A disappointing feature of Donald Trump’s first presidency was the number of people in his Cabinet who were working against him. He publicly admitted this was a problem in his October 26 appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast.
Trump has already made a few Cabinet picks. These include very influential positions that will determine policies affecting Americans. They will also reveal whether Trump has learned to steer clear of the people more interested in preserving the status quo than ushering in a “golden age” for America, as Trump has vowed to bring about.
The 47th president will rely on Susie Wiles as his chief of staff, Elise Stefanik as ambassador to the United Nations (assuming she is confirmed by the Senate), Stephen Miller as deputy chief of staff for policy, and Tom Homan as “border czar.” Mainstream media have had apoplectic seizures over the latter two for quite some time, a good sign for the MAGA base.
Susie Wiles
Susie Wiles is the silent-yet-deadly architect of Trump’s election campaign who will have the ear of the president. The chief of staff helps execute the administration’s agenda and will determine who has access to the president. This aspect of the job has raised concerns for MAGA hardliners such as Steve Bannon, who said on his War Room that Wiles’ comment about keeping the “clown car away from the White House” may be code for keeping MAGA purists out.
Wiles was an establishment Republican for much of her career. The daughter of legendary NFL broadcaster Pat Summerall, she has championed environmental causes and created support for more government spending on local services. In 1980, she worked as a scheduler during Ronald Reagan’s presidential campaign. In 1988, she worked as the deputy director of operations for the vice-presidential campaign of then-candidate Dan Quayle. Wiles also worked under the late former New York Representative Jack Kemp back in the 1970s, and for Jacksonville Mayors John Delaney and John Peyton. She ran Senator Rick Scott’s successful campaign for governor of Florida in 2010. When Mitt Romney ran for president in 2012, she served as co-chair of his Florida advisory council. She also had a brief stint running the 2012 presidential campaign of former Utah Governor Jon Huntsman.
Wiles joined Trump’s campaign team in Florida in 2016, a decision that triggered a lot of puzzled looks among political insiders. Republican consultant Tim Miller told the Tampa Bay Times that Trump was so far away from the ideology he knew Wiles to subscribe to that he couldn’t understand how she could work for him. Wiles, however, has said the GOP has fallen into “expediency culture,” which she believed will seriously damage the country, and that Trump was the change vehicle the party needed.
After Trump’s 2016 victory, Wiles stayed in Florida and managed Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’ successful campaign for governor. She and DeSantis, however, had a falling out and she was brought back into the Trump orbit later, just in time for Trump to beat DeSantis in the primaries and win the 2024 election.
Elise Stefanik
Representative Elise Stefanik, Trump’s pick for UN ambassador, has been in Congress since 2015 and currently serves as the House Republican Conference Chair and is a member of the House Armed Services Committee. She graduated from Harvard and worked in former President George W. Bush’s White House on the domestic policy council and in the chief of staff’s office.
She’s accrued a dismal 48-percent lifetime score in The New American’s Freedom Index. Stefanik voted to prohibit the Federal Reserve from issuing a central bank digital currency, but she also voted to reauthorize Section 702 of FISA reauthorization. She voted for a number of spending bills, but she opposed sending more money to Ukraine. She agreed with an amendment to an appropriations bill that would defund OSHA, but wouldn’t do the same when it came to defunding the Department of Education. To learn more about Stefanik’s voting record, visit her Freedom Index page here.
Stefanik is an ardent Israel backer. She has received hundreds of thousands of dollars from the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) during the 2024 cycle. She was especially aggressive during Congressional questioning of the Ivy League presidents accused of letting antisemitism proliferate on their campuses. And she has accused the UN of antisemitism because it criticized Israel’s bombing of Gaza.
Stefanik’s criticism of the UN is tied to her support for Israel. She has called for a “complete reassessment” of U.S. funding for the UN and pushed to block of American support for the organization. “American taxpayers have no interest in continuing to fund an organization that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have allowed to rot with antisemitism,” she said in an October 16 statement. She has supported Israel’s decision to cut off aid for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine (UNRWA), but has said nothing to indicate she understands the best solution would be to get the United States out of the UN.
Stephen Miller
Stephen Miller, who is credited with shaping Trump’s immigration policies during his first tenure in the White House, is one promising choice for the incoming administration. Miller is expected to play a major role in staffing the government — especially areas that intersect with immigration policy. Over the past two years, Miller has also been working on detailed plans for mass deportations.
Before joining Trump’s 2016 campaign, Miller worked for a number of congressional Republicans, including former Representatives Michelle Bachman (R-Minn.) and John Shadegg (R-Ariz.), and former Senator Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.).
After Trump’s first presidential term ended, Miller launched the America First Legal Foundation, a litigation outfit that challenged several Biden administration policies and all-around illegal and despotic behavior on the part of public and private entities. AFL sued to stop the Biden administration’s “catch-and-release” border policy during the Covid-19 pandemic. AFL recently announced that United Airlines is now backtracking on discriminatory DEI hiring practices it bragged about implementing, thanks to its lawsuit. AFL, in conjunction with 16 attorneys general, has also recently won a lawsuit to stop the Biden administration’s attempt to grant mass amnesty to illegals. And the group sued and won to have the Arizona secretary of state produce a list of illegals who were registered to vote.
Miller is one of the MAGA figures most despised by mainstream media. He is known for being unapologetic about his America First positions. Below is an exchange with MSNBC during which he called Joe Biden and Kamala Harris the number-one child traffickers:
Tom Homan
Homan served as Trump’s senior immigration official during his first presidency. He was acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement in 2017, and he has decades of experience in immigration enforcement. He was a police officer, a Border Patrol agent, and a special agent with the former Immigration and Naturalization Service.
Even before he was officially tapped to tackle immigration, Homan was very vocal about the need for mass deportations. As far as carrying that out, he said he would prioritize public safety and national security threats first. In September, Immigration and Customs Enforcement Deputy Director Patrick Lechleiter, in a letter to Congressman Tony Gonzales (R-Texas), said there are at least 435,000 illegal alien criminals in America — and those are just the ones officials know about. Homan has his work cut out for him right out of the gate.
Homan has shown stubborn resolve when it comes to taking the necessary action to undo Joe Biden’s immigration mess, even as mainstream media have tried to paint him as a cold-hearted individual who gets a kick out of separating families. He recently appeared on 60 Minutes, where the interviewer pressed him on the matter of family separation. When asked if there was a way to carry out mass deportations without separating families, Homan responded, “Of course there is. Families can be deported together.”
The immigration battle is going to be a heated one, and lawyers are already preparing for a serious fight. Becca Heller, founder of the International Refugee Assistance Project, told The New York Times, “We literally have a blueprint of what they are planning to do, and so we had months and months to figure out how to protect people.” Lee Gelernt, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union, said his organization has spent the last nine months planning for Trump and they are “prepared to go to court as often as necessary.” The lawsuits are expected to come in fast and pile up high as the incoming Trump administration moves to carry out one of its most important campaign promises.
