Trump’s Cabinet picks make clear his priorities. Allies get ready.

Any doubts that might have existed about Donald Trump’s plans for a second term in office are quickly evaporating as he announces his Cabinet picks.

While several of the nominees are plainly qualified, others are not. It is tempting to think that some have been picked merely to outrage the U.S. President-elect's detractors or to see how far the Senate will defer to his wishes.

Trump claims a mandate — winning the popular vote and both Houses of Congress and somehow that is a stamp of approval — but his margin of victory is smaller than he will admit and it is narrowing. That is likely to matter more in domestic policy than foreign affairs, but it likely heralds a battle in Washington that absorbs considerable attention and energy, and obliges the Trump administration to be even more inward looking than anticipated. Allies and partners must be ready.

The newly elected president has begun fleshing out his team, identifying key Cabinet members — who require Senate approval — and White House officials (who do not). Many of the nominees in the foreign policy arena, which require confirmation, are strong or otherwise reasonable choices.

Marco Rubio, the senator from Florida and prospective secretary of state, has worked on those issues for years and should easily pass muster. John Ratcliffe, a former director of national intelligence, has been named to head the CIA. New York Rep. Elise Stefanik, nominee for ambassador to the United Nations, served on the Armed Services Committee before taking up a Republican leadership role. All have extensive experience in their fields and should be confirmed without difficulty.

Rep. Mike Waltz, a three-term congressman from Florida and who will be the national security adviser, has served on House committees that cover the military intelligence agencies and foreign affairs. He doesn’t require Senate confirmation but if he did it wouldn't be a problem.

Several other choices will have considerably more trouble. Pete Hegseth, nominee for secretary of defense, deployed overseas as a member of the National Guard, but his primary qualifications seem to be his stalwart defense of Trump on Fox News and his belief that the U.S. military has been weakened by “woke politics.” Most famously, he championed pardons for military service members convicted of war crimes. None qualify him to run a $850 billion defense establishment.

Tulsi Gabbard, nominee for director of National Intelligence, is a former Democrat who became a vocal supporter of Trump after leaving her party. She has criticized the U.S. for being too quick to intervene in overseas conflicts and has blamed the West for prompting Russia to invade Ukraine. Her statements often parrot Moscow’s propaganda and she has been accused of being a Russian asset. There are reports of genuine alarm within the intelligence community at her nomination.

All are also waiting to see who will be nominated as United States trade representative, the position that will determine trade policy, an area of great concern to U.S. allies but of significance to the entire world. The selection of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to head the Department of Health and Human Services is also worrying since Kennedy is an anti-vaxxer, which could force other countries to return to policies requiring proof of vaccination that were in force during the COVID pandemic.

The only seeming qualification for these nominees is loyalty to Trump and the MAGA — Make America Great Again— movement (although he also seems to want his administration to be telegenic). All denied the validity of the 2020 election and insist that Trump was robbed of his rightful victory. Rubio, Waltz and Gabbard have questioned continuing aid to Ukraine, while Stefanik has abandoned her previous call to give the country NATO membership, saying now that her views align with those of the president-elect.

All strongly support aid for Israel; all have taken a tough line on China; all appear ready to shake up their department as Trump promised and, more worryingly, to exact retribution against those they will command who have ever challenged or crossed the next president.

A deeper look exposes each person’s tension with Trump. The president-elect and Rubio engaged in ferocious name-calling during the 2016 campaign, with the senator calling Trump a “con artist,” while the ex-president dismissed him as “a total lightweight who I wouldn't hire to run one of my smaller companies — a highly overrated politician!” They have since made peace. (A similar tension marked Trump’s early relationship with Vice President-elect J.D. Vance.)

Gabbard is a big supporter of renewable energy who sponsored bills to “keep fossil fuels in the ground.” Trump wants to “drill baby drill” and increase U.S. energy production.

Hegseth presents himself as the embodiment of a warrior and wants to eliminate the shackles that have constrained the U.S. military. Trump and his other Cabinet members insist that they will resist the pull toward war and will keep the U.S. from being involved in conflict. The world will be watching to see how long these tensions can be contained or when they will spill over and how.

That assumes, of course, that they will be confirmed. It is by no means clear that that will happen. While the president enjoys great deference in his Cabinet picks, the Senate has a constitutionally mandated role to “advise and consent.” Some of these choices demand real scrutiny, but Republicans in the Senate (and the House) have shown little inclination to defend their constitutional prerogatives and prefer instead to rubber-stamp Trump’s choices, echoing his insistence that he has a mandate.

That mandate is thinner than he believes. Trump won by a smaller margin than President Biden did in 2020. The GOP margin in both houses of Congress is narrow, and the nomination of serving representatives reduces it still further. A few defections could torpedo his nominees and undermine his agenda.

The election of John Thune as Senate majority leader — the head of the Republican Party in that house — is a warning to Trump. He is a traditional Republican, who supports the president-elect and the Senate as a political institution. Still, he may prove unwilling to green-light every candidate that Trump nominates, which, when combined with resistance from other traditional Republicans and government officials unwilling to abandon norms that have prevented the tools of state from being used for nakedly political purposes, may prove a bulwark against the president-elect’s worst excesses.

Ultimately, we are bystanders as this process unfolds. It is an uncomfortable feeling, watching a political spectacle of such consequence for the world whose participants nevertheless seem indifferent to its geopolitical significance. It is not without precedent, however.

The return to the White House of Donald Trump is a reminder that U.S. politics has departed from long-established trajectories and that its internal logic is determinative. The world may look at the U.S. as a global leader with responsibilities commensurate to that role, but some of the country’s leaders and an increasingly large number of voters do not.

As numerous writers on our opinion pages have warned, the U.S. is changing and its allies and partners must be ready for the consequences of that evolution. President-elect Trump’s Cabinet choices are a reminder that the time to adjust is growing short.