Trump’s cabinet of radicals are ripping up the rulebook

Earlyish in my journalistic career I was interviewed for a job by the late Robert Maxwell, now perhaps best known as the father of Ghislaine. For those too young to remember, he was an overbearing, quixotic, mercurial press baron with ambitions to be as rich and powerful as Rupert Murdoch. When he fell off a boat in unexplained circumstances in 1991 that ambition was still unrealised. Oh, and it turned out he was a crook.

The interview was delayed by an hour or more as assorted flunkies were ushered in to bend the knee to the great man. Time stood still. A butler scurried around in white gloves. And then it was our turn — my prospective editor and me.

It soon became clear that, while my putative boss wanted me, Maxwell didn’t. He fired off a barrage of hostile questions and insults which grew in pitch and intensity until he growled: “Do you take drugs?”

All niceties and social norms had vanished. I was in the court of an autocrat and I had two choices: accept him on his own terms or walk out of the room. I rather wanted the job — bureau chief in Washington — so I quietly denied any form of substance misuse. “Are you a communist?” he bellowed next. “We’ll find out, if so.”

I assured him I was no red. “Now, when can your wife come to be interviewed by me?” Um...

It was all over in 20 minutes. I had the job — but I had also discovered how charismatic autocrats work: they break all the rules — ALL the rules — and you take them on their own terms or you’re toast.

Welcome to the second coming of Donald Trump. Like Robert Maxwell he trashes the conventions of how things should be done. You play by his rules. And as Leo, the leader of the Scorpions, tells John Travolta in Grease: “The rules are there ain’t no rules.”

And thus it comes to pass that a weekend Fox News presenter Pete Hegseth is Trump’s pick to be the defence secretary, overseeing a service employing more than two million people and a budget of nearly $900bn. A QAnon-adjacent anti-vaxxer, RFK Jr, is in line to be the health secretary. And Tulsi Gabbard, is a darling of the Kremlin’s media apparatus is the choice to be in charge of the US intelligence agencies. Well, why not? Who should be US ambassador to Israel other than Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, who believes there is no such thing as a Palestinian; no such a thing as the West Bank; no such thing as settlements; and no such thing as an occupation? The UN is irrelevant in his mind: Israel’s boundaries are decreed by Almighty God. That should go well. And I haven’t even mentioned the man-child Elon Musk, or Matt Gaetz, subject of FBI and congressional probes into sex trafficking charges, as Trump’s first pick to head the justice department — to be the actual attorney general. In Washington this week, I met several distinguished lawyers whose jaws were still on the floor.

They rightly suspected that he could never survive a confirmation hearing — and Gaetz himself has now withdrawn his name from consideration, having always denied the allegations against him. Why nominate him in the first place? Was Trump testing the loyalty of Maga senators? Was Gaetz an outrageous stalking horse for a more palatable alternative? Was he a bit of chaff to distract attention from the sheer awfulness of his other appointments? But there’s a fourth possibility: that Trump is behaving in this way just because he can. As with Maxwell, it’s futile to try to square the man’s behaviour with any previous conventions or norms. He demands you take him on his own terms. And the American people have just decided they’re fine with that.

This leaves the rest of the world in a quandary. You wonder how the top spooks at MI6 and GCHQ feel about cosying up to Tulsi Gabbard, accused this week by former Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley of being “a Russian, Iranian, Syrian and Chinese sympathiser”. That’s quite the CV to be head of US national intelligence. And so on — through trade, the environment, Nato and much, much more — the world’s leaders are left scratching their heads. There is no point in trying to double guess this cast of misfits. They have simply been picked for their loyalty. Trump knew that Gaetz was, by any conventional measure, an absurd choice as attorney general. But the very act of nomination tells us a lot about what comes next.

Perhaps just as worrying are the nominees who are not exactly unqualified but will combine loyalty with extreme ideologies. I’m thinking of Brendan Carr, who is likely to lead the Federal Communications Commission, which has immense powers to investigate and/or regulate the media, including the internet. Trump has repeatedly advocated stripping major broadcasters such as ABC, NBC and CBS of their licences. Will Carr tamely do his bidding? You might ask why else is he there? Carr shares with his friend Musk a conviction that all content moderation — the attempt to curb the most ugly fringes of social media, including fact-checking — is censorship, pure and simple. He believes there is a “censorship cartel” — they include Apple, Google, Meta and Microsoft — which needs to be dismantled.