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What Trump’s cabinet picks reveal so far
Jon Lieber, Eurasia Group's head of research and managing director for the firm's coverage of United States political and policy developments, shares his perspective on US politics from Washington, DC.
This is what we're watching in US politics this week: It's Trump's transition, of course. Lots of activity happening over the course of the week with some unexpected developments, including a lot of very unusual cabinet appointees. Sean Duffy at Department of Transportation, former "Real World" star and congressman, who has very little experience with transportation other than presumably driving a car, and of course, competing on the "Real World/Road Rules Challenge" is going to be in charge of the transportation department.
Other picks like Pete Hegseth have been a little more controversial. The former Army National Guard member and Fox News host has been accused of sexual assault. Not a great look for the incoming Secretary of Defense. But he's nowhere near as controversial as the recently withdrawn pick, Matt Gaetz, the firebrand Congressman from Florida who resigned his seat in order to become Trump's attorney general, and then found out that no Republican wanted him in that job.
Gaetz's withdrawal will allow some of the more controversial attention to be focused on people like RFK Jr. as the Secretary of Health and Human Services, somebody with a long career in the nonprofit management space, but no experience in public administration and who's been extremely critical of the US's Public Health Administration, including on toxins in foods, additives in foods, vaccines, and the approval process for them. And he's tapped into a strain of anger among Republicans at the public health apparatus that they say failed to protect the public during the COVID-19 epidemic, pointing to inconsistent and sometimes unnecessary masking guidelines. Things like social distancing, keeping the schools closed, and of course the vaccine recommendations that a lot of Republicans rejected during that pandemic. RFK's confirmation odds, however, look pretty good if you look at the relatively warm reception that he's been received with by most Republicans.
One area that's still totally in doubt for the most part is Trump's economic team. It's been two weeks since the election, there's no treasury of the secretary, there's no USTR. There is a commerce secretary pick, another Trump ally who has no experience in public administration, Howard Lutnick, a lot like Wilbur Ross in the first administration, but potentially leaving Trump's trade czar, Robert Lighthizer, without any clear role. So there's a lot more clarity on the national security side than there is on the economic side for now. That may change over the weekend. And of course, the one thing with President Trump is you could always expect the unexpected.
Exclusive GZERO Poll: What will Trump do first in office?
Donald Trump has promised a laundry list of things he will accomplish “on Day 1” in office. To name a few, he has vowed to immediately begin a mass deportation of immigrants, streamline the federal government, pardon Jan. 6 rioters, and roll back the Biden administration’s education and climate policies.
But Trump will face an uphill battle. While he will have a united Congress behind him, he will still need to circumvent budgetary, logistical, and political barriers – especially for some of his most ambitious goals, like deporting millions of immigrants.
With the help of Echelon Insights, GZERO polled over 1,000 Americans about what they think Donald Trump is likely to do first. The majority of respondents believed that Trump’s first priority in office will be deporting unauthorized immigrants, followed by pardoning Jan. 6 rioters and enacting tariffs on China.
What do you think Trump is likely to do first in office? Shoot us an email sharing your prediction here.
Ukraine fires US missiles into Russia. What's next?
Ian Bremmer shares his insights on global politics this week on World In :60.
Ukraine has launched US-made long-range missiles into Russia for the first time. Will this change the course of the war?
I don't think so. First of all, the reason the Americans were dragging their feet for so long is because they didn't believe it would have any strategic impact in the war to give that permissioning to the Ukrainians and they were worried that it might lead to Russian escalation. That escalation is less likely given that Trump has been elected and he's going to be in power in just a couple of months, so the Russians basically have to deal with it, and they'll probably end up hitting more Ukrainian sites in the next couple of months. But I don't think it's really going to help the Ukrainians. I don't think it's going to hurt the Russians that much. What I do think is that the Russians are more likely to give better weapons, more capable weapons, to the Houthis, for example. So, if the Americans are going to arm proxies better, then the Russians will arm proxies better, and that could lead to bigger problems in the Gulf.
How likely will Trump be able to carry out mass deportations when he's in office?
I think he will be capable. He certainly was elected in part on that intention, on that promise. This is something that Biden really did not pay attention to until way too late and he lost a lot of votes in blue cities where people felt like there were just far too many illegal immigrants and the costs were great, and the security concerns were real. And so, the fact that he says he's going to use the military, that's potentially a Supreme Court question, but especially when you talk about people that have committed crimes in the United States, why they should still be in the US is a very serious question. And I wouldn't be surprised at all if 300,000, 500,000 deported in the first year. In other words, a hell of a lot higher than you've seen under Biden. There will be an inflation cost there, but it's one that I don't think Trump is going to take a big hit for.
Will there be political fallout from Hong Kong's decision to jail pro-democracy activists?
Not really, because China has changed the national security law. They've completely integrated Hong Kong into the Chinese political system and the pro-democracy activists don't have anyone that's willing to support them, not the UK, not the United States. I mean, they're human rights organizations, and you'll see members of Congress on the Democrat and Republican side that'll complain about it, but they won't do anything. So on balance, I don't think it matters, and that means, or I should say, it doesn't matter for China, which means very little blowback.
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What Donald Trump’s Cabinet picks mean for AI
Donald Trump isn’t finished nominating his presidential Cabinet — and some of his top candidates might have a tricky time getting confirmed, even by a Republican-controlled Senate. Still, Trump’s early picks already offer signs about how he might direct his federal government’s approach to artificial intelligence.
Duane Pozza, a former Federal Trade Commission assistant director in the first Trump administration who is now a partner at the law firm Wiley Rein, said the government’s approach to AI is at an “inflection point,” and Trump has big decisions to make about how much of Joe Biden’s AI legacy he wants to undo. “The next administration will decide whether to roll back any part of the executive order,” he said, referring to Biden’s sweeping executive order on AI from October 2023, “and how to best implement policies to support AI innovation for US global competition.”
Antitrust the process
Trump’s selection of Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz could also have implications for AI. Gaetz’s nomination has drawn intense bipartisan scrutiny over his professional inexperience and brash demeanor, and allegations of sexual misconduct and illegal drug use that were the subject of a House Ethics Committee investigation, the findings of which have not yet been released. If confirmed, Gaetz could carry out Trump’s prosecutorial whims by targeting the president’s enemies in Silicon Valley — over the years there have been many, including Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos.
But the Justice Department is also one of two antitrust authorities in the United States alongside the Federal Trade Commission. And while we don’t know who Trump will pick to succeed Lina Khan as chair of the FTC — she might resign, but she can technically stay under a successor is confirmed — Gaetz, along with Vice President JD Vance, has signaled sympathies for Khan’s tough-on-tech outlook in the past and even suggested she should stay on under Trump.
Benjamin Sirota, a former Justice Department antitrust prosecutor and current partner at the law firm Kobre & Kim, said the lines between traditional Democratic and Republican stances in antitrust law have blurred. He expects Trump will usher in “a retrenchment from some of the most aggressive policies and priorities of the current regime, but not a wholesale retreat.”
“We could see Trump enforcers seek to rapidly resolve large, pending digital monopolization cases,” especially if they’re looking to cut costs, said Diana Moss, vice president at the Progressive Policy Institute, alluding to cases filed against Google and Amazon under Biden. While she said Trump’s antitrust chiefs may single out disfavored companies, she otherwise expects a return to more traditional methods of determining market power than Khan’s Neo-Brandeisian principles, which look beyond price increases toward broader standards of consumer harm.
With federal investigations into AI companies having started under Biden, it’s unclear whether Trump might target political enemies. One potential target is OpenAI, whose CEO, Sam Altman, is a consistent Democratic Party donor and whose relationship with Microsoft is already reportedly the subject of a federal antitrust investigation.
Keeping China at bay
Trump and Biden both have aggressive stances toward China, so there should be some continuity in litigating the ongoing trade war. The focus under Biden has been pouring funds into chip companies building manufacturing facilities in the United States while enacting export controls to limit China’s ability to get powerful US-made chips.
Hanna Dohmen, a research analyst at Georgetown University's Center for Security and Emerging Technology, expects the administration to “continue using the expansive international trade toolbox to restrict China's ability to buy, make, and access AI chips.”
“The Trump administration likely will not try to roll back the CHIPS and Science Act because there is bipartisan support for onshoring semiconductor manufacturing,” she added, noting that the administration is more likely to favor deregulation and tax credits in the future rather than additional CHIPS Act spending.
There are more unknowns than knowns
Plans for the second Trump administration are still coming together, but the proposed Cabinet is full of outsiders without deep track records on artificial intelligence. Former Rep. Lee Zeldin, Trump’s pick to helm the Environmental Protection Agency, said it’s his focus to “make the United States the artificial intelligence capital of the world,” likely through deregulatory efforts at a time when liberals and climate change activists are deeply concerned by the energy consumption of data servers needed for AI.
Brendan Carr, a Federal Communications Commission member who Trump has nominated to chair the bipartisan agency, has been particularly aggressive toward social media companies, which have long depended on artificial intelligence for content moderation efforts. And much of the government’s involvement with AI will fall under the jurisdiction of Pete Hegseth, a Fox News anchor nominated for defense secretary, and former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, nominee for director of national intelligence, neither of whom have fleshed out their positions on AI.
But of course, the real influence behind Trump’s AI decision-making — at least while the two are still cozy — may be Elon Musk, who has been tapped to run something called the Department of Government Efficiency, aka DOGE, alongside businessman Vivek Ramaswamy, and has Trump’s ear.
Musk has been deeply critical of government regulation over the years, frequently feuding with agencies including the Securities and Exchange Committee and the FTC. And while Musk has expressed public concerns about the risks of AI, once calling for a pause on AI development, he has also built his own AI company called xAI that developed the chatbot Grok. Musk has supported California’s proposed AI safety bill but also sued to block the state’s deepfake law. If Musk becomes an influential member of Trump’s team, even outside of a formal Cabinet post, the government’s AI policy may be, well, whatever Elon wants it to be.A microchip and the Taiwanese flag in an illustration.
TSMC set to get its CHIPS money
The award marked the first finalized disbursement of the CHIPS Act since it was passed in 2022 and will go toward building TSMC's three new chip factories in Arizona — helping offset the $65 billion cost.
A total of $36 billion has been approved by Congress and directed by the Commerce Department to foreign companies such as TSMC and Samsung, as well as US companies including Intel and Texas Instruments. The delays, in addition to the normal snail’s pace of bureaucracy, stem from the fact that the Commerce Department spent much of the past two years negotiating with semiconductor companies, procuring specific commitments before finalizing the amounts they’d receive.
President Joe Biden needs to disburse the payments quickly because the future of the CHIPS Act is in question. When Donald Trump takes office in January, he may fulfill campaign promises to dismantle the Biden initiative or ask the Republican-controlled Congress to repeal it. Alternatively, the president-elect could carry on with the disbursements, which could further a bipartisan goal of beating back China’s AI ambitions.
Europe's biggest concerns about Trump's return
Carl Bildt, former prime minister of Sweden and co-chair of the European Council on Foreign Relations, shares his perspective on European politics from Delhi, India.
Is Europe prepared for a Trump presidency?
And that's of course the big issue around every capital of Europe. There are two major issues and concerns.
One of them, obviously, the Russian war against Ukraine. What will be the US policy? Trump has promised to make peace within 24 hours. That's not going to happen. Putin is determined to continue this particular war. What would be the consequences then? Is Trump going to throw Ukraine under the bus, abandon support and thus abandon de facto concerns for the security of Europe? How would Europe react to that big issue?
Second big issue, tariffs. Trump has said that tariffs is the word that he loves most of all words. And he said that he's going to impose 10, 20% tariffs on all imports and far more on imports, of course, from China. That's going to have hugely negative effects for the global economy, also for the European economy, US economy and everyone else. What's going to be the European reaction to that? Counter tariffs or trying to line up with other global trade actors to preserve as much as we can, open up a big global trading system? Huge issues. No answer until by January 20th we know what the Trump administration is going to do. One conclusion, fairly obvious; we better buckle up.
FILE PHOTO: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Republican presidential candidate and former U.S. President Donald Trump greet each other at a campaign event sponsored by conservative group Turning Point USA, in Duluth, Georgia, U.S., October 23, 2024.
All of Trump’s horses and all of Trump’s men
With world leaders descending upon Brazil this week for the annual G20 summit, the specter of Donald Trump’s return looms all around. The summit, along with this month’s COP29 climate summit, bookend the Biden interregnum - a period that opened with a deadly global pandemic and saw the start of two wars.
As we now know, foreign policy did not determine the 2024 election outcome. The pivotal question voters wrestled with was the one Trumpput to them: “Are you better off now than you were four years ago?” A majority of voters across the electoral map answered this question in the negative. Despite the hyper-polarized political moment, and all the fault lines in US politics – gender, generational, racial, party identification – it was the economic one that proved most salient.
Yet, when Trump is inaugurated in January, he will take the helm of the United States at a moment of vast geopolitical uncertainty. By Trump’s own assessment, the world is on the brink of World War III. Inan interview earlier this year, Yuval Noah Hariri suggested that WWIII may have already started with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and “we just don’t know it yet.” Certainly, reports of North Korean troop deployment to the Russia-Ukraine war theater do little to assuage these fears. Nor does US President Joe Biden’s late-in-the-game policy shift this weekend to allow Ukraine to deploy US-provided, long-range missiles to strike inside Russian territory.
Since his resolute victory two weeks ago, Trump has made quick work assembling the team he wants around him for the challenges ahead. It is a team of loyalists and Trump-world insiders (many Washington outsiders)tasked with preventing World War III, restoring peace in Europe and the Middle East, and putting the world together again.
With his cabinet and leadership selections, Trump makes clear that direction will come from the very top. Appointees will be expected to execute the president’s agenda. The pick of veteran and television host Pete Hegseth to lead the Department of Defense is perhaps the clearest indicator of the model to come.
With Europe deeply on edge about whether the US will remain steadfastly committed to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, Ukraine, and Europe’s common defense, Hegseth’s bureaucratic inexperience offers little clarity or comfort. Known more for his television work and pardon advocacy than any particular security policy position, Hegseth’s promotion to American dignitary has left Europe scratching its collective head. It signals to European leaders that Trump’s transactional, unpredictable approach will dictate the next four years.
Elsewhere, in the Indo-Pacific, a giant question mark hangs over how the second Trump administration plans to engage with a host of partnerships and plans initiated by Biden. Outgoing Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin met with his counterparts in Australia and Japan this weekend for a Trilateral Defense Ministers’ Meeting. In a joint statement following the session, the leaders affirmed the longevity and enduring commitment of the partnership.
With the US-China relationship the essential quandary of our times, will Hegseth (and Trump) remain committed to these relationships? What happens to AUKUS, the trilateral partnership between Australia, the United Kingdom, and the US that’s viewed by Australians as so critical to their security? What about the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue with members of the same group plus India? Each of these pillars is viewed by Biden as foundational for the region’s geopolitics, and yet incoming Trump personnel have provided scant details of their plans.
While much is being made of Trump’s flashier picks – Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to lead a newly formed Department of Government Efficiency – it is the repeat performers who telegraph Trump’s policy priorities. As he said every day on the campaign trail, these are immigration, trade, and the economy.
The return of former Immigration and Customs Enforcement Director Thomas Homan, now as “border czar,” coupled with Stephen Miller as Trump’s deputy chief of staff, confirm Trump 2.0 will be ideologically tough and swift-acting on immigration. Trumpimplemented 472 executive orders on immigration during his first term. Homan and Miller will be hard at work over the next few months readying actions for Trump’s signature on his first day back in the Oval Office.
On trade, everyone overseas is on pins and needles over Trump’s tariff threats. European political leaders and business executives are kept up at night worrying over whether Trump will seek to impose a universal tariff of 10-20% on imported goods, and, if so, under what authority. Against this backdrop, the reported return of former US Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer to an expanded “trade czar” role is being closely watched. Both Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974 and the International Emergency Economic Powers Act will be relevant channels for Trump’s tariff ambitions. Having Lighthizer by his side provides the president with a dedicated co-pilot.
Finally, that Trump has seemingly taken the most time to land on his picks to lead the Treasury and Commerce departments is unsurprising. Trump’s election, his mandate, and his plans both at home and abroad in his next term each depend on his administration’s ability to execute its economic vision. Trump’s tax extensions, corporate tax cuts, and economic tools of national security like tariffs and sanctions, must also take action on the pivotal question Trump asked voters in November – they must feel better in four years than they do today.
The pace of Trump’s appointment decisions is evidence that he is ready to get to work. The sooner he can roll back Biden’s initiatives and implement the policies he has been discussing again and again over the last four years, the sooner he can remake the US and America’s role in the world in his image.
U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin poses with Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr during a courtesy call at the Malacanang Palace in Manila, Philippines, November 18, 2024.
Philippines locks in enhanced defense deal with US to deter China
Manila’s top defense official Gilberto Teodorosigned a treaty with the US on Monday that will allow the Philippines to access more closely-held military intelligence and purchase more advanced technology to defend itself from China. US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said the agreement was meant to display Washington’s commitment, saying, “We are more than allies. We are family.”
Unlike some other US allies, Manila feels quite confident that its relationship with Washington will stay strong under incoming President Donald Trump. Trump and Filipino President Ferdinand Marcos, Jr. spoke over the phone on Tuesday about strengthening the alliance, which Marcos said was “very productive.”
Trump is pledging a hawkish approach to China, and the Philippines is eager to upgrade its own defenses given ongoing conflicts over the South China Sea. The strong alignment on shared interests and Marcos’praise for Trump’s “robust leadership” seem promising, as long as he can make the case to Trump that the US is coming out ahead in the transaction.
How is China preparing for Trump? President Xi Jinping attempted to set boundaries in the relationship at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Peru over the weekend. He drew “four red lines” for Trump to avoid: undermining the Communist Party, pushing China toward democracy, stifling China’s economic rise, and encouraging Taiwanese independence.
“These are the most important guardrails and safety nets for China-US relations,” he said. But with Trump promising punitive tariffs up to 60% on Chinese goods, and appointing China hardliners like Marco Rubio and Mike Waltz, confrontation looks likely.