What Trump’s picks suggest about how his presidency will go

AFTER Donald Trump won the presidential election in 2016 – when he was a former television star rather than a former president – he managed the White House transition as if he was staging his reality show, “The Apprentice”.

Aspiring Cabinet members arrived at the tower that bears his name in New York and walked past TV cameras. That series was drawn-out, with celebrity appearances, including by Kanye West. This time Trump is directing a tighter show: deliberating at his estate at Mar-a-Lago away from cameras and issuing his hiring verdicts over social media at a much faster pace. Unfortunately, the outcomes are hardly saner.

The most alarming choices came in a 24-hour period. On Nov 12, Trump announced that Pete Hegseth, a Fox News personality who served in the National Guard, would be defence secretary. Hegseth is one of the few who defended Trump’s statement that there were “fine people on both sides” of protests against a white-supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017. He is preoccupied by the scourge of wokeness in the army but has no experience in government.