Opinion | Elon Musk, R.F.K. Jr. and the Unconfirmables of a Second Trump Administration

If you watched any of Donald Trump’s recent rally in Butler, Pa., you probably noticed Elon Musk beside him — jumping, jiving, arms raised, belly bared — and wondered what in the name of Tesla the chronically overstimulated gazillionaire was doing. Impromptu aerobics? A cheerleading audition? Charades?

If only. Musk, I fear, was previewing a second Trump administration — in which Trump would embrace and embolden a crew of self-impressed eccentrics and ideological outliers who are happy, even eager, to make confounding and fawning spectacles of themselves. Consider Musk their spirit animal. Multiply him by about two dozen and you have the Trump cabinet of tomorrow — or an only slightly exaggerated cartoon of it.

Much of the fallout of a Trump victory is unknowable. But this much is certain: Returned to the White House, Trump would get input from — and award key positions to — a bestiary of nihilists, destructionists and even criminals unlike any collection of advisers that any other president assembled. They’d be unscrupulous in all fashions but one: unswerving loyalty to Trump. He fumed about what he saw as a lack of that among his previous cadre of helpmates. The coming coterie would affirm Trump’s worst impulses, nurture his nuttiest ideas and gleefully carry out his orders.

The first time around, Trump cared about impressing the Washington crowd and was fixated on what he believed to be the high I.Q.’s of his department and agency heads. He made them sound like the Incredibles.

The current team in waiting? They’re the Unconfirmables.

I’m not saying that Trump would fail to fill crucial government jobs. If Republicans get very lucky, prevail in most of the closest Senate races and wind up with a three- or four-seat majority in that chamber, he might be able to get its sign-off on a cockapoo as Treasury secretary. Or, worse yet, Jared Kushner. And even without such a majority, Trump could find ways to circumvent Senate involvement and oversight. That would be utterly in character for a president who’d have zero regard for precedent and even less for propriety.

But whatever the legislative arithmetic, I have a hard time seeing some cast members of “Trump: The Sequel” passing an F.B.I. background check, let alone winning Senate approval or getting high-level security clearances. And while a right-wing provocateur like Laura Loomer wouldn’t find herself as an assistant secretary of the interior, she and the rest of the Unconfirmables would quite possibly find themselves in the Oval Office when they sought Trump’s ear, and he sought their adulation.

Trump’s staffing process would be messy, ugly and scary in part because he would hardly have his pick of shining political stars: His quickness to torment, fire and then publicly vilify the people who worked for him between 2017 and 2021 — when he burned through chiefs of staff and reportedly shrugged at a gathering mob’s pledge to execute his vice president — would leave him an unusually limited group of applicants.

“There are two categories, right?” former Gov. Chris Christie, the New Jersey Republican who led Trump’s 2016 transition for a while, said to me. “The first category is people who just want to have a title no matter what and aren’t really up to the job. And I think that’ll be a large part of who he gets.” The second category, Christie said, are “people who believe: Well, if I get in there, I can help to make it a little better.” That contingent, he added, would be much smaller than in 2017.

On top of which, Trump’s campaign has been a steady amassing of debts: to the oil and gas industry, which he effectively encouraged to buy the election for him; to Musk, who turned X into a digital Trump pep rally and is essentially cartwheeling across Pennsylvania with fistfuls of money for anyone with any inkling to vote for the madman of Mar-a-Lago; to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who took a break from playing with animal carcasses — I mean, terminated his own presidential campaign — to endorse and stump for Trump. Trump has already said that he’ll repay Musk by putting him in charge of some new government efficiency commission, and he gave Kennedy a place on his transition team, presumably the bullpen from which Kennedy would emerge into a prime administration slot. A public health conspiracy theorist would be reborn as a steward of public health.

The plutocrats and opportunists are circling: A recent article by Rachael Bade and Jasper Goodman in Politico detailed concerns among some Republicans that Howard Lutnick, the chief executive of the Cantor Fitzgerald investment firm who’s a co-chair of Trump’s transition operation, might be serving his business interests with his transition work.

I doubt Trump minds. It’s the kind of commingling he personified as president. Besides, he’s less interested than ever in rules, more intent than before on rebellion. He’s not going to worry about the sketchy semiotics of communicating with, or getting counsel from, the likes of Steve Bannon, Paul Manafort and Peter Navarro, all of whom have done time in the clink. Each will wear his incarceration as a badge of honor. Trump will accept it as such.

To Bannon, Manafort and Navarro, add Roger Stone, who was convicted of seven felonies but had his sentence commuted by Trump just days before he was supposed to report to a federal prison for a 40-month term. Add Corey Lewandowski, who has faced battery charges, which were dropped in one instance and resolved through a deal with prosecutors in another. Trump’s own felony convictions in Manhattan in May didn’t differentiate him from his posse. He just blends in all the better now.

“If Trump is elected,” said the Democratic strategist Doug Sosnik, who worked in the White House under Bill Clinton, “you’re going to see personnel much more, um, exotic than before.”

Sosnik was referring not only to the criminals around Trump but also to the zealots and cranks whose feeding of Trump’s ego during his campaign has surely been an audition for a similar fattening of it during another Trump presidency. I bring you Stephen Miller, a senior adviser during the Trump administration whose own obsessions — detention camps, mass deportations — have become Trump’s. It’s probably no coincidence that the day before Trump claimed during his debate with Vice President Kamala Harris that Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating people’s pets, Miller wrote a post on X with that precise allegation. That’s how hallucinations bloom in Trump’s brain. That’s the caliber of company Trump keeps.

How about Loomer? Her social media posts also chart her racism: Two days before the Trump-Harris debate, she warned that a victory in the election by Harris, whose mother was Indian American, would mean that the White House would “smell like curry.” The vileness of that comment didn’t prevent Trump from letting Loomer tag along with him to the debate. Nor did her past trafficking in Sept. 11 conspiracy theories discourage him, a day later, from bringing her to a memorial service for victims of those 2001 terrorist attacks. So there’s no reason to believe it would bar her from his White House — which, I suppose, would smell like McDonald’s.

“It feels like all bets are off if he wins,” Will Howell, a professor of political science and the director of the Center for Effective Government at the University of Chicago, told me. “The way to think about this is not that there are a handful of Steve Bannons who will be elevated and will do all kinds of damage. We’re at a point where the center of gravity of the party itself has shifted dramatically, and it now sits squarely underneath Trump’s feet. He and his impulses and his convictions are where the party stands. And that was not true in 2016, when he had to manage coalitions and bring in people who were not strict loyalists.”

Knowledgeable Republicans with whom I spoke said that even so, they can’t imagine Trump trying to put someone like Bannon or Stone in his cabinet per se or in any position that typically demands Senate confirmation. His own vanity would dissuade him from taking that gargantuan a risk of being denied and demeaned. But they can imagine Trump taking a chance on, say, Ric Grenell, a gratuitously combative foreign policy maven who in 2020 led a sham effort to discredit and overturn Joe Biden’s victory in Nevada. Grenell is now being touted as a possible secretary of state or national security adviser.

Trump could similarly promote Kash Patel, a populist pugilist who, in an appearance on Bannon’s podcast last year, served notice that he and other Trump allies were prepared to “go out and find the conspirators not just in government, but in the media,” including journalists “who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections.” Trump, during his presidency, reportedly thought about deputizing Patel to conduct purges of inadequately obsequious staffers, but cooler heads in the administration quashed that idea. There’d be no such sentries and no such resistance in the future; Trump’s sons Don Jr. and Eric have pledged a thorough vetting of would-be aides that identifies and repels possible dissidents. Not so coincidentally, Patel “has been mentioned alongside many others as a potential C.I.A. director, attorney general or, if he fails Senate confirmation, a top job on the National Security Council,” Elizabeth Williamson wrote in The Times last week.

Patel might indeed fail Senate confirmation, as might Grenell, Kennedy (if nominated to a post of that nature) and other Trump darlings if Republicans remain in the Senate minority or regain the majority by only one or two seats. Republicans wouldn’t be able to survive defections, and a few of the senators in their caucus — most notably, Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska — aren’t reliable rubber stamps for Trump.

“I think it will be hugely problematic for him to try to find a team that can be confirmed,” former Senator Heidi Heitkamp, a North Dakota Democrat, told me.

But, she added, that doesn’t necessarily augur epic confirmation battles that raise the temperature on Capitol Hill even higher: “My question is: Does he simply bypass the Senate confirmation altogether and just put people in positions and dare people to challenge them?”

She and other Washington insiders explained that Trump could do that, at least temporarily, by presenting his appointees as provisional choices and affixing the word “acting” to their titles, as he did when he made Grenell the acting director of national intelligence in February 2020. They’d be time-limited but would in some cases have many months, not weeks, to wreak havoc. “I like ‘acting’,” Trump said in 2019, when his revolving-door administration left him with a bevy of vacancies to fill. “It gives me more flexibility. Do you understand that? I like ‘acting.’ So we have a few that are ‘acting.’” Expect many if he gets another go at this gig.

Expect more unilateral decisions and highhanded commands like the orders he once issued to John F. Kelly, his White House chief of staff at the time, to grant Kushner a top-secret security clearance. Such executive action has become increasingly common among presidents, and the Supreme Court, with its ruling on presidential immunity, has given Trump every reason to believe that he can ask forgiveness, not permission, and it will be readily granted.

So has Trump’s own political history: After two impeachments, several damning judgments in civil suits, federal indictments and a guilty verdict on all 34 counts in a Manhattan criminal case, he seems to have a 50-50 shot at an inauguration in January. Why wouldn’t he junk any nettlesome procedures? What’s to stop him from putting a neutered figurehead in a job that senators monitor and giving more power to far-right flatterers in the shadows?

What’s to stop those flatterers from plundering and degrading the richest and most powerful country on earth? Certainly not Trump. He’d be too busy admiring their initiative and accepting their compliments.