The cabinet takes shape and the transition accelerates

The week after the election brought the transition into view, and the transition moved faster than the capital expected. The president-elect began naming his government within days of the result, and the names arrived in a stream that the press corps could barely keep up with: the former campaign manager installed as chief of staff, the Florida senator nominated for secretary of state, the television host selected to run the Pentagon, the congressman put forward for attorney general, and, most strikingly, the owner of the social platform that had helped carry the campaign appointed, alongside a businessman turned politician, to lead a new commission on government efficiency that does not yet exist as a department.

The picks tell the story of the second term’s theory of government. The nominees are, almost to a person, loyalists of the first order, people chosen for their fidelity to the movement rather than for their résumés in the departments they will run; the defence nominee is a combat veteran and cable commentator with no Pentagon experience at the executive level, the attorney general pick is a congressman who had never practised as a prosecutor in the role’s sense, and the foreign policy team is built around the president’s instinct rather than the establishment’s doctrine. The pattern is deliberate, and the pattern is the message: the second term will be run by the movement, not by the institutions.

The efficiency commission is the pick that captures the mood. The two businessmen, appointed to advise on cutting the federal government’s size, have no statutory power and no department to run, yet the announcement was the week’s largest headline, the platform owner’s promises to slash budgets drawing the immediate praise of the movement and the immediate alarm of the civil service; the commission’s actual authority is a question for the year ahead, but its symbolic weight is already enormous.

The speed of the nominations is itself a statement. The first term’s early weeks were marked by chaos and turnover, and the transition team has been determined to avoid the repetition; by selecting the cabinet before the inauguration and announcing the selections in public, the president-elect has projected an image of control, and the image matters to the markets, the allies and the bureaucracy alike. The rapidity carries risk, the backgrounds will be examined in the confirmation process, and at least one of the picks has already begun to attract the scrutiny that the Senate will apply.

The confirmation fights will be the winter’s drama. The Senate, with the Republican majority secured, will move most of the nominees through, but the narrowness of the majority means that a handful of dissenters can make trouble, and the backgrounds of several nominees guarantee that the hearings will be conducted at full volume. The administration is being assembled at speed, and the speed is the point: the president-elect wants the government, and the country, to know what the next four years will look like before the oath is even sworn.

The cabinet took shape in a week, and the shape is the clearest picture yet of the second term. The loyalists have been chosen, the institutions will be directed, and the commission on efficiency has been announced as the emblem of the project; the transition is running at the pace of the campaign that produced it. The picks are the movement’s answer to the question of who will govern, and the answer, for better or worse, is unmistakable.