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The contours of Team Trump 2.0 are taking shape with some unorthodox choices that will have potentially dismal consequences for Ukraine, the Palestinians, the global climate and thousands of US civil servants.
Among the latest head-turning picks announced by president-elect Donald Trump are the tech entrepreneurs Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to co-lead a new “Department of Government Efficiency”, tasked with trimming potentially trillions off US government spending.
Its acronym DOGE also references the name of a cryptocurrency that Musk promotes - just one of several potential conflicts of interest given his large array of business interests and contracts with the federal government.
While the owner of X (formerly Twitter), Tesla and SpaceX emerged as a generous and ever-present supporter of Trump on the campaign trail, few expected his pick to lead the Department of Defense - the little-known Fox News commentator and former soldier Pete Hegseth.
Also left-field is Trump’s nominee to serve as US ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, who calls himself an “unapologetic Zionist” and who denies the existence of “Palestinians” as an ethnic group.
The incoming president had already announced a few cabinet-level appointments after starting the transition by naming Susie Wiles in the all-important role of White House chief of staff, the first woman to hold the job.
Other big roles are still to be filled in the countdown to Trump’s inauguration on January 20 following his election triumph over Kamala Harris. One of the biggest is the expected announcement that he will nominate Marco Rubio as his Secretary of State in charge of US foreign policy.
The Florida senator clashed bitterly with Trump when they both ran for the Republican nomination in 2016, but has since mended fences and was in the running for the vice presidential pick that eventually went to JD Vance.
In the Senate, Rubio has carved out hawkish stances on China and Iran consistent with Trump’s get-tough approach to those countries - and has also endorsed the incoming president’s determination to end billions in US support for Ukraine.
Speaking last week after the election, Rubio said “we are funding a stalemate”. He added: “I think the Ukrainians have been incredibly brave and strong in standing up to Russia. But at the end of the day, what we are funding here is a stalemate war, and it needs to be brought to a conclusion.”
Trump says he can end the war swiftly, but has not set out how. Any conclusion risks entailing the dismemberment of Ukraine with the US forcing President Volodymyr Zelensky’s government to cede the country’s east and Crimea to Vladimir Putin’s Russia.
Trump also has climate change in his sights, calling it a “hoax”, as Sir Keir Starmer joins other leaders at the latest round of global talks in Azerbaijan.
The president-elect intends again to withdraw the United States from the Paris Agreement on climate change, to permit more drilling for fossil fuels and to gut environmental protections enforced by the outgoing Democratic administration of Joe Biden.
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To oversee that agenda, he has nominated Republican former Representative Lee Zeldin to lead the Environmental Protection Agency.
The EPA pick indicated that action will also come to cancel the Biden administration’s plan to accelerate the transition from combustion engines to electric vehicles - despite the key advisory role being played in the Trump transition by Tesla boss Elon Musk.
“We will restore US energy dominance, revitalize our auto industry to bring back American jobs, and make the US the global leader of AI. We will do so while protecting access to clean air and water,” Zeldin said.
John Podesta, who as Biden’s climate adviser is helping to lead the US delegation at COP29 in Baku, insisted that there remains hope despite the change of administration.
“None of this is a hoax. It is real. It's a matter of life and death," the top Democratic official said. "Fortunately, many in our country and around the world are working to prepare the world for this new reality and to mitigate the most catastrophic effects of climate change."
The most immediate priority for Trump looks to be enacting his vow to lead the biggest deportation of illegal immigrants in US history.
He is nominating South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem as the next Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security. She was another in the running to be Trump’s running mate before she released a memoir detailing how she shot dead her dog on the family farm.
The Department of Homeland Security is responsible for everything from border protection and immigration to responding to natural disasters, and will take the lead role in the immigration crackdown.
Trump has already appointed Tom Homan as his administration's incoming "border czar" tasked with taking charge of security and deportations - including raids on workplaces suspected of employing illegal migrants.
In the president’s first term, Homan was the acting director of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, and supported the most controversial aspect of his crackdown then - separating children from parents who had crossed the border illegally.
Another Trump ally set to be involved in the crackdown will be Stephen Miller, a highly divisive adviser in his first term who is expected to be deputy chief of staff for policy in the new administration.
