Trump’s plan to drain the swamp Washington's vested interests are rattled

The threat to K Street lobbyists is more obvious, but you wouldn’t know it from the outside. The Chamber of Commerce put out a polite statement congratulating Trump on his victory — after which the incoming President immediately started filling top posts with sworn enemies of the special interests the chamber represents. One long-time lobbyist I spoke with on Monday afternoon said K Street is “scared to death and not saying anything” for fear of retribution.

“The angel of death is hovering and they just want fucking lamb’s blood on their door,” the person added. Everyone is hoping the incoming administration “has bigger fish to fry” than their particular industry.

There is no modern precedent for these nominees. Trump’s first cabinet ruffled no feathers in the Republican Party as he surrounded himself with known quantities with conventional worldviews. Remember Tom Price? Alexander Acosta? How about David Shulkin and Sonny Perdue? Most people certainly don’t, though it’s hard to imagine anyone will have forgotten about RFK Jr in 10 years’ time.

Even Trump’s more disruptive picks in 2016 were solidly on the Right, from the longtime donor and activist Betsy DeVos to Rex Tillerson, who was first recommended to Trump by Condoleezza Rice and Robert Gates. Tillerson’s nomination even drew support from Dick Cheney.

But with a win in the popular vote and demographic winds shifting in his favour, Trump did the unthinkable this time around. This cabinet is a mix of bomb-throwers and GOP foot soldiers — slotting a fierce critic of government surveillance like Tulsi Gabbard next to John Ratcliffe, who is a staunch defender of controversial spy powers. If confirmed, Kennedy will rub elbows with Russell Vought, a longtime proponent of deregulation and cultural conservatism, and Chris Wright, a fracking executive.

Gabbard herself has said that Marco Rubio — nominated to lead the State Department — represents “the neocon, warmongering establishment of Washington, D.C.” As Director of National Intelligence, Gabbard’s sphere of influence would overlap significantly with Rubio’s. While Trump’s prior disagreements with his own nominees have been hashed out — and this is good enough for the GOP base — their disagreements with one another have not. How long the collective bunch will hold the peace is anyone’s guess.

But there is one thing that knits these characters together: their loyalty to Trump. It would be foolish to assume this will necessarily prevent discord and chaos. But perhaps these aren’t obstacles to success. During his first term, Trump openly said internal conflict was “the best way to go”, as news of fights between advisers such as John Bolton and John Kelly leaked into the press.

“It’s tough,” Trump said. “I like conflict, I like having two people with different points of view, and I certainly have that. And then I make a decision. But I like watching it, I like seeing it, and I think it’s the best way to go.”

This is not the way either major party has viewed presidential cabinets in the past; they were always considered places to park supportive ideologues. Even Barack Obama, elected on the mandate of “hope and change”, shied away from nominating Kennedy to head up the Environmental Protection Agency in 2008. Described by Politico at the time as a “well-respected climate lawyer”, a Chamber of Commerce lobbyist told the outlet that “a Kennedy appointment is as liberal as you can possibly get. There is no one [candidate] based firmer in extremes.”

Trump’s Republican Party today, in contrast, is one where Russia hawks Rubio and Michael Walz will have to share the stage with Moscow-friendly Kennedy and Gabbard. Pete Hegseth, a decorated veteran, activist, and Fox News host, will oversee the gargantuan Pentagon budget if he’s confirmed as Defense Secretary. He is a bitter opponent of the department’s bureaucracy who would gladly wave a wand and clean house. He will sit alongside Lori Chavez-DeRemer, Trump’s Teamsters-friendly Labor pick who is one of the only Republicans to have co-sponsored sweeping pro-union legislation and Kennedy and Gabbard, lifelong Democrats.

It’s hard to exaggerate how unusual it is for Democrats to find their way into a Republican cabinet, accept nominations alongside GOP ideologues, and be met with such little protest by most of the conservative movement. In the case of Kennedy and Gabbard, both were invited into Trump world not despite their unorthodox politics but because of them.

Not all of Kennedy, Gabbard, Chavez-DeRemer, and Hegseth’s views are truly subversive, though, and most of Trump’s nominees are ho-hum conservative standardbearers flavoured with a dash of MAGA. Former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi followed Matt Gaetz as nominee to head up the Department of Justice. Former GOP Reps. Sean Duffy and Doug Collins were tapped to lead the Departments of Transportation and Veterans Affairs respectively along with a handful of other Republican loyalists. Scott Bessent and Howard Lutnick will be familiar faces to Wall Street at Treasury and the Commerce Department.

But if Trump is their unifying belief, Trumpism will be defined by their clashing ideas. For outsiders, that’s an exciting prospect. For insiders, who’ve spent decades building the system and building their livelihoods around it, the prospect is deeply unsettling.

They fear that Trump and his deputies are plotting “retribution” and “mass” layoffs across the federal workforce. Brian Stelter reported this week that some journalists are genuinely anxious “about newsrooms being raided and media owners being audited”. At a recent gala for the Committee to Protect Journalists, Stelter notes one media CEO said, “journalists are being forced to hire their own security, for themselves and their families. And publications are setting aside massive legal budgets for the challenges we know are to come. It’s chilling.”

Journalists may not need private security, but legal protection could be critical. Trump has a long history of calling for leaders to pull the broadcast licenses of outlets that, as he sees it, report egregiously false information. Brendan Carr, Trump’s pick to head up the Federal Communications Commission, tweeted shortly after the announcement to say: “Broadcast media have had the privilege of using a scarce and valuable public resource — our airwaves. In turn, they are required by law to operate in the public interest. When the transition is complete, the FCC will enforce this public interest obligation.”

Trump, it is clear, has remade the GOP in his image, priming the party institutions to absorb “climate lunatics” such as RFK Jr — as one nonprofit leader told me this week — and to make peace with the politics of revenge. The transformation took eight years of pressure from the man and his voters. If anything, that level of compliance coupled with the utter demoralisation of the Democrats suggests Trump’s pledge to “drain the swamp” of his enemies is more serious than ever before.

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Emily Jashinsky is UnHerd‘s Washington D.C. Correspondent.

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