What the Early List of Trump Staffers Tells Us

Check out this (non-exhaustive) list of who’s in, who’s out and who’s reportedly on deck of the incoming Donald Trump administration.

Who’s in:

• Sen. Marco Rubio: The president-elect is expected to name the Florida senator as his secretary of state. New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan’s take on Rubio: He’s “staked out a position as a foreign policy hawk, taking hard lines on China and Iran in particular.”

• Rep. Michael Waltz: Trump has tapped the Florida congressman and fierce China critic to be his national security adviser. Like Rubio, Waltz has a reputation for hawkishness, which includes the time he praised Trump for threatening to bomb Russia.

• Rep. Elise Stefanik: The New York Republican, who became a conservative media star when she grilled Ivy League presidents on antisemitism during congressional hearings last year, has been named Trump’s UN ambassador. Stefanik has been highly critical of the pro-Palestine protest movement.

• Tom Homan: A frequent Fox News guest, Trump’s incoming “border czar” is an immigration hardliner who served as the president-elect’s acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement from 2017 to 2018. Homan’s also had high-profile clashes with Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in the past.

• Lee Zeldin: The former New York congressman will serve as administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency. Zeldin’s reaction to joining Trump’s Cabinet: “We will restore US energy dominance, revitalize our auto industry to bring back American jobs, and make the US the global leader of AI. We will do so while protecting access to clean air and water.”

• Stephen Miller: The longtime Trump adviser, credited with shaping some of the president-elect’s harshest border laws, has been named deputy chief of staff for policy.

Who’s out: Trump announced this weekend that Nikki Haley, his ex-UN ambassador, and Mike Pompeo, his former secretary of state, will not join his second administration.

• Pompeo and Haley’s aggressive foreign policy stances have led the “America First” faction of the GOP to label them “neocons.”

Who’s on deck: Trump has signaled that Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy will all play key roles in his new administration, although he’s yet to name them to official capacities.

Related: While Sens. John Thune of South Dakota and John Cornyn of Texas were seen as the frontrunners to replace Mitch McConnell as Senate majority leader, a MAGA media push has coalesced around Sen. Rick Scott of Florida.

• Thune and Cornyn are viewed by some as a continuation of McConnell’s “establishment” reign.

• Conservative influencers like Benny Johnson and Charlie Kirk have rallied their millions of followers on X/Twitter to pressure senators into endorsing Scott.

• "Rick Scott of Florida is the only candidate who agrees with Donald Trump. Call your senator and demand a public endorsement of Rick Scott,” Tucker Carlson tweeted on Saturday.

What Tucker Carlson told Axios on whether the media campaign would work:

Bubba’s Two Cents

Trump’s hiring choices have long been a complaint of his supporters (and even Trump, not known for self-criticism, has admitted to making mistakes in this area). But the explanation in 2016 was that there just weren’t enough people aligned with the Trump agenda who were qualified to staff the administration. Trump will walk into a very different situation this time around, both in the makeup of his Cabinet and Congress, where there are no shortage of pro-Trump representatives and senators.

The big question: Will this make him more effective at implementing his agenda and will that be good for the country?

What to keep an eye on: Will Trump’s appointment of “foreign policy hawks” like Rubio and Walz bring him into conflict with the isolationist wing of MAGA?