The Trump Cabinet picks who seriously threaten democracy — and the ones who don’t

Let’s be clear: Not everything Donald Trump has proposed to do in his upcoming administration is a threat American democracy.

Some of his Cabinet appointments, like Sen. Marco Rubio for secretary of state or former Rep. Lee Zeldin for EPA administrator, are basically what you’d expect from Republicans. You might disagree with their policies, but you can’t seriously argue that they represent threats to the rule of law or democratic norms. Others, like former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard for director of national intelligence and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for secretary of Health and Human Services, are troublingly unqualified and even outright dangerous — but not an immediate five-alarm fire for American democracy specifically.

Yet at the same time, there is already clear and undeniable cause for alarm.

Around the world, there are certain steps a leader takes if they want to destroy a country’s democracy, like putting loyalists in charge of law enforcement and politicizing the armed forces. Many of Trump’s early decisions fit this pattern to a T.

The biggest red flag is the choice of arch-loyalist Matt Gaetz as attorney general. The Justice Department is arguably the single most powerful domestic policy agency, running everything from the FBI to federal criminal prosecutors to civil rights litigation. Gaetz has few, if any, qualifications to manage all of this — except for his vendetta against the department, as it once investigated him on suspicion of sex crimes. (Gaetz denies the allegations and the DOJ dropped its investigation into them in 2023.) His pitch for the job, one Trump insider told the Bulwark, was to “go over there and start cuttin’ fuckin’ heads.”

Trump’s plans for the military are similarly ominous. Two teams of reports, in the Wall Street Journal and Reuters respectively, have uncovered plans for a political purge of the brass — potentially including the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Trump’s proposed secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, is a Fox News commentator and MAGA diehard who called for precisely such a purge in a recent book.

And then there’s Trump’s scheme to get his Cabinet picks in office. If the Republican Senate actually does block any of these picks, Trump has demanded the power to install them through recess appointments while the chamber is out of session. If enough senators balk, Trump reportedly has put together a complicated backup plan that boils down to the House giving him the power to go around the Senate entirely — effectively eviscerating its constitutional advice-and-consent role on appointments.

Of course, we don’t know how much of these really bad ideas will come to pass. Trump is famous for saying things and failing to follow through. But given the enormity of the tail risk — the corrosion of American democracy — it’s critical to take what’s happening right now seriously. 

And that means being clear-eyed about the Trump agenda: both what’s not so scary about it, and what is.

The “authoritarian checklist” that can guide us through Trump 2.0

The United States is not the only democracy to elect an authoritarian of late. Voters in a series of other countries — including Hungary, Turkey, Israel, India, Poland, Venezuela, Brazil, and the Philippines — have elevated similarly dangerous leaders in recent elections. None of these countries are exactly like the United States, but all have some things in common that can give us guidance as to what to expect. 

One of the most important similarities is that none of these country’s leaders openly campaigned on abolishing democracy. The concept remained far too popular among both citizens and elites to act like Hitler and abolish elections outright.

Instead, they made incremental changes that would slowly-but-surely increase their own power while neutering opponents both in and out of the government. No one step marks the end of democracy, but each cumulatively makes it a little bit weaker. If this process reaches its endpoint, elections become functionally meaningless — theoretically free contests that in actuality are nearly impossible for the incumbent party to lose.

Executing this strategy requires a few key moves.

First, would-be authoritarians need the loyalists in key government positions. No one can hollow out an entire government on their own; it’s simply too towering a task to micro-manage. So they delegate, empowering individuals with unwavering loyalty and dedication to remaking key government institutions along authoritarian lines. In India, for example, the second-most powerful position in government — home minister — is occupied by a man named Amit Shah, a close friend and comrade of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s since 1982.

Second, they need those appointees to eviscerate legal and political guardrails on their power. Independent prosecutors, government accountability offices, courts, legislative prerogatives — all of this needs to be either co-opted or eliminated. The failed 2023 judicial overhaul in Israel, which would have effectively stripped its courts of any ability to check Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s power, is an unusually stark example of such a move.

After these first two steps have succeeded in consolidating power over the state, the authoritarian then wields it to weaken dissenters outside of government — with the ultimate aim of tilting the playing field on which elections take place.

This doesn’t just mean obvious things, like formally restricting free speech rights, but more subtle tools — like wielding tax agencies and spurious legal investigations against critics and potential private sector rivals. Hungary’s Viktor Orbán is the pioneer here, using something as seemingly benign as government ad spending to bring the Hungarian media under his control.

Through all of this, they need to be able to count on the loyalty of the security services as a last resort. In between elections, would-be authoritarians fear nothing more than popular uprisings and military coups. Stacking the intelligence community and armed forces with loyalists is the best way to ensure that coups fail (as happened in Turkey in 2016) or to violently repress street protests if necessary (as happened after Venezuela’s stolen election earlier this year).

These four points — appoint loyalists, eviscerate guardrails, attack dissent, suborn armed forces — are the key benchmarks one should use for evaluating Trump’s policies. 

Does what he’s proposing truly further one of those objectives? If so, by how much? How likely is it to happen? And how does the threat level rank relative to other things that he’s doing?

Grading Trump’s early decisions by the checklist

Trying to assess Trump’s policies on these metrics is not some kind of academic game. 

Those of us who care about democracy, in the press and elsewhere, need to maintain our credibility with potentially persuadable third parties — like swing voters or moderate Republican senators. Being seen as liberal hacks who call any Republican appointee a threat to democracy is a problem; so too is developing a track record of crying wolf by labeling everything Trump does anti-democratic.

In this spirit, it’s clear what emerges as the most dangerous move of Trump’s early transition: the Gaetz pick.

It is hard to imagine someone more cravenly loyal to Trump than Gaetz. It is hard to imagine anyone who has a more serious vendetta against non-partisan administration of laws, since Gaetz was once the target of a federal investigation. And it is hard to imagine a more important position than attorney general — one that gives immense power both to eviscerate guardrails and to punish private sector dissenters with spurious criminal investigations (among other tools).

The Defense Department plans aren’t too far behind. Purging the Joint Chiefs based on political loyalty — excuse me, alleged “wokeness” — removes one of the chief barriers to Trump’s alleged desire to invoke the Insurrection Act and deploy soldiers against protestors at home. Hegseth isn’t quite as egregious a Cabinet choice as Gaetz, but it’s hard to imagine someone who has proposed such purges and regularly praises Trump on TV standing in the way of his boss’s plans.

We can go on down the list. 

The plan for circumventing the Senate’s advice-and-consent power would be extremely threatening to guardrails if it happened, but it’s unclear how likely it is to happen. Gabbard as director of national intelligence raises some troubling questions about politicizing intelligence, but she’s not as much of a Trump toady as a Gaetz or even a Hegseth. Kennedy is almost certainly a disaster for public health, but not an obvious threat to democracy narrowly speaking. The office of presidential personnel is small potatoes compared to a cabinet post, but Trump’s decision to put his book publisher in charge of it will facilitate his plans for seeding the entire government with loyalists.

By contrast, there’s no reason to think appointments like Rubio or Zeldin even register on this scale. These are the kind of appointments you’d expect from any Republican, and while their policies may be terrible, they’re not an attack on our system of government. In terms of protecting our democracy, the question for them isn’t whether they themselves are a sign of authoritarian rot, but whether they would have the courage to resist it while in power (color me skeptical).

Ranking these matters for more than just credibility purposes. Democracy’s defenders have limited resources and energy, especially when both chambers of Congress and the Supreme Court are controlled by Republicans. They need to prioritize which Trump appointments and policies to fight, a task made far more difficult by the deluge of daily outrages that we all remember from Trump’s first term.

That requires being clear-eyed about what really is threatening and what isn’t. And at present, an objective evaluation of Trump’s early proposals should give Americans a hell of a lot to worry about.