Donald Trump: with appointments he announced, what can we expect from his new mandate in the US?

The future president of the United States, Donald Trump, has already begun to select his team with the appointment of twenty people who share a common profile: absolute loyalty to his vision, a good presence on television and firm support for his most controversial measures, such as mass deportations.

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Some of these appointments must be confirmed by the Senate, where the Republicans will have a majority of 53 seats starting in January that could be affected by internal dissent. Given this scenario, Trump has already announced that he will try to avoid this procedure in that House and make unilateral appointments.

For now, among the profiles he has already named are Susie Wiles, who will be the first woman to serve as chief of staff, and Karoline Leavitt, just 27 years old, who will be his press secretary in the White House.

But there are other appointments whose announcement was marked by controversy. For example, Stephen Miller, who will be deputy White House policy director, was the architect of the migrant family separation policies and the entry ban on people from Muslim-majority countries during Trump’s first term. Now he is the ideologue of the mass deportation plans.

There is also Matt Gaetz, one of Trump’s most loyal legislators in Congress, whose appointment as attorney general is one of the most surprising and there are doubts that he can be confirmed by a Senate dominated by Republicans. Gaetz was accused of sex trafficking of a minor and is being investigated for this by the House Ethics Committee, as well as for drug use.

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No less controversial are the recent appointments of Marco Rubio and Elon Musk. The first, a senator from Florida since 2011, of Cuban origin and considered a “hawk” in foreign policy – defender of a hard line against China and Iran, as well as sanctions against Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua – will be secretary of state. And although he is now loyal to the former president, The two maintained an intense rivalry during the race for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016, which Trump ultimately won..

And the second, the magnate owner of SpaceX, Tesla and the social network X, the richest person in the world, will be director of government efficiency. Musk, a former critic of Trump, has been one of his biggest donors in the presidential campaign and will now direct, together with businessman Vivek Ramaswamy, an organization dedicated to government efficiency. He has already promised to cut a third of the federal budget.

The bouquet of controversial appointments is completed by Pete Hegseth, a Fox News presenter with no international experience, who will be head of the Pentagon. An unconventional choice to lead the most powerful Armed Forces in the world. There is also Thomas Homan, whom Trump himself called his “border czar.” He headed the immigration agency (ICE) during the Republican’s first term and was in charge of deportations in Barack Obama’s government. He also participated in the policy of family separation and has promised more raids on workplaces to detain undocumented immigrants, opening the door to the use of the military. And finally, there is Robert F. Kennedy Jr, a conspiracy theorist and vaccine skeptic, whom Trump named his Secretary of Health and Human Services.

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For Juan Nicolás Garzón Acosta, professor at the Faculty of Law and Political Sciences at the University of La Sabana, the appointments announced so far show that Trump’s second will be a government “surely, like the previous one, very personalistic and focused on his figure”.

“The fact that Trump is naming his closest circle, in some way those he trusts most and who were key during his campaign, suggests that he will be very close to what he promised as a candidate and that he now wants to fulfill as president” , adds Garzón Acosta, who also states that The profiles chosen by Trump are obviously “more conservative and anti-immigration” in nature..

What’s coming in immigration matters?

Analysts precisely agree that one of the main conclusions after these appointments is that Trump has chosen to choose figures known for their tough positions to stop migration and advance deportations, which confirms the president-elect’s intention to fulfill one of his main goals. campaign promises, although it does not seem that he will have an easy time.

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Immigration in an illegal situation was a key point for voters in the United States presidential electionsand Trump’s promises to close the border and carry out the largest deportation in the country’s history appear to have resonated at the polls. But realizing these promises can be complicated, experts in the area warn.

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Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, an advisor to the American Immigration Council, maintains that with between 13 and 15 million undocumented migrants in the United States (not the 20 million that Trump cites without sources in his speeches), talk of mass deportations “is not realistic “. It would be necessary to employ tens of thousands of officials to staff hundreds of detention centers and courts throughout the country, argued the lawyer for this non-profit organization, which would have an extraordinary cost and take a long time.

“We estimate it would take more than a decade (to deport 13 million people),” he told AFP. “And that’s only assuming that Congress funds the government about a trillion dollars to carry out those mass deportations.”

Practical details aside, The profile of the figures chosen by Trump to take over this area shows a certain determination on the part of the magnate.

In addition to Thomas Homan, the “border czar,” there is Trump’s bid to lead the Department of Homeland Security, the governor of South Dakota, Kristi Noem, a 52-year-old Republican who recently gained international fame when she scuttled her opportunity to be the vice president of the current president-elect by admitting in her biography, with some pride, that she killed her dog Cricket because he was “untrainable.”

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Although his state, in the north of the country, does not border Mexico, Noem won applause from the right when she sent her National Guard troops to the border. After being nominated for her new position, Noem said she felt “honored.” “We will secure the border, and we will restore security to American communities so that families can once again have the opportunity to pursue the American dream,” he said.

Intelligence and the international role

There are appointments that generate other types of precautions. That of Tulsi Gabbard, a firm opponent of Washington’s military interventionism, at the head of the intelligence services, for example, generated concern, especially about a possible politicization of the work of American spies and their submission to the White House.

But before taking office, the 43-year-old former soldier, a turncoat from the Democratic Party, must be endorsed by the Senate. If that Chamber gives its approval, the woman, who has no experience in the matter and has spoken out in the past in favor of Russian presidents Vladimir Putin and Syrian president Bashar al Assad, will become the new director of national intelligence..

The eminently political position was created in 2005 after it was discovered to what extent the lack of coordination between different government offices prevented the attacks of September 11, 2001 from being thwarted.

“It is an administrative function to ensure that the agencies talk to each other, that they coordinate (…), that the CIA does not lead the dance and that there are rules of analysis,” explains Mathew Burrows, a former CIA employee who currently works as an analyst at the Stimson think tank in Washington.

The director of the intelligence services also speaks with the president daily, so Gabbard’s opinions and her closeness to Trump raise concerns, although her predecessors also composed a team tailored to her.

“His appointment will be a threat to the security of the United States,” says Tom Nichols, a professor at the United States Naval War College. “A person with (those) opinions should not be able to get close to the real jewels of American intelligence.” Gabbard’s statements have caused controversy for years, such as when she alluded to Russia’s “legitimate concerns about Ukraine’s possible entry into NATO.”

For experts, the second term will surely begin differently. Trump “wants to neutralize criticism from the community (and) Gabbard, by being in charge of the daily briefing with the president, has the power to eliminate analysis that does not serve her decisions”according to Burrows. The expert fears that Gabbard’s opinions “politicize the intelligence services.” She “must understand that her role is to speak truth to power. And I am sure that Trump does not have that in mind because (…) he is convinced that he has all the truth he needs,” warns the analyst.

We will have to wait a while to see the real consequences of the appointment but “the community necessarily fears a witch hunt,” says Alexandre Papaemmanuel, professor at the Sciences-Po institute in Paris.

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Donald Trump “will turn everything upside down,” he predicts. “Just as he was able to break the codes of politics, of the media relationship with voters and citizens, what can and cannot be said, we can imagine that he will want to break the very old codes of the intelligence services.”

Along these lines, for Juan Nicolás Garzón Acosta, from the University of La Sabana, Trump’s second term is ultimately shaping up to be a “more confrontational one, probably with a more nationalist discourse and that will try to get the United States out of various commitments.” international events in which he is involved.

The experts agree, in any case, that this new government, with the cabinet that is being formed, will choose to give strong, visible blows of opinion that mark the line of the arrival of a new administration that wants to show itself committed to more tough in economic, security, immigration, international and even health matters. What remains to be seen is how citizens will react to these decisions.