Does anybody seriously expect the president-elect’s motley crew of cabinet nominees to actually ‘drain the swamp’ in their new positions?

I spend far too much time workshopping my material to death in drafts before publishing, which means that I often miss the opportunity to use the Corner for its proper purpose: making stupidly obvious, yet important, observations. To wit: Does anybody seriously expect Donald Trump’s motley crew of cabinet nominees to actually “drain the swamp” in their new positions, or in fact get anything substantive done in changing the culture of the large, inefficient, and corrupt bureaucracies they’ve been chosen to lead and purportedly “fix”?

Sure, these guys and gals all are telegenic and well known in online conservative circles — that’s how Trump found them, after all, having run through most of the legitimately experienced people during his first administration — but who’s actually going to do the hard work of reorganizing and fixing these broken institutions? (Recall the eternal question asked by Dan Hedaya in Joe Versus the Volcano: “I know he can get the job, but can he do the job?”) Does Pete Hegseth seem like the guy with the Pentagon experience to reform a byzantine network of turf-warring generals, Beltway bandits, and public-private corruption networks, while simultaneously revitalizing our moribund U.S. Navy building program and reorienting America’s strategic focus to the Pacific — as opposed to a guy who looks dudely as a Fox News host on television? Is RFK Jr.’s obsession with beef tallow and chemically assisted bodybuilding really the proper skill set for a position that controls fully one quarter of the entire federal budget, including Medicare? In all honesty, doesn’t it seem a bit like — to quote noted cultural critic Taylor Lorenz — Trump is just sort of out there “raw-dogging the air” with some of these glamour-boy cabinet picks?

I understand that none of these are polite questions to ask right now. But it is also a much different question than whether Trump can get his nominees confirmed. I suspect Hegseth is going to be a harder lift on that front than Tulsi Gabbard at this point — properly so, in my opinion — but when push comes to shove, I expect Trump get all if not most of his controversial nominees across the finish line. (I submit to you that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as secretary of health and human services is an appointment that Donald Trump, RFK Jr., and Americans will all swiftly grow to mutually regret in varying measure.)

Once that’s accomplished, however, what has Team MAGA really won? Now what? Far too many people seem to mistake the beginning of the fight for its end, leading me to suspect they’re content with the symbolism of Trump’s “winning” and getting his appointees in — regardless of their qualifications or weaknesses, the point here is to prove that the Big Man gets his way — and don’t really care if, for example, the FBI actually continues to run politically motivated investigations on whomever it happens to deem fit that particular election cycle. (No, Kash Patel cannot simply fix this with the wave of an authoritarian wand or “make it all go away” with a few pen strokes and timely firings. That is not how entrenched, complicated, rule-bound federal bureaucracies work.)

The eternal weakness of political punditry when it comes to cabinet nominations — on the left and the right alike — is how we reduce it to a game of personalities or (alternately) ideology. Commentators ask, “Will so-and-so get enough votes for confirmation?” or “Does so-and-so believe what I believe on the issues?” We do this because those are the easy questions, the superficially measurable ones. But anybody with actual working experience within a major federal bureaucracy — I have two under my own belt — knows that neither of those questions is half as important as the one that people always forget to ask (except for Tom Hanks’s boss, that is): What reason have any of these people given us to believe that they’re competent for the jobs they’re asking for, particularly when they’re expected to go to war with the deeper culture of the institutions they presume to lead?