One quality many of President-elect Donald Trump’s recent picks for his incoming administration have in common is that they are poorly qualified for their positions and primed to try to implement some terrible ideas. But there’s another thing that binds them: They’re TV stars.
It’s well established by now that Trump has a taste for loyalty and ideological allies. But between Trump’s picks of Mehmet Oz for administrator of Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, Pete Hegseth for defense secretary and Sean Duffy for transportation secretary, it’s apparent that he is also keen to boost people who have developed a following on television and have an eye for delivering entertainment. It’s a grim reminder of how much of Trump’s right-wing populism has the same energy as an infomercial for a janky, overpriced product.
Trump's fondness for TV stardom will most likely undermine his ability to achieve some of his goals.
Oz — commonly referred to on television as “Dr. Oz” — is a poor choice to head up a government agency with a trillion-dollar budget that oversees medication coverage decisions, drug price negotiations, vaccine programs and the Affordable Care Act’s insurance marketplace. He’s a heart surgeon turned television-personality doctor, first through appearances on “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” and later via his own daytime talk show.
Oz has no experience in government and his public health endeavors have been marred by junk science and hucksterism. As The New York Times reports, he has “sown misinformation — about Covid treatments, weight loss hacks and unproven supplements. He has invested in drug companies, even as he has publicly taken aim at Big Pharma, and has profited from a medical device that he helped invent but that has been subject to several recalls.”
Duffy, Trump’s pick for transportation secretary, is exactly the opposite of the kind of figure the public needs in the position for which Trump is choosing him. The former congressman later became a corporate lobbyist, working on behalf of U.S. airline companies, oil and gas interests and auto manufacturers to lobby the Transportation Department. This means he was working on behalf of groups that seek to loosen consumer protections, safety rules and environmental regulations. Duffy is not a political neophyte — he is a former congressman for Wisconsin. But his greatest asset in Trump’s eyes may be that he is a Fox News host, and married to another Fox News host, Rachel Campos-Duffy, to boot. Duffy is also a former reality-TV star — he was once a cast member on MTV’s “The Real World” (as was his wife).
Trump’s pick of Hegseth for defense secretary was particularly shocking. This is a position that involves overseeing more than 1 million active-duty troops, hundreds of thousands of civilians, and helping shape how the country handles matters of war, including developing strike targets. But Hegseth is mainly known for being a rambunctious Fox News host, often distinguished as a loose cannon on TV panels and obsessing over culture wars.
Hegseth opposes women in combat roles and has advised Trump to purge “woke” generals. (He is also now being scrutinized for sexual assault allegations.) When announcing his pick of Hegseth, Trump trumpeted the popularity of Hegseth’s recent book, as if book sales would be a proxy for how effective he’d be at protecting the country. Politico interviewed several Defense Department officials who reported great concern about Hegseth’s fitness for the position. “It’s a deadly serious job and this strikes me as a mainly performative person who is best known for talking about wokeness and not doing anything meaningful on national security post serving in the military,” one Defense Department official told Politico. “It is a massive bureaucracy, you have to understand how that works to support national security around the globe.”
There are also several additional Trump picks who also have experience as contributors or hosts on Fox News, including former Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee.
Trump’s fondness for TV stardom will most likely undermine his ability to achieve some of his goals. It’s one thing for his Cabinet and agency picks to say yes to his demands. It’s another thing altogether for them to navigate the complex bureaucratic processes required to achieve them.
But perhaps Trump won’t care, because he doesn’t think hard about efficacy. TV — and cable news in particular — has a vise grip on the way Trump views the world. During his first term in office, Fox News played a remarkable role in shaping his thoughts about politics and policy. And much of Trump’s political strategy involves thinking about how things will appear on video. You could argue that his decision to raise his fist in the air after surviving an assassination attempt was the result of his instinct to be Trump the showman above any other concern (such as the very real possibility of more bullets being fired).
It’s unclear how much Trump’s selections are informed by his familiarity with them through television versus wagering that their TV skills would be a political asset. But it all bleeds together when a president-elect systematically attempts to place so many TV personalities in the top posts of government. It’s optics all the way down, and the notion of effective governance seems entirely beside the point.