Don’t Adjust Your Screens
A television administration is taking shape under Trump, but it’s not just any kind of TV.
Donald Trump recently dropped a few announcements about new nominees to his incoming administration. They include
Linda McMahon for Secretary of Education,
Dr. Mehmet Oz to run the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, and
Sean Duffy to head the Transportation Department
These appointments are shocking, and I suppose that’s part of the point. They are irresponsible, which is also the point, especially for a movement bent on upending norms and destroying the administrative “deep” state.
But there are other things that connect these nominations, and even a darker purpose at work. So today I want to discuss them and raise the alarm. First, all of these nominees come directly from the world of television. Second—and this is no surprise with Trump—they are all wholly inexperienced and uniformly unfit for their positions. But this actually doesn’t matter, once you understand what their true purpose likely will be.
Trump Television
One thing these new appointees have in common is television. Trump is an avid television watcher and is himself a former reality TV star. He judges his team by how good they look and sound on television. On some level, it isn’t that surprising that he would turn to television to fill his cabinet.
Linda McMahon is an executive from the world of professional wrestling. She’s the wife of the former CEO of World Wrestling Entertainment, Vince McMahon, and her biggest qualification appears to be her major political contributions to Trump’s campaign. As NBC News reported,
McMahon was one of Trump's top donors during the 2024 campaign — contributing more than $20 million to the Make America Great Again Inc. super PAC, as well as $937,800 to his campaign and affiliated joint fundraising committees.
Dr. Mehmet Oz is a celebrity physician and talk show host who, as Trump likes to brag, won nine daytime Emmys for The Dr. Oz Show. Like that other well known television physician, Dr. Phil, Dr. Oz was originally launched to stardom by Oprah Winfrey then gained notoriety on his own show where he often platformed pseudoscience and junk medicine.
Sean Duffy is yet another Fox News personality, this time from the Fox Business side of things. Duffy first found stardom on The Real World: Boston where he once compared a Black castmate to Hitler. On a Road Rules: All Stars version of that show, he met his current wife, Rachel Campos-Duffy. She is also now a Fox host opposite—you guessed it—another Trump nominee, Pete Hegseth. Trump has plucked Hegseth to head (checks notes) the Defense Department.
What a nasty and tangled web they have woven.
No experience? You’re hired!
Another thing these nominees share is an utter lack of relevant experience. That is unsurprising when the range of options begins and ends with television personalities.
McMahon’s relevant experience in education policy was a one-year stint in 2009 with the Connecticut Board of Education. She actually resigned from that Board a day after a newspaper inquired about her false claim that she had an education degree and told McMahon it intended to write about it; in fact she had only received a teaching certificate from East Carolina University. (She claims she resigned for unrelated reasons.) Despite this lack of experience and false CV, Trump now wants her to oversee the entire Education Department—one that he wants to see dismantled. Like her predecessor under Trump, Betsy DeVos, who also had no actual classroom experience, McMahon has expressed support for conservative priorities such as “school choice” and voucher programs.
Dr. Oz is a former heart surgeon, but he has no experience running a large bureaucracy, let alone one that oversees both Medicare and Medicaid and covers more than 150 million Americans. As the New York Times warned, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services “regulate health insurance and set policy that guides the prices that doctors, hospitals and drug companies are paid for many medical services.” And then the kicker: “About a quarter of all federal spending runs through the centers.”
Sean Duffy, who is up for Transportation Secretary, was a Congressman from Wisconsin at one point, but while serving in Congress he had nothing to do with transportation policy or any committee related to transportation. All aviation, rail and transit in the country are overseen by the department. As the Times noted,
If confirmed, Mr. Duffy will oversee a Federal Aviation Administration struggling with air traffic control and a Federal Railroad Administration still pushing for safety reforms after a fiery derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, in 2023. He will also be in charge of assessing how to rebuild the country’s crumbling infrastructure.
Mr. Duffy would also be managing remaining funds from the 2021 $1 trillion infrastructure law, a cornerstone of the Biden administration’s efforts to prioritize rebuilding the nation’s infrastructure, and would help to shape its priorities.
In fairness, new leaders do sometimes come laterally from the world of business, or city or state governance, to bring fresh ideas and management styles. But bringing people in because they are loyalists like McMahon, or look good on TV like Oz, Duffy and Hegseth, renders these appointments more of a joke. A candidate with neither relevant subject matter experience nor significant executive experience (with the exception of McMahon, who is there to undo everything) cannot manage such a large organization, let alone gain the trust and cooperation of those within it who have invested so heavily in its success.
Perhaps that is the point. By turning our government into a spectacle and a show, the federal government will wield less influence and can be more easily gutted, per the designs of the authors of Project 2025. And once you think about it, it’s clear that the one thing each of these television personalities has a lot of experience with is putting on a show. What they say may not make sense and may be completely uninformed, but they will look good saying it!
And that leads me to my next point.
The lying loyalists
There’s another common thread among these nominees: entertainment that masquerades as something real.
Take McMahon. She’s steeped in the world of professional wrestling, which is a fake spectacle where combatants aren’t really fighting each other. It’s literally all pretend fighting. People watching it know it’s not real, but they treat it like it is. And that is a rather amazing allegory for everything Trump has ever promised and failed to deliver.
Dr. Oz is a quack physician who has come under fire for peddling things like hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for Covid, all without disclosing that he has financial ties to the drug’s manufacturer. On his show, he has also platformed vaccine denialists like RFK, Jr., who by no small coincidence is being tapped to head the Department of Health and Human Services.
And the nominees from Fox News? That network has so much as admitted in court that it is an entertainment not a news outlet. They are quite experienced liars who look good lying.
In my view, Trump is nominating these loyalists not for their experience in these fields or at these departments but because they are experienced propagandists. Each of them has highly relevant experience selling something fake to the public, whether its a wrestling match or whatever Rupert Murdoch wants pushed out to audiences.
Seen in this light, other appointees make a perverse kind of sense, too. Tulsi Gabbard willingly spreads Kremlin talking points and has been lying from the get go about her party allegiances. RFK, Jr. spreads debunked conspiracies and also lied to his followers and the public about his intentions as a third party candidate. And Matt Gaetz will say and do anything to advance his own career and stay out of prison.
Trump himself is a con man who values the ability to brazenly lie and sell anything to a naive public. Even his own reality TV show was a sham: The producers of The Apprentice built Trump up as an experienced and capable businessman, but in truth he was far from this. Yet the lie worked, and it caused millions of Americans to see Trump in a positive light and admire his accomplishments when in reality he was a bankrupt charlatan.
Trump is now filling his cabinet with accomplished liars and propagandists precisely because he will need them to keep the MAGA image polished, even as it sinks into the mud. When tariffs cause inflation to soar, when mass deportations result in widespread human rights abuses and misery, and when American isolationism leaves millions of our friends and allies vulnerable to Russian aggression, Trump will need a trusty set of liars to work the media and the American public and get them to believe down is really up.
In short, the sycophants Trump is assembling know how to pull fast ones over on all of us. And the White House will deploy them ruthlessly. We need to understand that propaganda and skillful lying will be a top priority—and they’re a big reason why he picked them in the first place.
“So what do we do?” many ask.
The first step to defending against what’s coming is to understand it well. That’s the stage we are in now. It’s imperative that we acknowledge the danger before we can counter it.
Become an informed resister. This is a long fight we have ahead.
Hiring people like this will have the effect of causing many career professionals to leave government service. Still another part of Project 2025’s plan.