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Susie Wiles has been named Trump’s White House chief of staff. A longtime Republican strategist and Florida political operative, Wiles will be the first woman to hold the position.
Everything you need to know about Team Trump 2.0
Susie Wiles has been named Trump’s White House chief of staff. A longtime Republican strategist and Florida political operative, Wiles will be the first woman to hold the position. Before serving as Trump’s de facto campaign advisor in 2024, she was credited with helping Gov. Ron DeSantis and Sen. Rick Scott get elected in the Sunshine State.
Tom Homan has been tapped to serve as “border czar” to oversee Trump’s plans for mass deportations. The former ICE director is a strong believer in border control and will also be responsible for maritime and aviation security. At the National Conservatism Conference in Washington, DC, earlier this year, Homan notably said that if he was appointed to the position “no one’s off the table. If you’re here illegally, you better be looking over your shoulder.”
Stephen Miller, a senior adviser and speechwriter in Trump’s first term, has been appointed deputy chief of staff for policy. He also is expected to play a big role in cracking down on immigration. In an interview on Fox News last week, Miller expressed that he hoped to increase deportation numbers to more than one million per year, and said he hoped to begin them as soon as possible.
To head the Environmental Protection Agency, Trump announced on Monday that he would nominate former Rep. Lee Zeldin, of New York. Zeldin, if confirmed, will be tasked with carrying out Trump's campaign promise to roll back Biden’s climate policies and environmental regulations.
Rep. Mike Waltz, a House Republican and veteran Green Beret, has been chosen to serve as national security adviser. Waltz is a big China hawk who has argued that the US is not prepared enough for a potential conflict in the Indo-Pacific.
Sen. Marco Rubio has been tapped to become America’s top diplomat – in the role of secretary of state. Rubio aligns with Trump in that he is a China hawk and has supported negotiating an end to the war in Ukraine. But he is also a proponent of maintaining alliances and could serve as a counterweight to isolationist voices in Trump’s circle on some issues. He is also known for his hawkishness when it comes to Iran, Cuba, and Venezuela — and could make Latin America a much bigger priority for Trump 2.0. Tapping Rubio “suggests that Trump is going to take a more direct interest in Latin American policy this time around,” says Eurasia Group’s Clayton Allen.
John Ratcliffe, a loyalist who served as director of national intelligence in Trump's first administration, has been tapped to become the next CIA director. Ratcliffe is also a China hawk who aligns with Trump on security policy.
Rep. Elise Stefanik will serve as the US ambassador to the UN. She is currently the chair of the House Republican Conference and the only woman in House Republican leadership. She has often criticized the UN, particularly over issues involving Israel and Palestine. She recently called for the US to conduct a “complete reassessment” of US funding for the UN if it continues to consider revoking Israel’s UN membership.
Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee will serve as US ambassador to Israel. Huckabee is also an evangelical pastor and the first non-Jew named to the position in 15 years. He has been a stalwart supporter of Israel’s right to defend itself and of its settlements in the West Bank throughout his career. His appointment is expected to further empower the far right within Israel’s government.
South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem has been picked to become Trump’s Homeland Security chief to oversee Immigration and Customs Enforcement, FEMA, the Secret Service, and Customs and Border Protection. Noem is known as a hardliner on immigration, even sending her state’s national guard to the southern border to assist in detaining migrants, and supported Trump’s travel ban from Muslim-majority countries during his first term.
Fox News host Pete Hegseth has been nominatedto become defense secretary. Hegseth is an Army veteran who served in Afghanistan and Iraq but lacks government experience, and this unorthodox choice is already facing major questions. He is expected to face a tough Senate confirmation process.
Trump has also created new positions for Elon Musk, the world's richest person, and former GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy to lead a new "Department of Government Efficiency.” Since this cabinet position does not officially exist and cannot be created without an act of Congress, it is unclear how it will increase efficiency or streamline the bureaucracy. Trump says it will “provide advice and guidance from outside the government.”
On Wednesday, Trump announced that former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, a defector from the Democratic Party who was briefly in contention to be Trump’s running mate, has been nominated to become the director of national intelligence. Her prior service as a lieutenant colonel in the Army Reserve has made her skeptical of the foreign policy establishment. She has no experience in the intelligence community and has faced allegations of parroting Kremlin propaganda. She is expected to face a tough and possibly unsuccessful Senate confirmation process.
Trump has nominated Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz to serve as his attorney general. Gaetz notably was being investigated by the House Ethics Committee over sexual misconduct allegations until he resigned this past week after being nominated. As one of Trump's closest allies, Gaetz’s nomination raises flags about his ability to put his loyalties aside in a position that is meant to be independent of the president. That said, Gaetz is far from the first AG nominee whose independence has been questioned. The same was said about Eric Holder and Barack Obama, John Mitchell and Richard Nixon, or John F Kennedy and his brother, Robert F Kennedy.
Speaking of Robert F. Kennedy, his son, RFK Jr., an environmental lawyer and an heir to one of America’s most-storied Democratic families, has been nominated as health and human services director, despite having no medical or public health degree. Kennedy is a vocal vaccine skeptic and critic of the CDC and has promoted theories that suggest HIV is not the true cause of AIDS. His appointment has raised concerns among public health experts and lawmakers that he would spread medical misinformation from the crucial health agency. Kennedy plans to take on processed foods and reform the food system.
Doug Burgum, the governor of North Dakota who briefly sought the Republican presidential nomination before dropping out and supporting Trump, has been named the president-elect’s pick for interior secretary. Burgum has ties to fossil fuel companies and often served as a liaison between oil executives and Trump on the campaign trail.
Vice President Kamala Harris speaks on TV during a debate with her opponent, former President Donald Trump, on Sept. 10, 2024.
US election leaps into the unknown
Last week’s presidential debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump marked the final scheduled milestone before Election Day on Nov. 5. It also bookended a summer of surprises that began with President Joe Biden’s disastrous debate performance against Trump on June 27.
With no additional tests on the calendar after Trump quelled the possibility of a follow-up debate, and as the race enters its closing stages, both campaigns should be asking themselves what more they must do to win in November.
For Trump, the answer may be very little. Since the start of 2024, Trump’s favorability rating has hovered consistently around 43%. His polling averages have maintained a narrow bandwidth of roughly 45-47%. Over the same period, Trump defeated a primary pool of Republican presidential hopefuls, became the first former president to be convicted of a crime (sentencing on 34 felony convictions will be after the election), faced an attempt on his life at a campaign rally, selected a largely unfavorable running mate in Sen. JD Vance, and saw his long-preferred opponent replaced with an untested female candidate. An incident this weekend at the Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach is being investigated as a second assassination attempt against Trump.
In economic terms, sentiment and intentions around Trump appear to be rigidly inelastic. Should Trump continue along this course, which would seem to allow for quite a wide margin of behavior and developments, it is already fairly clear where he will land in November. As in both 2016 and 2020, Trump is likely to secure approximately 46% of the popular vote. The election in 2016, of course, brought Trump to power. The election in 2020 saw him removed from the White House.
Continuing with the analogy, Harris’ prospects are much more subject to “price sensitivity.” Harris’ potential ceiling of support is a meaningful known unknown. When she entered the race in July, only 37% had a favorable view of the VP, who had played a largely behind-the-scenes role in the Biden administration and had not caught fire during her presidential run in 2020. By mid-September, Harris’ favorability is at 46% and climbing. The nearly 10% swing in popularity suggests she may not yet have reached her favorability peak.
On voting intentions, much was made earlier this month of a poll that found Trump leading Harris by a single percentage point. A widely circulated interpretation of the poll was that, after a remarkable run in August, Harris had reached an inevitable campaign skid. Yet, over the period polled, Trump continued to absorb votes from Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s suspended campaign that, at its peak, pulled in 10% of the votes. With aggregate polling placing Harris ahead of Trump in national averages, she may be outpacing him in voter support.
Still, given the particularities of the US electoral college system, to win the election in November Harris must not only secure enough votes, but she must secure enough votes in the right places. Conventional wisdom holds that to clinch this geographic vote allocation, Harris will need to lead Trump in national averages by multiple percentage points going into Election Day (perhaps even upwards of four percentage points). Hillary Clinton learned this the hard way in 2016 when she won the popular vote but not the Oval Office. Biden made sure he remembered Clinton’s lesson in 2020.
Harris’ campaign strategy since entering the race appears to be an appetizer of generic Democratic policy and a main course of good vibes. To translate this recipe into further polling gains, Democrats must execute a coordinated ground operation, leveraging the uptick in campaign volunteers since Harris became the party’s nominee. Harris’ campaign must also remain hyper-focused on undecided voters across key swing states like Arizona, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Her intentional reference to 800,000 Polish Americans living in Pennsylvania during the debate exchange on Russia reflects an awareness that this election will come down to just a few thousand voters across a handful of swing states.
And in a year that saw George Clooney effectively end Biden’s candidacy, the power of Taylor Swift’s post-debate endorsement of Harris cannot be discounted. Turning out voters is the task at hand, and Swift’s support has already reportedly led hundreds of thousands to consider casting their votes.
This has been a noisy election season. After primaries, conventions, assassination attempts, a candidate swap, and two consequential presidential debates, both campaigns have nothing left to do but head for the finish line. With Trump’s favorability and polling essentially known, the signal that’s emerging is: This is Harris’ race to win.
Lindsay Newman is a geopolitical risk expert and columnist for GZERO.
History has its eyes on US
In the run-up to the 2020 election, Europe was preoccupied with the future of the transatlantic relationship. In London, almost every conversation among think tanks, civil society, and diplomatic circles eventually came around to the so-called special relationship between the United States and the United Kingdom, just then wrestling with its Brexit bet.
There was plenty of hand-wringing about whether Donald Trump would be reelected in 2020. The frequently heard view across the pond was that Europeans could forgive Americans for electing Trump for the first time in 2016 – for they knew not what they did. But to return him to office, without the guise of plausible deniability, would mean something else entirely.
Europe would have been put on notice that US voters had accepted the “America First” embrace. The US was going home, and Europe might need to go it alone.
As we find ourselves in the (re)run-up to another Trump-Biden election season, all eyes are again on US voters and the choice they have set before themselves in November. Tariffs and trade policy are up for grabs, the energy and regulatory environment face “sliding doors,” and diplomatic and multilateral engagement find themselves on differential courses – on display last week at the annual G7 Summit where Biden sought in his final pre-election summit to keep the wartime band together with new US measures to intensify pressure on Russia and a transatlantic pledge to leverage Russia’s immobilized assets for Ukraine funding.
It is all too clear that geopolitics is at stake this fall.
What if the 2020 election vantage point from abroad got it wrong?
What if, despite the US rethinking its global role, we are still in the age of US primacy after all? Over the past four years, the US may have unwittingly made this case.
During the pandemic, US pharmaceutical firms – in concert with global researchers – delivered groundbreaking vaccines to save lives. Across the security sphere, the US has led its European partners on a renaissance of NATO, charting the course on both the sanctions to constrain Russia and the military expenditures to bolster Ukraine. Earlier this spring, when further US funding came into doubt, Ukraine and Europe faced a protracted scare. Elsewhere in the Middle East, the US has demonstrated that without any boots on the ground and with untiring diplomatic efforts bearing only partial fruit, it remains a pivotal player in any room. Iran’s attack on Israel on April 13, which saw nearly all of its 300-plus missiles shot down by a US-led coalition supporting Israel, is prime evidence.
And despite years of hard- versus soft-landing debates, the United States remains the world’s largest economy. In recent years, the Biden administration has been busy trying a new industrial policy on for size, a model now being replicated elsewhere. Meanwhile, the US Federal Reserve has set the global template and pace on fiscal policy.
The US dollar remains dominant, even as Russia and others that face a widening web of US-led sanctions and tools of economic security have continued to study currency alternatives. According to the Fed’s latest available data (2022), the US dollar represents 58% of global official foreign exchange reserves compared with the next best Euro at 21%. The dollar was involved in roughly 88% of global foreign exchange transactions in April 2022, a figure that has been stable for 20 years.
According to polling conducted across Europe, Canada, and the United States in 2023 by the German Marshall Fund in its Transatlantic Trends series, 64% of respondents viewed the US as the most influential actor in global affairs (including 62% of Europeans). Lest we overlook it, the same polling found that only 14% viewed China as the most influential global actor.
Looking across the ocean, the view from Europe looks significantly less lonesome than it did on the cusp of 2020. This might be because Trump did not win in 2020, or it might be that the US is more structurally entrenched in the global system than domestic partisan politics suggests. Will a Biden 2.0 mean the status quo on transatlantic support for Ukraine? Would a Trump 2.0 see the administration drive Russia and Ukraine to the negotiating table and pursue a deal that leaves Europe out in the cold? Will Trump’s transactional foreign policy present a sharp test for Europe with more bilateral relationships than multilateral engagement?
Either way, November’s election and its aftermath will begin to answer these questions.
Lindsay Newman is the practice head of Global Macro, Geopolitics for Eurasia Group and is based in London. She writes the Views on America column for GZERO.
Do Donald Trump’s criminal convictions put American democracy at risk?
“Having crossed the Rubicon [of January 6],” Glasser says, “I think that the idea that we’re just treating this as a normal election between two warring tribes with different ideologies is really what history is going to remember about this moment, unfortunately.”
“We’ve grown accustomed to the luxury of repeated, peaceful transfers of power,” Bharara adds, “There’s nothing that guarantees that just because the US has been a great democracy, it will persist in being democratic.”
Catch GZERO World with Ian Bremmer every week on US public television (check local listings) and online.
GOP's response to Trump verdict: An "ominous sign" for the future?
It’s far too early to say how former President Trump’s 34 felony convictions in the New York hush money case will affect the 2024 US presidential election, but make no mistake, the verdict has far-reaching implications for the future of the Republican party.
On GZERO World, Ian Bremmer was joined by New Yorker columnist Susan Glasser and former US attorney Preet Bharara for a frank look at what Trump’s conviction means for the GOP moving forward. As historic as Trump’s conviction is, the political response may be even more unprecedented and could have dangerous implications not just for Republicans or capital “D” Democrats but for our already fragile, lower-case “d” democracy.
“This is a marker of the escalation that we’re seeing in 2024,” Glasser says, pointing to the GOP attacks on the US justice system, “I think it’s a sign of where the Republican party is at, that they’ve essentially mortgaged the party so completely to the fate of one individual, that they’re willing to tear down what remains of faith in our institutions.”
Catch GZERO World with Ian Bremmer every week on US public television (check local listings) and online.
The US Supreme Court’s “upside-down” logic in Trump immunity case
2024 is certain to be a historic year for the US Supreme Court: In June, SCOTUS will issue rulings on former president Donald Trump’s immunity claims in charges brought by Special Counsel Jack Smith involving Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election. Emily Bazelon joins Ian Bremmer on GZERO World to unpack the legal arguments at the heart of the case and what caught SCOTUS experts off-guard during oral arguments.
Like in the 2000 Bush v. Gore case that ultimately handed the election win to George W. Bush, Court watchers had expected the justices to issue a narrow ruling in the Trump case. But during arguments, the conservative justices asked questions that seemed more interested in raising hypotheticals about whether limiting the scope of immunity might restrict a president’s power too much. With Trump again on the ballot in 2024, the stakes could not be higher. Will the justices make a limited ruling or wade into the politics of the US presidential election with, as Justice Gorsuch put it, “a ruling for the ages”?
Catch GZERO World with Ian Bremmer every week on US public television (check local listings) and online.
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- How the Supreme Court immunity ruling changes presidential power - GZERO Media ›
Former President of the United States Donald J. Trump.
Georgia poses new dangers for Trump
Late Monday night, Donald Trump and 18 other people were indicted by a grand jury in Atlanta for conspiring to overturn the results of the 2020 election in the state of Georgia.
Trump will face 13 felony charges. Former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, and other alleged co-conspirators are charged with taking part in a “criminal enterprise” to flip the presidential election in a crucial state.
You can read the full indictment here.
Let’s cut to the chase: Trump has already been indicted three times – in New York City, Washington, DC, and Florida – and he faces dozens of other felony charges in those cases. And though it’s too soon to know the likelihood of a Trump conviction in any of them, there’s no evidence yet that they’ve dented his popularity. Here are the latest GOP primary numbers and matchups with President Joe Biden.
Is this case different? Might this one put Trump in real legal and political jeopardy?
In fact, Georgia may offer Trump a much tougher set of both legal and political problems. Here are three reasons why.
RICO
Georgia law features something called the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, widely known as RICO. Legal experts have warned that the broad powers this law gives a prosecutor – in this case, Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis – can be used to charge Trump with all sorts of crimes related to the core charge of election fraud.
Under Georgia’s RICO law, prosecutors can bring such a case simply by showing the existence of an “enterprise” involved in at least two “qualifying” crimes that form part of a “pattern of racketeering activity.” He could, for example, be charged with solicitation to commit election fraud, perjury, forgery and/or improperly influencing government officials. These crimes need not have taken place in Georgia if their purpose was to overturn Georgia’s election results.
Crucially, the law doesn’t require the state to prove that Trump personally ordered, or even knew about, the commission of every crime in the indictment. It need only prove he led the enterprise that committed them.
Cameras rolling
In the interest of transparency, Georgia law requires there be cameras in the courtroom, unless a judge has a compelling reason not to allow them. This entire case may well play out on live television.
Yes, Trump is still riding high in Republican primary polls and running neck and neck with Biden. But undecided general election voters, particularly the independents Trump needs to win over in Nov. 2024, can now have a much closer look at the evidence against him. They won’t simply hear about it from Trump himself or from Trump-friendly media.
He also faces the risk that after months of televised daily legal grind, public fatigue with his long list of criminal charges will start to set in.
Unpardonable crimes
Despite all this, Trump may well be elected president next November, and the president of the United States can legally pardon convicted criminals. In theory, a president could pardon himself, though that idea has never been tested by US courts. But the charges facing Trump in Georgia are for state, not federal, crimes. No president can pardon someone convicted in state court.
Complicating matters further, under Georgia law, the governor couldn’t pardon a convicted president either. (There are already plenty of hard feelings between Trump and Governor Brian Kemp, who refused to help Trump reverse the state’s presidential election results in 2020.) If Trump were convicted in Georgia, only a five-member pardon board could absolve him. That’s a far more complicated problem.
The bottom line: Donald Trump has defied political and legal gravity for years. A poorly prepared prosecution, a friendly juror or two, and continued support from committed followers might well keep him aloft through 2024.
Or, Georgia might prove the band Radiohead right: “Gravity always wins.”
The Graphic Truth: Trump's indictment fundraising boom
Former President Donald Trump on Thursday pleaded not guilty to four counts linked to allegations that he tried to undermine the 2020 election result and remain in power despite losing the vote.
A judge set the first hearing for Aug. 28, just days after the first Republican presidential debate is set to take place – though the GOP frontrunner has suggested he may not participate in the debate.
Thursday’s appearance marked the third time in just four months that Trump has stood in a court and pleaded not guilty to criminal charges.
Still, not only do these legal woes not appear to be hurting Trump in the polls – the former president remains the frontrunner by a huge margin – but his joint fundraising committees have actually seen a boost from his previous indictments. The charges appear to be firing up his loyal base. (To be sure, that doesn’t translate to cash on hand as his legal quandaries appear to be draining the committee’s finances.)
We take a look at what Trump’s monthly joint fundraising committee has raised since he announced his reelection bid in Nov. 2022.