Pop Quiz: Name as many Joe Biden Cabinet officers as you can. For extra credit, jot down what is memorable about each. Don’t ask Google or ChatGPT, do it from memory, before reading further.
My guess is that most who take this quiz will recall Attorney General Merrick Garland, and perhaps Alejandro Mayorkas at Homeland Security, Pete Buttigieg at Transportation, and Tony Blinken at State. Three of those four are memorable primarily for what they didn’t do — Majorkas did not protect our border, Buttigieg stayed home for his well-publicized paternity leave, and Blinken didn’t do much of anything. AG Garland was busy, but doing the wrong things, among them mobilizing the largest FBI dragnet in history to find and prosecute January 6 trespassers.
Organizations tend to take on the characteristics of their leaders. Those of a certain age might recall Vince Lombardi’s tough and scrappy Green Bay Packers, or John Wooden’s surgically precise UCLA Bruins, both teams whose players modeled their coach’s personality, year in and year out. In the same fashion, Team Biden emulated their leader: low energy, enjoying the prestige and privilege of office, but rarely proactive and hardly inspirational.
Team Trump is the polar opposite of Team Biden. Among the things we can’t help admiring about our current president (even when clouded by Donald Trump’s flaws that get so much attention) are his boundless energy, intensity, and constant motion. So, it’s no surprise that he has assembled and deployed Cabinet officers with similar characteristics, always on the go, always pushing themselves and the administration’s agenda.
Like their boss, they’re far from perfect — several tend to get ahead of their skis and have stumbled. But no one is sitting around in plush offices — they’re out and about, on the job.
We see them all the time and have no problem reeling off their names, jobs, and scorecards.
In summary:
JD Vance, vice president. As second in command, Vance is fully engaged, highly visible, and regularly travels and works with the president and/or his cabinet officers.
Marco Rubio, secretary of state. Any who might have thought that the youthful-looking Senator Rubio is just another smooth but superficial lifetime politician should now step back and admire Rubio’s focused, efficient, and steady handling of very unsettled foreign affairs, in the Middle East and elsewhere.
Kristy Noem, Homeland Security. Her’s is a lead role in what has been arguably the most remarkable performance reversal in U.S. history, inheriting a wide open southern border with thousands of illegal penetrations per day and driving that essentially to zero illegal penetrations, and now leading Trump’s roundup and deportation of illegal aliens already here. Noem has been ridiculed for tagging along on ICE raids, body armor and all, but nothing beats firsthand insights. Does anyone remember seeing Majorkas in the field?
Pete Hegseth, secretary of defense. Trump’s surprise choice of Hegseth — an outspoken U.S. Army combat veteran and Fox News host raised a lot of eyebrows. His senate confirmation was touch-and-go, and on the job, he’s had some miscues. But so far, his energy, enthusiasm, and deep commitment to the warrior ethic essential to our military have carried the day. He’s all over the world, always in front of his troops (where military leaders belong), and is obviously respected by them. U.S. military recruiting, in deep trouble for years, is now through the roof.
Scott Bessent, Treasury. I cannot recall any former Treasury secretary so visibly and professionally in command of economic issues. Bessent is constantly on the go, interacting with American business leaders, deftly navigating the swirling waters of Trump’s tariff policies. Bessent and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick — both bringing extensive business experience and acumen — collaborated closely in the extensive tariff deal-making with economic leaders worldwide, repeatedly achieving successes that were previously considered unachievable.
Pam Bondi, attorney general. Among Trump’s most daunting organizational challenges is the top-to-bottom reorientation of the Department of Justice, including the FBI, which led the charge in resisting Trump during his first term. Bondi is a seasoned professional with a pit bull temperament, teaming with her FBI Director, Kash Patel, to clean house and simultaneously deal with a steady barrage of new DOJ issues.
Doug Bergum (Interior) and Chris Wright (Energy) are collaborating on ways to reboot U.S. energy production — with demonstrable success.
Sean Duffy, in double duty as Transportation Secretary and Acting NASA Administrator, is shepherding DOT’s long-overdue effort to modernize Air Traffic Control systems and the resurgence of NASA, with a focus on near-term missions to the moon and then to Mars. Just last week, the president gave him a third, important assignment — to take control of Union Station in Washington, DC, ground zero for much crime and homelessness in that city.
Linda McMahon, Education, is going head-to-head with ultra-politicized teachers unions, and also championing school choice, with full recognition that success will put her Department of Education out of business.
And let’s not forget Elon Musk, whose brief but remarkable tenure as head of the Trump-invented Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) jump-started a key element of the Trump agenda and simultaneously aroused a torrent of opposition from the resistors.
Musk paid a steep personal price for his DOGE work, both financially and in terms of his reputation. The unsavory and much-too-visible clash between Trump and Musk may have been inevitable for two justifiably gigantic egos. Hopefully, both know that Musk’s contributions to the Trump team were substantial. He was attacked for being an unelected intruder, but his real sin was his unblinking revelation of a mountain of governmental waste and too many dirty little secrets behind it.
The next tier of the Team Trump also deserves recognition: Steve Witcoff holds the enormously important job of serving as Trump’s personal envoy on peace negotiations in both the Israel/Hamas and Russia/Ukraine wars; Tulsi Gabbard, DNI, has been unearthing and releasing long-suppressed information regarding the genesis of the hugely disruptive 2016 “Russia hoax”; Lee Zeldin (EPA), unravelling the stranglehold of Obama-era decision to subject CO2 to EPA regulation.
Along with the caliber and demonstrable capabilities of Team Trump, the president’s frequent interaction with the full team is also noteworthy. Trump has so far held seven full cabinet meetings, working sessions with media presence, and opportunities for Q&A. Last week’s cabinet meeting was a three-hour marathon. By comparison, Joe Biden held only nine full cabinet meetings during his four-year term, and for the most part, those were tightly scripted show-and-tell affairs.
Of course, not everyone is enamored by Team Trump and its members’ close-knit collaboration. In the always hyper-critical New Yorker, columnist Susan Glass called the recent meeting the “longest, cringiest Trump cabinet meeting yet” and characterized the participants, individually and collectively, as sycophants.
The author seems not to understand the simple reality that successful teams, in business and sports, are invariably 100% aligned, everyone on the bus, all pulling the same way. Her piece sharply criticizes her fellow media counterparts for their positive coverage of last week’s cabinet meeting.
Ironically, her own words — “this is what passes for journalism these days” — capture today’s larger media problem.
