party, this looks like a party that moves through American politics in the form of a “shambolic, lumbering and decidedly dangerous mess” whose incapacity is “not just the absence of a common public purpose but, more ominously, the inability to control dangerous tendencies located ever more centrally inside the party.”
The institutions of the Republican Party — the establishment, as it were — have no capacity to influence, shape or discipline any of the people who operate under the Republican umbrella. This has been true for some time — it is a large part of how Trump could execute a hostile takeover in the first place — and it is especially true at this moment, when the party is little more than a patronage network centered on the personalist rule of an American caudillo and his billionaire allies, whose money can be deployed to circumvent party structures as much as bolster them. That Elon Musk could decide to run the Republican campaign apparatus and then subsequently make himself Trump’s unofficial co-president is evidence enough of the problem.
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https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/11/opinion/trump-republican-party-cabinet.html?unlocked_article_code=1.g04.g3vt.MxEr69Z8vFzW&smid=url-share