As many noted during the 2024 election, one of the major ways Donald Trump’s second term will differ from his first is in who he surrounds himself with in the White House. Whereas during his first time in office, he hired relatively mainstream Republicans—who were comfortable pushing back when he reportedly said he “wanted the kind generals that Hitler had” or asked if the government could “just shoot” racial justice protesters in the summer of 2020—this time, he plans to exclusively hire advisers who tell him what he wants to hear. In fact, according to his eldest son, a prerequisite for serving in a second Trump administration is to not “know better” than his father.
During an interview with Fox News on Thursday, Donald Trump Jr. said that he is going to be “heavily involved on the transition,” adding, “I want to make sure, now that we know who the real players are, the people who will actually deliver on the president’s message, the people who don’t think that they know better than the duly elected president of the United States.” (It’s not clear if these people will be required to take an IQ test to confirm they don’t “know better” than Trump on a variety of matters, or if they will simply have to pledge not to speak up even if they know he’s in the wrong.) “I want to make sure that those people are in his Cabinet,” Jr. told Fox. “I want to make sure that those people are in this administration.”
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This past July, Don Jr. told Axios that he wants “veto power” over who makes the second-administration cut, so that he can “block the bad actors” who aren’t sufficiently loyal to his dad. “I want to block the liars. I want to block the guys that are pretending they’re with you,” he said. Cantor Fitzgerald CEO Howard Lutnik, who will help lead the transition, has similarly said government appointees must prove their “loyalty” to Trump.
Names currently being circulated to make up the incoming president’s Cabinet include Marco Rubio, Elon Musk, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the latter of whom has said Trump promised him oversight of the Department of Health and Human Services. There, among other things, Kennedy has pledged to get rid of fluoride in water, which Trump has said “sounds okay” to him. If either had bothered to check in with actual experts, they would have been told of the overwhelmingly positive benefits of fluoridated water—but as the Trumps have made clear, experts are not welcome in this administration.
