In the genteel surroundings of Butterworth’s, a restaurant two blocks from Capitol Hill in Washington, diners who had long fantasised about throwing a grenade into the established norms of government were revelling in another wave of nominations by Donald Trump, the president-elect.
Over veal shank and negroni crème brûlée, young men better known by their online personas cheered as Robert F Kennedy Jr, a vaccine sceptic, was picked as head of the Department of Health and Human Services, Tulsi Gabbard, a former Democrat who has been accused of being a Putin apologist, was elevated to intelligence chief, and Matt Gaetz, a Florida congressman formerly under investigation by the House of Representatives’ ethics committee, was nominated as attorney-general.
Washington was being lit on fire and these influential Trump supporters were here for the sheer, unbridled pleasure of watching it burn.
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“This is their Super Bowl,” said one of my dining companions, a conservative influencer who posts online as Audrey Horne. “It’s their victory lap. They’re loving the chaos.”
The restaurant, which opened this autumn, has become a salon of the new right, a mostly male and extremely online group whose luminaries are Peter Thiel, founder of PayPal, and Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and head of the newly formed Department of Government Efficiency (Doge), whose stated aim is to “dismantle government bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure federal agencies”. Despite its name, Doge is an advisory committee, not a governmental department.
The new right was instrumental in rallying people, young men in particular, to Trump’s cause with a mix of anti-woke, anti-feminist, pro-chaos and disruption messaging, dressed in layers of irony.
After four years as president, when Trump believes that he was stymied by a “deep state” that worked within the government bureaucracy to stop him carrying out his agenda, and four years out of power, when the president-elect believes that he was targeted by unfair prosecutions, Trump is determined to dismantle legacy institutions and “drain the swamp”.
This philosophy is embodied by the first foreign leader that Trump chose to meet after his re-election: Javier Milei, the far-right “anarcho-capitalist” libertarian president of Argentina.
When he took power a year ago, Milei promised to take a “chainsaw” to Argentina’s institutions to fix a broken economy and government. The country’s poverty rate has since soared to more than 50 per cent, though many still hope that his “shock therapy” will deliver results.
“Milei really matters because he’s been able to articulate this very disruptive … getting rid of all these government departments [mindset],” said Marshall Kosloff, host of The Realignment podcast, which surveys the ways that America has changed since Trump’s election in 2016.
That libertarian instinct, exemplified by Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, who will lead Doge together, has blended with the nationalist populism of Trump and JD Vance, his vice-presidential choice, to create an anti-establishment, anti-institutional force that is being unleashed on Washington.
While Trump has made some fairly conventional nominations — such as picking Doug Burgum, North Dakota’s governor and once a rival for the 2024 Republican nomination, to lead the Department of the Interior, and choosing Senator Marco Rubio for secretary of state — others have been unexpected.
“I’d say the big debate would be reform versus just total disruption. And these picks indicate they’re picking the disruption option,” Kosloff said.
On Friday night, Trump announced that he had chosen Karoline Leavitt, his 27-year-old national campaign press secretary, to serve as his White House press secretary, meaning she will be the youngest person to hold the position when she begins in January.
Nominees for government posts have to be approved by the Senate before their positions are confirmed. Though the Republicans have a thin majority, it is not at all clear that senators will push through appointments for candidates who are inexperienced and unvetted.
Trump has floated a way of bypassing the inconvenience of confirmation hearings by pushing through appointments while the Senate is in recess. In a post on X a few days after the election, he wrote that “any Republican Senator seeking the coveted LEADERSHIP position in the United States Senate must agree to Recess Appointments (in the Senate!), without which we will not be able to get people confirmed in a timely manner”.
The measure has been used before, including in the administrations of George W Bush and Barack Obama.
At a convention last week for the Federalist Society, a group of influential conservative and libertarian lawyers, those attending said they did not believe that Trump would succeed in using recess appointments to push through all of his controversial choices, and said they believed that the Senate would probably rebuff such requests.
Like many others, Peter Antonelli, a lawyer from Boston, considered the choice of Gaetz — a Florida congressman best known for leading the campaign to oust the Republican Speaker of the House last year — as a “troll” that he did not expect to get through the Senate.
Those around Trump say that he is deadly serious about his nominations. “He means what he says,” one adviser told me. “That’s it. He wants them.”
Trump wants his nominees to achieve specific objectives that he and his team have been planning for since at least 2020. Kosloff said the president-elect’s priority was to avoid repeating past mistakes.
“Trump and his team didn’t expect to win in 2016, so … they didn’t have a fully mapped set of people who they wanted to put in big positions, or even the second or third-layer positions,” he said. “The different factions of even the Trump coalition were not all aligned with the same mission.”
This resulted in internal chaos during the first six months of the administration but also a real vacuum that more establishment parts of the Republican party, as opposed to Trump and Make America Great Again (Maga) loyalists, were then able to fill.
Now, Trump, who believes that by winning the popular vote he has been delivered a resounding mandate to shake things up, is not going to let that happen.
Already, however, there have been hiccups. Pete Hegseth, Trump’s choice for defence secretary, is a telegenic Fox News host and former National Guard major who has said that women should not serve in combat roles. Hegseth, who was deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan, was said to be instrumental in convincing Trump during his first term to pardon three American soldiers accused or convicted of war crimes. Last week the transition team in Palm Beach were, according to Vanity Fair, meeting to discuss sexual assault allegations that he had been investigated for in 2017.
Trump made clear on Saturday that he was sticking by his choice. “President Trump is nominating high-calibre and extremely qualified candidates to serve in his administration,” Steven Cheung, his communications director said. “Mr Hegseth has vigorously denied any and all accusations, and no charges were filed.”
Other appointments have left Washington incredulous, and worried about their practical implications.
Gabbard, Trump’s pick for intelligence chief, has for years been the most prominent American politician to reliably repeat pro-Russian and pro-Syrian regime talking points. After Assad’s chemical attacks on his own people, which were documented by the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, Gabbard, who was a Democratic congresswoman in Hawaii at the time, said she was “sceptical” that they had happened.
She met Assad, an avowed foe of the US and Israel, and a close ally of Iran, in 2017 during a visit to Syria. Mouaz Mustafa, director of the Syrian emergency task force, who accompanied her on a trip to opposition-held areas in 2015, told me that she had asked three young girls who had been seriously burnt in an airstrike on their camp how they knew that it was Assad and his Russian allies who had dropped the bombs that hurt them, rather than the rebels that controlled the area. She didn’t appear to realise that the rebels didn’t have aircraft.
Gabbard later said that Assad was “not an enemy” of America but when criticised added that he was a “brutal dictator”.
A former western diplomat who worked on Syria during the civil war, and remains close to the opposition said Gabbard’s nomination was “mind blowing” and “very, very damaging”.
If Kennedy is confirmed as health secretary he would lead a $2 trillion agency with responsibility for approving drugs and vaccines, medical research and administering insurance programmes. While mainstream scientists agree with many of his claims about the failing American health system, he has also spread false information, including that antidepressants are linked to school shootings.
For many, however, it was Gaetz’s nomination as attorney-general that has been the most shocking. The Florida representative has made many enemies within his own party for his gleeful, wrecking-ball style and appears to relish the controversies swirling around him.
Until last year he had been under criminal investigation by the justice department for allegations of underage sex with minors and trafficking a 17-year-old girl across state lines. The criminal inquiry was dropped in February last year without any charges. Gaetz has denied all wrongdoing.
Following his nomination last week, Gaetz resigned his seat in the House of Representatives, meaning that another investigation being conducted by the House ethics committee into allegations of sexual misconduct and drug use was dropped as only House members are investigated by the committee. It is not clear whether it will still release the report of its finding.
Gaetz has repeatedly denied allegations of trafficking and having sex with a 17-year-old high school student at a drug-fuelled party in 2017.
During an interview with CNN last year, the Republican senator Markwayne Mullin said of Gaetz: “We had all seen the videos he was showing on the House floor … of the girls that he had slept with. He’d brag about how he would crush ED [erectile dysfunction] medicine and chase it with an energy drink so he could go all night.” Gaetz has denied the claim.
In a statement nominating Gaetz for attorney general, Trump wrote: “Under Matt’s leadership, all Americans will be proud of the Department of Justice once again.”
