Rogues’ Gallery: What a Second Trump Term Would Look Like
Personnel is policy, alas.
IF DONALD TRUMP IS RETURNED TO THE PRESIDENCY, he won’t be coming to the White House alone: He’ll be bringing a pack of the fiends, frauds, and felons who populated his first administration and later entered his orbit. In his tumultuous first term, Trump already burned through most of the respectable figures in GOP political and policy circles, those might be considered smart, talented, and responsible. Now it’s mostly just loyalists, toadies, and hangers-on who are left. Individuals with ambitions dangerous to the future of our democracy are likely to be in positions of power and influence.
And you’re going to be stuck seeing them on TV. Every day. For four long years.
So what faces, old and new, would we likely end up with? Obviously, all such forecasts are speculative: Trump is fickle, and someone who is in favor today could be in the doghouse tomorrow. Nevertheless, we can start penciling in some names. And arguably there’s no better way to really think through what a second Trump term might bring: With a candidate as, well, flexible on ideas as Trump, the clearest sense we can get for how he would actually govern comes from the people he would likely place in his administration.
Here are thoughts on what ten individuals might get up to in a second Trump term, plus a dozen other names at the bottom to think about. Who else would you include in a list like this? Share your thoughts in the comments.
Stephen Miller
As senior policy adviser to President Trump, and one of the few Trump staffers who lasted the entire first term, Miller was, and likely would be again, Trump’s point man on immigration.
Among other things, Miller was the architect of the parent/child border separation policy and of the travel ban that targeted residents of Muslim countries. While extra vetting of travelers and immigrants from countries with an elevated terrorism risk is a valid national security tactic, the blanket ban upended the lives of people who had already undergone vetting and received approval for visas—sometimes resulting in family separations—and affected former interpreters who had worked with the U.S. military in Iraq. Miller’s other greatest hits include nixing a 2017 government study showing that, over the previous decade, the revenues brought in by refugees had exceeded the costs by $63 billion.
Almost everyone has a passion. Miller’s is to stop people from coming to America—not just illegally but legally. “This is all I care about,” he reportedly said at a November 2019 White House meeting in which he got a little carried away on the subject of blocking asylum seekers from El Salvador. “I don’t have a family. I don’t have anything else. This is my life.”
Since then, Miller has gotten married and become the father of a child, but there is no evidence that he has found a new hobby.
Where does Miller’s anti-immigration zeal come from? Emails from Miller that were leaked in late 2019 suggest an affinity for white nationalist texts, websites, and tropes—including an admiring reference to the 1973 French novel Camp of the Saints, a fervid fantasy about Europe ravaged by brown invaders, and citations of the white supremacist websites American Renaissance and VDARE on such subjects as crime and race.
Not surprisingly, Miller is also an all-around authoritarian who has expressed the view that the courts should have no authority to question Trump’s immigration decisions. He pushed the bogus claim that there was massive voter fraud in the 2016 election and advocated a strategy whereby Trump would remain president via fake slates of electors.
If Trump wins, Miller, though not exactly tanned or rested, will be ready to step back into his old role.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
In late August, when RFK Jr. first signaled that he was considering dropping out of the presidential race, Trump told CNN that he would be open to appointing Kennedy to a post in his administration if Kennedy endorsed him. “I like him a lot,” Trump said. “I respect him a lot. . . . He’s a very different kind of a guy—a very smart guy. And, yeah, I would be honored by that endorsement, certainly.”
After ending his candidacy, RFK Jr. not only endorsed Trump but has stumped for him on the campaign trail and even joined his transition team.
The main thing to know about RFK Jr. is that he’s a kook. He used to be a far-left kook. In the 2000s, he peddled conspiratorial claims about George W. Bush stealing the 2004 election, compared him to Hitler and Mussolini, praised Venezuela’s socialist dictator Hugo Chávez, and claimed (shortly after 9/11) that hog farmers were a greater menace to America than al Qaeda. In 2015, he said people who promote skepticism about global warming, including conservative megadonors Charles and David Koch, should be tried in the Hague as war criminals.
Some of his nuttery, however, has been (or, at least, had been) nonpartisan, like the conspiracy theory about a link between vaccines and autism. Or the dead-bear-cub-dumping and whale-carcass-beheading incidents. (Are we sure it wasn’t RFK Jr. eating cats in Ohio?)
It’s not clear whether RFK Jr.’s far-left views have changed: While positioning himself as a champion of free speech, he recently refused to retract his call for the prosecution of climate change skeptics. But his brand of lunacy—such as the claim that Bill Gates has been using COVID-19 vaccines to plant people with tracking chips, or that the U.S. government is “developing ethnic bioweapons” by “collecting Russian DNA”—has now migrated to the right. RFK Jr.’s right-wing fan club is a Who’s Who of MAGA: Steve Bannon, Roger Stone, Charlie Kirk, Michael Flynn, David Sacks, Tucker Carlson.
Trump’s interest in RFK Jr.-style quackery is not new: He reached out to Kennedy in 2017 about possibly heading a vaccine-safety inquiry, though nothing came of it. For his part, RFK praised Trump for his favorable attitude toward “alternative medicines” such as hydroxychloroquine during the COVID-19 pandemic.
And on September 17, RFK Jr. told Carlson about his potential role in a Trump administration: “President Trump has asked me specifically to do two things. One, to help unravel the capture of the agencies by corrupt influence. In other words, to drain the swamp. . . . And he’s asked me to help him end the childhood disease, chronic disease epidemic, and make Americans healthy again.”
He also bragged that “I’m going to be deeply involved in helping to choose the people who run FDA, NIH, and CDC.” Yiiikes.
Kash Patel
If you had to write a two-word bio of this relatively obscure former federal prosecutor who held a number of defense- and national-security-related posts in the Trump administration in 2017–21, it would be “Trump loyalist.”
Unlike Miller or Bannon, Patel appears not to be an ideologue. He’s a Trump foot soldier. (An Atlantic profile suggests that the roots of his obsessive loyalty lie in a grievance against the Obama administration from his time as a prosecutor for not backing him in a dispute with a judge.) After the 2020 election, his commitment to keeping Trump in power prompted Trump to attempt to make him deputy director of the FBI. Attorney General Bill Barr and CIA Director Gina Haspel blocked the move, threatening to resign if Patel were appointed.
In a second Trump administration, Patel may not get Senate confirmation for either FBI or CIA director, but Trump could certainly make sure that whoever filled those posts would accommodate Patel. Trump also heavily relied on “acting” officials—who do not require Senate confirmation—to fill vacancies. Donald Trump Jr. has floated the idea of installing Patel as interim attorney general in the administration’s early days.
Patel has continued his “Trump loyalist” career after leaving government—among other things, as a director of the company that owns Trump’s Truth Social platform. Patel also produced “Justice for All,” the version of the national anthem sung by imprisoned January 6th rioters, which has become a hit at Trump rallies.
In anticipation of Trump’s return to the White House, Patel has threatened revenge against a litany of enemies. “We will go out and find the conspirators—not just in government, but in the media,” he told Bannon in December. “Yes, we’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections. We’re going to come after you. Whether it’s criminally or civilly, we’ll figure that out.”
A few days after that podcast, at the New York Young Republican Club gala, Trump declared, “Get ready, Kash. Get ready.”
Russ Vought
Russell Vought, a Project 2025 architect who served as director of the Office of Management and Budget in the Trump administration, is what passes in MAGA world for an ideas guy.
OMB is rarely at the center of political firestorms—but it was under Vought, who withheld military aid from Ukraine in 2019 while Trump was trying to strong-arm Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky into providing dirt on Joe Biden. Vought then refused to comply with the House investigation into the scandal.
After Trump’s 2020 defeat, Vought founded one of the handful of Trumpist think tanks, the Center for Renewing America. From that perch, he has helped cook up policy ideas that a new Trump administration might adopt—and been closely associated with Project 2025. (He wrote a chapter in the Project 2025 policy book.) Among Vought’s hobbyhorses: He believes that independent federal agencies are unconstitutional, so that, for example, the Justice Department and investigative agencies such as the FBI should be more directly under presidential authority.
Oh, and Vought also penned an op-ed in 2021 titled, “Is There Anything Actually Wrong With ‘Christian Nationalism’?” The answer, according to Vought, is No. While he acknowledges “a commitment to an institutional separation between church and state,” he also calls for “an orientation for engaging in the public square that recognizes America as a Christian nation, where our rights and duties are understood to come from God.” How that orientation would equally protect and include Americans who do not believe in a divine rights-bestower, or who worship a non-Christian God (or gods), is not clear.
Richard Grenell
A former ambassador to Germany, acting director of national intelligence, and Serbia/Kosovo policy adviser in the Trump administration, Trump loyalist Ric Grenell is angling for secretary of state (or maybe national security advisor) next time around.
Grenell’s Trump-era political biography includes some details that break the MAGA mold. In 2019, as ambassador to Germany, Grenell—who is gay—called for the worldwide repeal of laws that criminalize same-sex relations. Sounds very “globohomo,” as Trumpy edgelords say in the fever swamps of the online right.
But in most other ways, Grenell is 100 percent MAGA. Like Patel and Miller, he was involved in the “Stop the Steal” effort on Trump’s behalf, making allegations of a stolen vote in Nevada that he reportedly admitted were false and meant simply to “throw spaghetti at the wall.” In 2020, as an envoy mediating between Serbia and Kosovo, he proposed naming a reservoir bridging the two countries “Trump Lake.” And last year, he tried to pull a bizarre stunt intended to denounce the indictment brought against Trump by Special Counsel Jack Smith. The idea was for Trump and Grenell to visit former Kosovo president and prime minister—and accused war criminal—Hashim Thaci in prison in the Hague. It was supposed to be a gesture of solidarity: Thaci was also indicted by Smith and has, like Trump, claimed that the indictment was political. Trump didn’t buy the idea.
Like Patel, Grenell is committed to slashing and burning through the “administrative state” and the “deep state”—meaning that he would want to see the federal bureaucracy staffed with Trump and MAGA loyalists. But his possible foreign policy role raises other concerns: Some observers believe he is “trying to build up a developing authoritarian network of rightwing leaders” as potential allies for Trump. During his tenure in Germany, he flirted with the ascendant German far right. In a particularly disturbing episode, last January Grenell traveled to Guatemala in an attempt to disrupt a democratic transfer of power—facilitated by the Biden administration after a contentious election—and to boost a far-right group trying to invalidate a vote it baselessly claimed was fraudulent.
More recently, Grenell has pitched a Ukraine “peace deal” that would preserve “autonomous zones” in Ukraine—most likely de facto controlled by Russia—and nix NATO membership for Ukraine. Let’s hope that idea gets as far as his Hague stunt.
Steve Bannon
Bannon, the staunch Trump ally, media mogul who turned Breitbart into an alt-right platform, 2016 Trump campaign CEO, and White House chief strategist (a position created just for him) in 2017, is the impresario of the Trump cabinet in waiting: Most of the other figures on this list have been guests on his War Room podcast. But could Bannon himself be up for a new position?
In a July interview shortly before he reported to prison for contempt of Congress, Bannon—who made it clear that he views politics right now as a de facto civil war in which you “totally and completely destroy your opponent”—claimed that he doesn’t want a role in a new Trump administration, both because he sees his current MAGA movement role as more powerful and because he believes Trump is too moderate. The movement, he says, is “much more hard-core on things like Ukraine”—advocating a total end to aid and “massive investigations about where the money went”—and on immigration and mass deportations. But who knows what will happen if Bannon is actually offered an administration post and a chance to fulfill his plan for a “total destruction of the deep state” and a “hostile takeover” of the federal government, including a transfer of all federal contracts to MAGA zealots? Never say never.
As for Bannon’s greater vision beyond beating Washington’s bureaucracy into submission to MAGA: He asserted that MAGA is about “taking America back to its more constitutional Republic.” But his idea of such a republic is certainly not that of the Founders: For instance, he told New York Times columnist David Brooks that the ability of American Jews to “thrive and prosper . . . is conditional upon one thing, and that’s a hard weld with Christian nationalism.”
Tulsi Gabbard
Like RFK Jr., Gabbard is nominally a Democrat. The former congresswoman from Hawaii has been campaigning for Trump with RFK Jr. and has told Fox News that she would be “honored to serve” in a Trump administration, particularly in a foreign policy role. That means another voice for throwing Ukraine under the bus and for appeasing Vladimir Putin.
Gabbard is what the Reagan-era Democrat-to-Republican defector Jeane Kirkpatrick called an “always blame America first” Democrat: Even when she can bring herself to criticize Syria’s Bashar Assad (with whom she met in 2017) as a “brutal dictator,” she still blames the United States, not Assad (or his ally Putin), for the death and destruction in Syria. Shortly before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, she accused the Biden administration of wanting Russia to invade as an excuse to impose “draconian” sanctions. Later, she recycled Russian disinformation about sinister “biolabs” in Ukraine. Oh, and she thinks the United States is “not so different from what we’re seeing happening in Russia” in terms of threats to freedom of speech.
Jeffrey Clark
Once a low-key Justice Department bureaucrat in the environmental division, Clark shocked his friends when, as acting head of the civil division in 2020, he morphed into a zealous Trump warrior, plotting with Trump to oust Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen and use the department’s power to alter the election results in Georgia. Clark, an unindicted co-conspirator in the federal election interference case against Trump, also advocated (according to the indictment) using the Insurrection Act—that is, deploying the military—to suppress protests against Trump remaining in the White House should he stay on after January 20.
Some of Clark’s vision for a second Trump presidency can be gleaned from a paper he wrote for Vought’s Center for Renewing America—where he is a fellow—arguing that the Justice Department is too independent and that the president should have greater direct authority over its investigations and prosecutions. (Last year, the Washington Post also reported that Clark was “leading the work on the Insurrection Act under Project 2025.” However, the main Project 2025 policy book ultimately has nothing on the Insurrection Act—although it does advocate using the military to secure the southern border and possibly to round up illegal immigrants for detainment in tent camps and eventual deportation.)
Clark has apparently remained close to Trump and is likely to get a post in a second Trump administration—though probably not one that requires Senate confirmation. Clark’s legal troubles include likely suspension or even disbarment for violating ethics rules for lawyers, of which a disciplinary panel found him guilty in April, and a felony charge in Fulton County, Georgia as part of the election-related racketeering case in which Trump is also a defendant.
Mike Pompeo
The former secretary of state is one ex-Trump administration official who is both relatively mainstream and on good terms with Trump. In March, he said he would not rule out taking a post in a new Trump administration. Pompeo is among the more prominent of the Trump supporters who are strongly pro-Ukraine. While chances that a new Trump administration would be pro-Ukraine seem slim at this point, that may change if Ukraine is in a strong position by January and Vladimir Putin is on a “loser” trajectory. That would also boost Pompeo’s chances of a high-level administration post.
Vivek Ramaswamy
The former presidential contender who has thrown his support behind Trump said last month that he and Trump “have had great conversations about doing something substantial, not small, but maybe a couple roles that could be really big roles in the cabinet of the new administration.” A former pharma entrepreneur, Ramaswamy has supported ending birthright citizenship and asserted that “Great Replacement” was Democratic party policy. He has also pushed a slew of conspiracy theories about September 11th (“federal agents” were somehow involved), January 6th (an “inside job” by the “deep state”), and the 2020 election (stolen by “big tech”).
Ramaswamy, a son of immigrants, seems to be fine with normalizing racist and nativist bigotry as just another opinion. When Ann Coulter told him on his podcast last May that she agrees with most of his positions but still would not have voted for him “because you’re Indian” and the “core national identity” in the United States is white Anglo-Saxon Protestant, Ramaswamy commented, “I disagree with her but respect she had the guts to speak her mind.” His parents must be so proud.
Ramaswamy is also one of the most vocal opponents of Ukraine aid on the American political scene. During the Republican primaries, he not only called for ceding occupied Ukrainian territory to Russia and called U.S. support for Ukraine a “disaster,” but mocked Zelensky as a “comedian in cargo pants” and even appeared to call Ukraine’s Jewish president a Nazi. (A Ramaswamy spokeswoman said he was referring to an incident in which Zelensky, on a visit to Canada, joined in applauding a Ukrainian-Canadian World War II veteran who was later revealed to have served in a Nazi-aligned unit.) Ramaswamy also repeated false Kremlin talking points that legitimize Russian occupation in eastern Ukraine on the grounds that those regions are populated by Russian speakers and were historically Russian.
OBVIOUSLY, THIS IS ONLY A PARTIAL LIST. If a new Trump administration becomes a reality, we will no doubt see the return of relatively low-key figures like economist Diana Furchtgott-Roth, who served as deputy assistant secretary for research and technology at the Department of Transportation in the Trump administration and is an outspoken proponent of Trump’s fossil fuel–oriented energy policy. We may see an administration post for New York congresswoman Elise Stefanik, a moderate-turned-Trumpist who has affirmed that she would be “honored” to serve in any position—perhaps one that has to do with fighting campus antisemitism, an issue on which Stefanik commanded the spotlight late last year in a confrontation with then–Harvard president Claudine Gay. Ditto for Florida congressman Matt “We Ride or Die with Donald Trump” Gaetz. Former California congressman and Trump’s Russiagate champion Devin Nunes—currently CEO of the Trump Media & Technology Group, which owns Truth Social—is likely to be rewarded with an appointment. Combative Trump attorney and legal spokesperson Alina Habba, a senior adviser for Trump’s super PAC, MAGA Inc., is a solid candidate for a White House legal post, possibly White House counsel.
But Trump 2.0 may become a haven for even more controversial figures. Tucker Carlson, Charlie Kirk, Roger Stone? Disgraced former “America’s Mayor” and Four Seasons Landscaping hero Rudy Giuliani? Anti-woke crusader Chris Rufo, most recently seen attempting to prove that some black migrants somewhere in Ohio may have barbecued a cat? Michael Flynn, the former Trump national security advisor whose Russiagate troubles seem to have sent him tumbling into a lunacy startling even by MAGA standards—including the claim that George Soros and Bill Gates created COVID-19 to steal the 2020 election and “rule the world”? (In May 2023, Trump phoned into a Flynn-hosted event and told him to “stay healthy because we’re bringing you back”; a Trump spokesman did not comment on whether he was proposing to bring Flynn into his administration if he wins.)
And if we are truly going to see Trump unbound, who’s to say that doesn’t include Laura Loomer in a White House post?
Trump’s administration would mirror him: incompetent and dangerous
This article should be required reading for those who still view things on the old "liberal to conservative" scale. Especially those who identify as "conservative" and still see Trump as one of them or "the lesser of 2 evils." With people like RFK, Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard in the cult, and true conservatives like Liz Cheney, and now her father the former VP, as staunch critics, it should be clear that MAGA is not conservative in the traditional sense, but rabidly authoritarian. On that note, one name is conspicuous by its absence. That of the most shameless sellout of all, Elon Musk.