The contradictions of Team Trump

How Donald Trump will keep his coalition of support together amid his cabinet’s competing ideologies.

Donald Trump won the 2024 US election thanks to a multifarious coalition of white evangelicals, Maga devotees, working-class Americans, the too-online right, tech bros and low-information voters seeking some amorphous idea of change from the high-cost-of-living, high-immigration, too-much-disorder status quo. His staff and cabinet picks reflect that disjointedness: they are a ragtag bunch who range from political office-holders (such as Florida’s Senator Marco Rubio, who has been tapped to be Trump’s secretary of state) and private sector billionaires to vaccine deniers and multiple TV personalities, most of them regulars on Fox News. (Trump has also tapped multiple people who, like him, have been accused of sexual misconduct.) Already, certain nominations that please one group of Trump supporters are alienating others. With such a motley alliance putting him in office, can Trump please everyone – or even maintain their confidence?

The answer, perhaps surprisingly, is yes. Despite early and vocal objections over appointees who stray from Republican orthodoxy on issues like abortion, the Trump strategy here is one well trod by authoritarians throughout history. His followers have shown repeatedly that they will forgive all kinds of ideological inconsistencies so long as they have a strong-man leader to follow; and Trump has shown repeatedly that he will say one thing to get elected and then do what needs to be done to please his hardcore conservative base. Some less-savvy supporters will wind up feeling betrayed. But the conservative organisations, Wall Street, tech billionaires and white evangelicals will find that even Trump’s incoherent administration suits them quite well.

Take, for example, Robert F Kennedy Jr, Trump’s pick for head of Health and Human Services. Kennedy, who is widely known for his opposition to vaccines and processed foods, as well as his apparently lifelong habit of collecting animal corpses, is also nominally in favour of abortion rights, leaving some anti-abortion groups upset. And yet most of the outcry against Kennedy hasn’t come from conservative or anti-abortion groups, but from liberal ones, who object to his vaccine denialism and the fact that his ideas about science and health range from the half-baked to the dangerously delusional.

Anti-abortion groups have made some noise, of course. But many of them seem to understand that Kennedy is a lot like Trump when it comes to abortion rights: he supported them because he’s a member of the coastal elite and that’s the group norm, not because he had any real commitment to women’s rights and freedoms. Now that power has been dangled before him, Kennedy is happy to do a 180 turn on his previous view. Politico has reported that he is already deferring to anti-abortion organisers, agreeing to appoint a staunch abortion opponent to a senior position in the health department and to reinstate radical anti-abortion and anti-contraception rules from Trump’s first term. Kennedy is also notorious for believing scientifically disproven claims and crank theories, which makes him a good fit for the anti-abortion movement as it routinely peddles politically motivated lies and quackery, from proven-false claims that abortion causes breast cancer to bizarre assertions about abortion pills poisoning the water supply (not possible and not true, respectively).

Kennedy is an extreme example insofar as his politics are outside of the Republican mainstream. But he is entirely emblematic of Trumpism and the kind of people Trump has chosen to surround himself with: light on qualifications, entirely ridiculous, and enduringly loyal precisely because he knows he would never be in this position were it not for Trump – no one else would give him this kind of potential power. And so his own views matter only in that they align with Trump’s priorities. When it comes to Kennedy, this means that his well-established distrust of vaccines – views shared by several other Trump appointees – are relevant and very well may influence policy. His views on abortion, which have never been strongly held, likely won’t. Instead, he seems, like Trump, primed to give the Maga base whatever they want when it comes to abortion. And what they want is as much regulation and pain as possible.

The cobbling together of ostensibly conflicting coalitions in support of an all-powerful leader is a well-established tradition with a very dark history. In fascist Italy, Benito Mussolini enjoyed support not just from fascists but from Catholics, nationalists and even liberals; in Germany, Adolf Hitler’s policies were broadly popular across a diverse swath of the population. And elevating seemingly ridiculous figures to power is part of the autocrat’s game. As the historian and writer Anne Applebaum, who has spent her career writing on authoritarianism, recently said in an interview, people who are “given jobs because of their level of their loyalty to the leader… is one of the things that characterises an authoritarian regime”. Part of that loyalty test, she said, is very often “the forcing of people to adhere to a conspiracy theory or say things… that are patently untrue”. Team Trump’s demand that Republicans agree with the patently false claim that the 2020 election was stolen is one example; that they agree RFK Jr. is qualified to lead the department of Health and Human Services despite the clear disqualification of refusing to accept the scientific consensus on health measures that have saved millions of lives is another.

This understanding that loyalty matters above all is part of what well may keep seemingly disparate groups tied together in support of Trump. It doesn’t matter what Kennedy thinks about abortion; or what Pete Hegseth, the Fox News host who Trump has selected as his defence secretary, thinks about Ukraine; or what the former World Wrestling Entertainment CEO and likely next education secretary Linda McMahon thinks about public education. What will shape their behaviour in office is whatever Trump wants them to do.

And when it comes to issues that Trump doesn’t really care about – a very long list – he will outsource to groups like the conservative Heritage Foundation think tank and its Project 2025 masterplan. Savvier conservative actors understand that if they can earn Trump’s trust, they can almost entirely shape his policy agenda, aside from a handful of arenas where he wants his own will enacted (immigration top among them).

That doesn’t mean that all of Trump’s supporters will be satisfied. Engaged conservative groups, after all, are very different from average voters. Trump was elected in part thanks to voters who just don’t really pay attention to politics or the news; the Trump voters who do pay attention to politics tend to get their information from sources like YouTube and Fox. These voters are surely familiar enough with Trump to know his general vibe: anti-immigration, tough on crime, promising economic boom times. But they may not be particularly aware of what Trump and those closest to him have planned, from potential cuts to basic healthcare services and criminalising abortion to the support of autocratic right-wing regimes worldwide and tax breaks for the wealthiest at the expense of service cutbacks to the poorest.

Will the newly formed conservative Muslim groups that supported Trump, partly in response to the Biden administration’s refusal to oppose Israel’s devastating war in Gaza, be pleased that Trump has appointed as Israel ambassador the Evangelical Mike Huckabee, a man who believes Israel should control all of the land from the Jordan river to the Mediterranean sea and that Palestinians have no right to their own state? Will the young men who flocked to Trump feel well-represented by groups that suggest it might be wise to ban porn and that make sex for pleasure far more perilous for the women these young men ostensibly want to be having sex with? Will the voters who want to see lower costs at the supermarket be happy with tariffs that increase the price of cheap goods Americans love to buy, or immigration laws that make all kinds of labour – construction, food service, fruit-picking – suddenly scarce and therefore much more expensive?

The coalition of voters who elected Trump may be shocked by what’s to come. But the coalition of billionaires and powerful political interest groups that dedicated their resources to putting him in office? No matter how jumbled and incoherent Trump’s administration is, they know this is a president who may do their bidding so long as they do his in return – and they will be just fine.

[See also: The downfall of Matt Gaetz]