Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. are the central and most popular members of President Donald Trump’s Cabinet, but they have something else in common: All three are harsh former critics of their current boss.
Much has been made, especially on the left, of past statements by this big three in the Cabinet, Vance calling Trump Hitler, Rubio’s bruising 2016 primary attacks on the president’s hand size and pretty much everything former Democrat RFK Jr ever said prior to endorsing Trump in 2024.
To Democrats, of course, this about face to Orange Man Good from all three, and others in the White House orbit, means that these men have abandoned their principles and are bootlicking for their own power. But in fact, something much more amazing is happening.
Trump’s first term was often mired in internal debate and friction from a Cabinet that at times seemed more interested in being a guardrail to Trump’s supposed impulsiveness than stewards of his agenda.
Vice President Mike Pence, Defense Secretary Mark Esper, and National Security Adviser John Bolton, for example, were, in Trump’s administration and to this day, deeply critical of his approach to governing, which hurt the White House’s effectiveness.
This time around, in Trump 2.0, his Cabinet, which has remained all but unchanged for a year now, is not trying to hem him in, but rather to make his vision for a better America a reality, regardless of any past tensions they may have had with the boss.
This tells us a couple of things. First, it showsTrump has pretty thick skin at the end of the day. Barring the kind of complete betrayals we have seen from figures like Pence and Esper, the president is showing his ability to let bygones be bygones.
Second, it demonstrates that Vance, Rubio, and Bobby, not to mention former Democrat and current National Security Adviser Tulsi Gabbard, have found that when you honestly and openly work with Trump, and get to know him, your opinion of him can change.
Trump’s team of former rivals has also been so effective because Trump’s only firm ideological position is America first, and under this rubric, Vance’s economic protectionism, Rubio’s foreign adventurism and RFK Jr’s Make America Healthy Again agenda all have a welcome home at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.
Much of this is down to Trump’s unique ability to put common sense above political orthodoxy. For example, Democrats were stunned this week when the White House announced it wanted to bar large corporations from purchasing single family homes, something they themselves have called for.
Both from my own private conversations with members of the Trump administration and through their public remarks, what becomes clear is that, in the starkest possible reversal of the first term, today’s Cabinet is a well-oiled and utterly unified team.
The knock on the president, especially from conservative Never Trumpers, some of whom haunted his first White House, is that he has no principles. But the positive way to frame this is that he is flexible and open to new ideas.
The biggest question today in American politics is what the Republican Party will look like on Jan. 21, 2029, when Trump’s political career moves from the headlines to the history books. The answers sit in his Cabinet.
Trump took a lot of guff this past year for allegedly filling his White House with nothing but loyalists. Well, first of all, what do you want in the Cabinet, unloyalists? But second, these are not toadies, they are accomplished former foes who Trump has given the room and authority to execute pro American policies.
Maybe that really is the thread that pulls together Trump’s tight team, the idea of making America and Americans pro America again, to restore the bold idea that America is not a declining power, but rather that it can do great things both at home and around the globe.
While the bookmaking sharps have their money on Vance as the 2028 candidate most likely to emerge from Trump’s cabinet, whomever it is will almost certainly run not just as an individual, but as the man or woman who can continue to lead the all-star team that the president has assembled.
There is an old saw in Washington that personnel is policy, and that is a lesson Trump learned the hard way in his first term. But often times, the hard way is the best way to learn. And a year in, it is clear that President Trump has indeed learned well from his past mistakes.