Trump’s Republican Party overhaul is complete

In just a few days, Donald Trump has assembled a MAGA wish list of Cabinet members and White House staff — from Fox News host Pete Hegseth helming the Department of Defense to South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem at the Department of Homeland Security and former Rep. Matt Gaetz at the Department of Justice.

The reaction of Republicans to his controversial staffing moves has laid bare the full force of Trump not just on the Republican Party’s electoral politics, but on its governing outlook, too.

Never has the GOP been so fully on bended knee.

“If Donald Trump says, ‘jump three feet high and scratch your head,’ we all jump three feet high and scratch our head,” as GOP Rep. Troy Nehls (Texas) put it to reporters Wednesday.

Trump, indeed, is asking some tough things of Republicans on the Hill, including elevating Hegseth to the top of Defense, making a person with no previous management experience the CEO of the single largest employer of the United States. And some Republicans expressed disbelief when Trump announced his decision to make Gaetz his attorney general and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. his Health and Human Services secretary, suggesting they may have difficulty getting confirmed.

But eye-rolls and expressions of concern are not the makings of an intra-party resistance. And if personnel is policy, the governing rule of Trump 2.0, so far, appears to be obedience. After dominating the GOP electorally for the better part of a decade, he is now asserting himself more forcefully on the party in Washington.

“President Trump wants people loyal to him. Why wouldn’t you? And so I’m not sure that there’s a story there,” said Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.).

It is, his allies say, an example of a more urgent — and, perhaps, more savvy — Trump operation after his first Washington rodeo.

“The four years he was there, he did what he said, he’s learned the ones that betrayed him, and he will not make the same mistake twice,” said Rep. Ralph Norman (R-S.C.). “Tom Homan as an example, unbelievable. Stephen Miller, unbelievable. I mean, everybody he picks will get the job done. He realizes he’s got a short window to get this done, and he’s gonna take it back.”

Any incoming president — let alone one who won both the popular vote and electoral college so convincingly — is afforded some measure of goodwill and latitude by their own party, even as they offer advice and consent. Hill Democrats, meanwhile, are taking a subtler approach to opposing Trump’s picks.

“The former president promised on the campaign trail that America would have the best economy, the best border security and the best administration possible,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) said on Friday during a weekly press conference. “And the question that we have to all ask, when we’re confronted with nominations like Robert F. Kennedy Jr.: Are these the best individuals available to the incoming Trump administration?”

And yet the grand sweep of Trump’s picks and the degree to which they force his own GOP to register their supplication is remarkable.

The selection of Gaetz, along with Kennedy, was one of the most controversial of Trump’s picks to date. Rep. Max Miller (R-Ohio), a Trump ally, called it “a reckless pick.” And in a nod to how fearful Republicans are of speaking out against the president-elect, Rep. Mike Simpson, an Idaho Republican and senior GOP appropriator, put it bluntly when asked if Gaetz has the experience and character to be attorney general: “Are you shittin’ me, that you just asked that question? No! But hell, you’ll print that and now I’m going to be investigated.”

But to other Republicans, the strength of Trump’s victory was enough for overwhelming confidence in his Cabinet picks: “He’s the leader of my party. He just won resoundingly, and so he’s got my presumptive support for all of his nominees,” Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) said.

It’s possible that Gaetz or others won’t make it through confirmation hearings. Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) anticipated there will eventually be pushback from the upper chamber of Congress, once the official nomination process starts.

But for now, she said it’s too early: “He’s not even been sworn in.”

“It doesn’t start up til the background checks are done, they’re officially submitted to the Senate, the hearings are scheduled,” Collins said. “None of that’s happened.”

Trump is pushing Republicans to cede their power to confirm his appointments even further by allowing him to make them when the Senate is in recess. He is moving more quickly than he did in 2016 to announce key posts. And for the most part in the early days of Trump’s transition, the GOP is falling in line.

“President Trump keeps hitting home run after home run after home run after home run with his picks,” Mike Davis, a former GOP Senate and White House aide who is among Trump’s most vociferous legal defenders and speaks with him regularly, told POLITICO even before the selection of Gaetz, whom Davis is supportive of. “He’s already proving he’s not going to make the same mistakes again.”

Trump, Davis said, is assembling an administration full of “competent loyalists.” And in the broader GOP, even those who have not always demonstrated fealty to the former president are applauding.

Even his former Vice President Mike Pence, no Trump apologist, acknowledged at a panel discussion hosted by the Dispatch on Tuesday, “I am very encouraged by the early appointments by the president-elect.”

Trump’s raft of picks is overall a mixture of both what Davis calls “competent loyalists” and some that register more as tests of walk-the-plank fidelity.

“Following a slate of outstanding picks out of the gate, we seem to have entered the phase of rewarding those who made the most appearances on Trump’s behalf in battleground states,” said Pete Seat, who served as White House spokesperson for former President George W. Bush.

Many hard-line Republicans are excited about the choices, describing Trump’s newly picked Cabinet of loyalists as a fulfillment of the former president’s promise to “drain the swamp.” But this time, he knows how — and is moving things fast.

“The president was burned by picking I’ll say swamp creatures, conventional, traditional D.C. types who fought him during his administration. That’s why he had so much turnover,” Rep. Bob Good (R-Va.) said. “I hope, and we believe, that he’d be in a better position to make more effective decisions with personnel this time.”

Good, who was primaried out of office after Trump endorsed his opponent, added, “And I’m a frequent and open, vocal critic of the Republican Party when it’s wrong.”

Asked about Trump picking loyalists so far for the Cabinet, Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.) interrupted saying “I’ve noticed.”

“In 2016 he learned that not everybody in the bureaucracy is going to do whatever he says just because he’s the president,” Cramer said. “Quite honestly, there were a lot of months lost in the first term.”

He added, “He’s not going to make that mistake twice, and I applaud him for it.”

It may have been a plan in the making for the past four years. Rep. John Rutherford, who claims to be the first Florida Republican to endorse Trump, said he talked to the former president about the “Obama holdovers” problem soon after his endorsement. Rutherford said Trump agreed with him.

“He said, ‘I’ve got a 200-day window,” Rutherford recounted. “So he understands those things now that he didn’t know before. And so this is not the same transition team, and this is not the same President Trump.”

And so far Trump appears to be getting a head start on those 200 days. Rep. Kevin Hern (R-Okla.), agreed, saying his latest round of picks are more focused on accomplishing Trump’s agenda than his initial team in 2017.

“These are people that are serious, that before he just got people that would tell him what they wanted to do … these folks actually want to change the direction of America, and that’s the mandate we’ve got,” Hern told POLITICO.

Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah), now one of the few Republican anti-Trump voices left in Congress, had come to acceptance of Trump’s loyalist overhaul. The Utah senator and former Republican presidential nominee is retiring come January.

“I don’t think it’s a surprise that a president would choose people that he’s comfortable with,” Romney said at the Capitol on Tuesday. “President Trump was elected by the American people. They know what they voted for, and he’s delivering.”