Donald Trump's cabinet includes axe-throwing, tattooed defence chief

Like the Mafia dons to whom his detractors sometimes compare him, Donald Trump is said to prize loyalty above all other virtues. But he didn’t always get it during his first term in the White House, having to rely instead on aides and officials who often steered him away from his radical impulses.

He’s determined not to make the same mistake twice. ‘We want people who are going to follow the President, not act as unelected officials that know better, because they don’t,’ says Don Jr, a key part of his father’s ‘transition’ team.

Trump has already announced or is expected to announce more than a dozen key posts in his next government and some have left many in political circles aghast.

PETE HEGSETH

Square-jawed Hegseth co-hosts Fox News breakfast talk show Fox & Friends – but Trump wants him as Defence Secretary.

His relevant experience to take charge of the Pentagon – directing one of the world’s biggest organisations with 1.3 million active-duty troops and a defence budget of $840 billion – doesn’t go beyond having served in the National Guard in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, rising to the rank of major.

His combat experience arguably also includes once accidentally hitting a musician while trying out axe-throwing on live TV.

But the heavily tattooed 44-year-old – who claims he hasn’t really washed his hands in ten years as ‘germs are not a real thing’ – is a loyal Trumpite who has attacked ‘wokeness’ in the US military’s diversity and equality policies, and reportedly persuaded Trump to pardon three soldiers accused of war crimes in Iraq.

KRISTI NOEM

As governor of South Dakota since 2019, Noem has at least some track record of government, although running her sleepy Midwestern state of fewer than a million inhabitants is a far cry from ensuring national public safety as Secretary of Homeland Security.

A farmer and rancher – and the 1990 South Dakota Snow Queen – Noem is a solid Trump loyalist. The 52-year-old mother of three co-sponsored a bill to ban abortion and is a vehement advocate for gun rights, once boasting that her two-year-old granddaughter owned a rifle, shotgun and a ‘little pony named Sparkles’.

Noem was hotly tipped to be Trump’s Vice Presidential running mate until she was mired in scandal after admitting she’d shot a family dog which she ‘hated’. She claimed the incident showed her readiness to take on unpleasant tasks in politics.

ELON MUSK

After he pranced around the stage at a Trump rally and stumped up an estimated $200 million to fund his election campaign, the world’s richest person was, inevitably, going to be rewarded.

The tech tycoon, 53, will co-lead a new Department of Government Efficiency to ‘dismantle government bureaucracy’ with biotech billionaire Vivek Ramaswamy, 39. Musk has promised to slash an eye-watering $2trillion from the budget – around 30 per cent.

SUSIE WILES

The unassuming grandmother and keen bird-watcher doesn’t seem like a hardcore Trumpite but she, more than anyone else, is credited with masterminding her boss’s successful return to the White House. Wiles, 67, whose career stretches back to working for Ronald Reagan in 1980, has been dubbed the ‘ice maiden’ and is Trump’s predictable pick as White House Chief of Staff (the first female one), making her the President-elect’s chief gatekeeper and about the most powerful official in his administration.

A master organiser and famously disciplined, she already knows the challenges of keeping the capricious Trump in line. Insiders say she’s a moderate, traditional Republican. If so, she’s the only one in his new team who is.

STEPHEN MILLER

Trump’s intended deputy Chief of Staff proved unquestioning loyalty to him during his first adminstration stint as a senior aide and speechwriting supremo.

He’s a hardliner in many policy areas but particularly immigration where he pushed Trump to build a wall along the Mexican border. He and Musk may bond over their love of sci-fi TV series Star Trek.

MARCO RUBIO 

The ambitious Florida senator clashed with Trump during the 2016 Republican primaries – saying ‘he doesn’t sweat because his pores are clogged from the spray tan’ – but, like so many of the President-elect’s critics from his party, has since sworn fealty.

The son of Cuban immigrants, Rubio, 53, is expected to become the first Latino to serve as Secretary of State. Like Trump, he is hawkish on China and Iran but not nearly so isolationist – supporting arming Ukraine and opposing withdrawal from Afghanistan.

JOHN RATCLIFFE

Trump had trouble with intelligence bosses last time so he’s plumped for a man of tried and tested loyalty as his next CIA Director. Or as Trump describes 59-year-old Ratcliffe, ‘a warrior for truth and honesty’.

As Trump’s former director of national intelligence, he sided with the President-elect against other intelligence chiefs who dismissed the damaging contents of a laptop belonging to Hunter Biden as mere Russian propaganda.

MIKE HUCKABEE

The two-time failed Republican presidential nominee is expected to become Trump’s US ambassador to Israel though he breaks precedent by not being Jewish.

Huckabee said in 2008 there was ‘no such thing as a Palestinian’ and that the Palestinian issue was simply a ‘political tool to try to force land away from Israel’.