Presidential transition season in Washington has a customary rhythm. About 20 people get nominated for Cabinet positions or other high-level executive-branch jobs; a small handful of these nominees become the subject of scandals, usually involving light corruption or pretend surprise that the Spanish-speaking housekeeper they paid in cash was an undocumented immigrant, and have their nominations withdrawn. The rest get confirmed, and it’s on to the next news cycle, which will be about either the strengths of the president’s “mandate” or the length of his “honeymoon.”
The public relations industry has a related subfield called “crisis communications”—the art of preparing for, and reacting to, adverse publicity. In D.C., firms with names like Marathon Strategies, ROKK Solutions, WilmerHale, and DCI Group claim specialties in the field, which has its own best-practice catchphrases (“Tell it all, tell it early, tell it yourself”) and academic frameworks like “rhetorical arena theory.” (Arena theory! Sounds fun.)
The presidential transition is all about so-called crisis comms: vetting nominees to prevent scandals before they start, then responding immediately to whatever problems arise. The purpose is to prevent collateral damage to the president’s image, preserve his “political capital,” and convey that he is a person of integrity who had no prior knowledge of the private jet flights his secretary of agriculture nominee accepted from a company that recently dumped 57 tons of pig carcasses into the Ohio River.
But while more than a handful of Donald Trump’s nominees face obstacles in their paths to Senate confirmation, the phone lines on K Street’s crisis corridor appear to be mostly silent right now. The Trump 2.0 team is, if anything, making a point of nominating figures who have one or more red flags in their past. But if its strategy for communicating about these nominees could be summed up in a single word, it would be whatever.
The most prominent allegations involve sexual assault or misconduct, like those against prospective Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth (accused of sexually assaulting and possibly raping a woman he met at a conference in 2017) and prospective Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (accused of groping and harassing a woman who worked for his family as a nanny). Initial attorney general nominee Matt Gaetz was accused of statutory rape and of paying young women to be present at “sex parties.” Secretary of education nominee Linda McMahon is accused of negligently contributing to the sexual abuse of minors who worked for World Wrestling Entertainment. (All four deny the accusations against them.)
There’s more: Tulsi Gabbard, nominated as director of national intelligence, has a history of endorsing dubious claims made by the Russian and Syrian states. Pam Bondi, Gaetz’s replacement as AG nominee, once closed a fraud investigation into a campaign donor named Donald Trump shortly after receiving his contribution. Homeland security nominee Kristi Noem wrote that she shot her dog and dominated a meeting with Kim Jong-un that didn’t take place. Trump adviser Boris Epshteyn, who has been helping lead the selection process itself, was in the news Tuesday for allegedly soliciting bribes from potential nominees and was convicted of disorderly conduct in 2021 for groping a woman at a bar in Arizona. (Epshteyn denies the bribery allegations, and his 2021 conviction was “set aside” after he completed an alcohol-abuse course.)
The Trump team isn’t talking much about its troubled nominees. Transition spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt has stuck to bland platitudes—telling the Washington Post after Gaetz’s dropout, for instance, that “President Trump will continue to appoint highly-qualified men and women who have the talent, experience, and necessary skill sets to Make America Great Again.”
Vice President–elect J.D. Vance, who has in the past specialized in making mainstream-friendly defenses of Trump’s more extreme positions, may as well have gotten lost in a Kentucky holler. Hegseth was sent on his own to Capitol Hill, where he misleadingly claimed to have been “completely cleared” by California police who investigated the accusation against him. (A statement released by the relevant local prosecutor last week said only that “no charges were supported by proof beyond a reasonable doubt.”)
Skeptical Senate Republicans have filled the vacuum. Gaetz’s nomination flopped almost immediately; North Dakota’s Kevin Cramer told Fox News in its aftermath that he was concerned about the Hegseth allegations as well, saying, “It’s a pretty big problem, given that we have … a sexual-assault problem in our military.” A source “in Trump’s political orbit” told Fox in the same piece that, given what happened to Gaetz, Hegseth, Kennedy, and Gabbard should also be “worried” about whether they will be voted through. Two anonymous GOP senators told the Hill something similar in a piece published Monday.
The most instructive story about the president-elect’s perspective on his nominees appeared in Axios. Citing “people who know Trump best,” the piece explained that he believes that “polite men, who often dominate politics, are too soft and fake to confront the harsh realities of real life,” whereas successful men “are rugged, often handsome, tough and flawed.” But while this may explain, in a deeply concerning sort of way, why so many of Trump’s nominees and advisers have records of assault—it was a trend in his first term as well—it doesn’t explain why he’s not making the case for this particular group of them.
I spoke with Andrew Friedman, the head of crisis communications at the PR giant Orchestra, about what a more typical crisis-response operation might look like. Those strategies, he says, could include issuing fact sheets, arranging for media appearances by “validators” (i.e., surrogates who can make media appearances to dispute details of an allegation or attest to its subject’s character), or front-running bad news by arranging for it to emerge in a sympathetic interview. He hasn’t noticed the transition team doing much if any of this. “It has to start from a client thinking a thing is a crisis, though,” he says. “I don’t think they think of this as a crisis. I think they think of this as a natural part of the process.”
It’s often said that Trump intentionally “floods the zone” with endless controversies so that public outrage never stays focused long enough to do real damage. Friedman isn’t sure that’s what’s happening here. “Keep moving and don’t let bad news overtake an entire agenda is certainly a strategy, but in this case I don’t know that it’s applicable,” he says. “Getting your Cabinet named and approved is something that happens in what is, by definition, a short period of time.” In other words, the confirmation process for these nominees will follow a tight, fixed schedule: Either they’re going to be confirmed or they’re not. You can’t just quietly drop the matter of having a secretary of defense.
But does Trump care whether his initial nominees are confirmed? If you’re not concerned about damage to your reputation, there can’t be a crisis—and his reputation, as they say, is what it is. He is 78 years old, is term-limited from running for president again, and has never believed in polls or election results that reflect poorly on him anyway. Republican senators have to worry about the party’s long-term “brand” and midterm performance; Trump governs as if MAGA voters are his only constituents, and is planning to circumvent Congress whenever possible, going forward.
In other words, if Pete Hegseth and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. need to be replaced with other telegenic macho men, that, for Trump, is fine. He has never paid a price, with his base, for cycling through personnel. The “political capital” model depends on public support that waxes and wanes in response to current events, and Trump’s coalition is not exactly a news-responsive one. Polls say he did well vis-à-vis Kamala Harris with “low-propensity” voters, who rarely engage with the political media. One pre-election Ipsos poll found that his support was especially strong among Americans who believe that violent crime rates, inflation, and unauthorized border crossings were at historic highs. (None of those things are true.)
Indeed, there’s no sign that nominating a Cabinet of creepers has diminished support for the Trump presidency. A CBS News poll taken during the peak of the controversy over Gaetz’s nomination, in fact, found that 59 percent of Americans approved of how Trump was conducting his transition. The president-elect tried to appoint the subject of an ongoing congressional sex-trafficking investigation as attorney general, and the people who put him in office thought it was fine, if they thought about it at all. If he ever pays a price with these voters, it will probably be because of something like tariffs on Mexico triggering a spike in the price of a can of Modelo, not because of a failure to win a news cycle using the conventional techniques of public relations. There may be a game going on in the rhetorical arena, but no one in the crowd is paying attention.
