Jenny Beth Martin
President-elect Donald Trump is moving fast and breaking things. Since winning three weeks ago, he has moved quickly to name the cabinet and senior White House staff he wants working to enact his second-term agenda. As only the second Republican presidential candidate to win the popular vote since the 1980s, he has a strong mandate — and, consequently, he deserves to have his nominees confirmed quickly.
Trump did not wait long to begin naming names, especially when compared to his predecessor. In his own transition, President Joe Biden had only named one person to his team as of Nov. 11, 2020 — his White House chief of staff. Biden didn’t name another advisor until almost two weeks later, when, on Nov. 23, 2020, he announced his choices to serve as the secretaries of State and Homeland Security, and his nominees to serve as director of national intelligence and as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.
By contrast, Trump has already named 17 nominees who will need Senate confirmation, from his selections to run the departments of State, Defense and Homeland Security to his choices to run the departments of the Interior, Energy, Commerce, Health and Human Services, Transportation and Veterans Affairs, among others.
Moreover, Trump has already named his director of the Central Intelligence Agency and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence as well as his ambassadors to the United Nations, Israel and NATO.
Further, Trump has named his senior White House staff — including his chief of staff, four deputy chiefs of staff, national security advisor, a “border czar,” White House counsel, communications director, press secretary, staff secretary and director of presidential personnel.
And though we are not sure where exactly in the org chart they are going to go, he has also named his co-directors of the new Department of Government Efficiency, which will help him wrangle the executive branch.
That is a remarkable number of nominees and appointees in a very short period of time, and both the pace and quality of the nominees and appointees speak to the professionalism of the transition operation Trump has put together.
There are certain qualities shared by all these nominees. For starters, those whose positions will require them to be in front of the public on a regular basis all appear to have had significant experience in front of television cameras. In a political environment where pushing a coordinated message is necessary for success, the ability to communicate well via television is not a bug, but a feature.
Second — and perhaps more important — they are all people Trump trusts to act on his behalf, as befits the nominees charged with helping him manage the leviathan that is the executive branch of the federal government, with its 15 cabinet departments and other executive branch agencies, more than 50 independent federal commissions whose chiefs are selected by the president, and its more than 4 million civilian and military employees. To manage that behemoth, the president is allowed a grand total of about 4,000 appointments, roughly 1,200 of which require confirmation by the Senate.
Trump is working at a pace and with an intensity that would fell some men half his age. And why shouldn’t he? He is a smart man and no doubt learned from his first term that the most precious resource any president has is time, and time is a depleting resource. The clock keeps ticking and time gone by cannot be gotten back. He will begin his second term on January 20 and he will have precisely 1,460 days to enact his agenda — no more, and no less.
That is why the Senate should move quickly to confirm his nominees and get them in place. The Senate’s constitutional role to advise and consent is meant to prevent the appointment by a wannabe-tyrant executive of confederates determined to help him undermine the guard rails of our constitutional government. Trump has no intent to do any such thing and neither do any of those he has nominated for senior posts in his administration.
In fact, it is just the opposite. As a victim of the unconstitutional weaponization of the justice system and the illegal use of the intelligence and national security establishment against him — beginning with the FBI/CIA plot to destroy him before he was even elected president the first time, continuing through the Russia Hoax and the illegal surveillance, and then into the unprecedented decisions to prosecute him in multiple venues for outrageous “offenses” after he left office — Trump is more sensitive than anyone to the evils that result from such action. What he wants to do is restore constitutional government, to ensure that neither the system of justice nor the CIA/FBI intelligence and national security establishment are ever again wrongly used against American citizens — and to do that, he needs allies as determined as he is to tame the beast.
Trump has moved quickly to get his team in place so he can take advantage of every single one of the 1,460 days in his second term. He has chosen well. The Senate should respect that and confirm his nominees with dispatch.
Jenny Beth Martin is honorary chairman of Tea Party Patriots Action.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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