The Three Types of Jobs...

... available in the Trump II administration, and who he's filling them with.

As we’ve watched Donald Trump announce dozens of his intended appointments and nominations over the past month or so, it seems that positions, and appointees, can be broken down into three groups (as Trump sees them): the TV jobs, the real jobs, and the payoff jobs.

TV jobs are those he expects to see pressing the administration line on the boob tube; unsurprisingly, most of the selections for those posts have plenty of experience doing just that. This includes the press secretary (Karoline Leavitt) and secretaries of high-profile departments such as Defense (Pete Hegseth), Justice (Pam Bondi), and Transportation (Sean Duffy).

Real jobs I would broadly define as positions that, in Trump’s mind, will actually work with him to figure out how to do things and then tell everybody else to get them done. This includes some cabinet positions – I would suggest that Treasury (Scott Bessent) and Commerce (Howard Lutnick) qualify – but mostly comprise the attorneys and deputies who will fill West Wing offices. Many of them come from the campaign, including Susie Wiles, James Blair, and Taylor Budowich, or his various legal teams. And, of course, long-time toadies such as Stephen Miller and Dan Scavino. Others, such as Bessent and Lutnick, have proven their competence by becoming very very wealthy.

There are plenty of positions left for Trump to hand out as payoffs, either in reward for generosity or as token gestures to portions of the electorate. Neither type is exactly novel in Presidential administrations, but Trump is particularly flagrant about it – and he has lots of positions that he clearly doesn’t care enough about for merit to matter. Perhaps the most transparent of the demographic payoffs has been Lori Chavez-DeRemer, a Hispanic woman, to helm the Department of Labor, a pick that baffled and infuriated many anti-union conservatives. A close second would be Scott Turner, the nominee for Housing and Urban Development, who remains the only significant Black person named to the incoming administration.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s post at Health and Human Services is a blatant payoff for his withdrawal and endorsement (although recent reporting suggests there may have been a literal payoff as well), and Tulsi Gabbard, chosen for Director of National Intelligence, could be seen that way too. But there are lots and lots of people who gave and raised lots of money for the campaign. Some demanded actual administration jobs – Linda McMahon, for instance, who reportedly wanted Treasury but had to settle for a job Trump doesn’t care about, heading Education; and Kelly Loeffler, tapped for Small Business Administration (where Trump stuck McMahon for Trump I.) Fun fact: Loeffler is one of three losing candidates in 2020 Georgia Senate election appointed to Trump II positions, along with David Purdue (Ambassador to China) and Doug Collins (Veterans Affairs).

Many others are being given ambassador posts. Rewarding big fundraisers to these positions is a longstanding, bipartisan tradition. There is some logic to it (as such ambassadors, and administration officials, have argued to me): most ambassadors are expected to maintain fine homes to host fine catered gatherings of local dignitaries and business leaders, and the State Department doesn’t generally like to pay for all that. So, picj a donor who can afford to maintain such a lifestyle in a foreign land and thank you for the privilege. Purdue, for example, is rich enough to git the bill and also competent enough to trust with an important post like China.

Sadly, you can see why Kari Lake, who falls short on both counts, was passed over for the Mexico job.

You can also pretty quickly imagine that these ambassadorial payoff posts are going overwhelmingly to white men. It’s probably a bit unfair to blame that entirely on Trump’s bigotry; that’s just who has the giant wads of wealth in this country.

More fair, I think, is to criticize Trump’s predilection for white men in the “real jobs” category. To be fair, he has named a woman chief of staff (Susie Wiles), which is more than any of the previous chauvenists-in-chief have done. And you’ll find women here and there among his legal staff and elsewhere.

Still, it will be telling when we first get a map of who works where in the West Wing, and can plot the terrain by race, gender, and ethnicity.

For now, we can scrutinize the cabinet, which as I suggested above doesn’t really map to Trump’s idea of who will actually do important work for the administration.

In 2017, it was widely acknowledged that Donald Trump’s cabinet was the least diverse of any President since the 1970s. Different assessments might come to different conclusions about Trump’s 2025 version once it’s in place, but it’s pretty clear that the new cabinet will be competitive in homogeneity with his 2017 group.

Of roughly two dozen cabinet and cabinet-level selections (depending one which offices he chooses to elevate or reduce in stature), Trump has picked just one Black member, two Hispanic-Americans, and one AAPI – who (Tulsi Gabbard) might struggle to get through Senate confirmation. Those four would equal the number of racial and ethnic minorities Trump included in 2017, far fewer than in Biden’s cabinet and tied with Trump I for lowest since Carter, even as those minorities have risen as a share of the adult U.S. population.

Trump has picked eight women for cabinet-level positions, which is double the number in the Trump I cabinet, and pretty competitive with other recent Presidents, according to the Center for American Women and Politics. As noted above, raising women to true executive branch equality is still a work in progress.

It’s also notable that Trump has selected an openly gay man for Secretary of the Treasury, which is a significant first.

Of course, counting demographic representatives doesn’t tell the whole story. There is important context in the “anti-woke” directives that presumably will stifle the hiring, success, and promotion of historically underrepresented groups throughout the government. There is hostility to LGBTQ+ initiatives from much of the Republican Party, that will likely be reflected within many departments. And there is the dispiritingly large number of high-level appointees and nominees (male and female) who have been credibly accused of committing or covering up sexual abuse or harassment. (Also, was it really pro-diversity for Trump to put Elaine Chao in the cabinet and subsequently fling racist epithets at her in public?)

It remains to be seen whether and how the administration will try to follow through on its promise to rid the ranks of “woke,” “DEI-hire,” or simply Democrat-leaning civil service employees. Or, how many of them will bolt before subjecting themselves to what’s coming. That will be tougher to track than these top-level appointments, but could have very serious effects on the government that works in all of our names.