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Around this time eight years ago, much of the political world marveled at the fact that Donald Trump was making Cabinet choices without bothering to scrutinize or vet any of the choices. While it’s standard for an incoming administration to review prospective nominees’ personal and financial backgrounds, including their tax returns, the then-Republican president-elect decided not to bother.
The Wall Street Journal reported at the time that Trump — who had a habit of announcing Cabinet nominees “before his transition team was ready for the announcement” — was making decisions “based on gut instinct.” He was, in other words, winging it.
Once in the White House, there was more of the same. While the then-president boasted that he and his team had “a great vetting process,” there was ample evidence to the contrary: The Republican president and his operation failed routinely to do any meaningful scrutiny at all of nominees who ended up failing due to controversies that Trump and his aides would’ve seen coming had they bothered to do their homework.
It’s against this backdrop that Trump has already announced his Cabinet choices for a second term in record time. And how, pray tell, did he manage to make these selections so quickly? As it turns out, it was easy: The president-elect and his team are once again downplaying the significance of the whole vetting process.
The Washington Post reported last week, “As his team considers hundreds of potential appointees for key jobs, he’s so far declined to let the Federal Bureau of Investigation check for potential red flags and security threats to guard against espionage — instead relying on private campaign lawyers for some appointees and doing no vetting at all for others.”
One GOP senator downplayed the significance of these tactics. NBC News reported:
Republican Sen. Bill Hagerty suggested Sunday that Americans don’t care about traditional FBI background checks for President-elect Donald Trump’s Cabinet picks as Democrats call for deeper vetting of executive branch nominees. Hagerty, R-Tenn., said Sunday that Americans “don’t care” who conducts background checks for presidential nominees when asked about the FBI’s role in conducting a background check on former Fox News host Pete Hegseth.
Appearing on ABC News’ “This Week,” the Tennessee Republican told Jonathan Karl: “I don’t think the American public cares who does the background checks.”
That might very well be true. I haven’t seen any recent public opinion research on this, but it’s quite likely that the typical American voter isn’t overly interested in prospective Cabinet nominees and their vetting process during the presidential transition process.
But I also think Hagerty is missing the point.
Incoming administrations don’t carefully scrutinize prospective nominees because they think it’s important to voters; they do this because it’s important to the incoming administrations themselves. It’s not about checking a political box to satisfy the demands of the electorate; it’s about conducting important work that’s supposed to matter to presidents and White House officials.
MSNBC’s Jen Psaki explained over the weekend:
There is a reason that presidential transition teams have extensively vetted nominees for decades. This process can (and should) expose the skeletons, the conflicts of interest and, yes, even the immorality of some president-elect picks. The process typically involves hours of intensive interviews with the candidates, an FBI background check and extensive reviews with teams of lawyers about backgrounds and qualifications. It sounds invasive because it is invasive. But it also allows presidents-elect to weed out people who either can’t be confirmed or shouldn’t be confirmed to any Cabinet job.
That framing is exactly right: The point is to identify red flags that would alert officials to those who “either can’t be confirmed or shouldn’t be confirmed to any Cabinet job.” As the process relates to the former, a thorough vetting process will alert a White House to prospective nominees who’ll likely fail in the Senate, saving a president time and embarrassment.
As for those who shouldn’t be confirmed, it’s worth emphasizing that vetting teams do these deep dives to make sure those in positions of power don’t have scandals that could be leveraged against them, leaving them vulnerable to blackmail or extortion.
As far as Bill Hagerty is concerned, the public doesn’t much care about vetting. The better question, however, is why Trump doesn’t much care about vetting.