Trump’s vile allies ready to go hard

Trump and his cronies are ready to clamp down on the US border

Donald Trump is assembling a team of racists, reactionaries and the super-rich to fill his cabinet. In 2016 Trump was more cautious, choosing a number of mainstream officials.

But he now considers this to have been a mistake as those mainstream officials acted as a brake on some of his plans.

This time around, Trump is looking to stack his cabinet with staunch loyalists, choosing hardened cadre and his biggest financial backers to fill the roles.

It’s a sign of what is to come in the administration, as Trump is set to ram through policies of mass deportation, cutting climate regulations and sweeping tax cuts for the rich.

Tom Homan, Border tsar

Homan is ex-police and former acting US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) director. He played a crucial role in Trump’s previous border policy of separating thousands of migrant children from their parents.

In July 2024, Homan said, “If Trump comes back in January, I’ll be on his heels coming back, and I will run the biggest deportation force this country has ever seen. They ain’t seen shit yet. Wait until 2025.”

He joined the Heritage Foundation in 2022 and became a contributor to its Project 2025, a far right policy wish list for Trump’s second term.

Homan shows how the Democrat’s helped lay the ground for Trump. He got his career breakthrough when former Democrat president Barack Obama appointed him to head Ice’s deportation branch in 2013. The agency then conducted a record number of deportations.

In 2015, Obama gave him a Presidential Rank Award, the highest civil service recognition. A Washington Post article at the time stated, “Thomas Homan deports people. And he’s really good at it.”

Robert F Kennedy Department of health and human services

Robert F Kennedy Jr claims he wants to Make America Healthy Again. But he is notorious for opposing vaccines and for spreading conspiracy theories.Kennedy wrongly claims that “no vaccine is effective” and compares mandatory vaccinations to living in Nazi Germany. He believes childhood immunisations cause autism and has suggested defunding school vaccination programmes.

In 2018, Kennedy sparked a scare campaign against measles vaccinations in Samoa. The following year a measles outbreak infected 57,000 people and killed 83 people, including many children.

Kennedy also taps into a well of frustration, suspicion and anger over big pharma and food corporations. He promises to sack swathes of the government health care agencies.

Kennedy hates pharmaceuticals but he loves nutraceuticals—dietary supplements, including vitamins and fish oils, and exaggerates their potential. He wants to devote half the National Institute of Health budget to developing alternative therapies.

Mark Gaetz, Attorney General

Gaetz is a hardline Trump supporter and known for being a controversial reactionary figure in the House of Representatives.

In 2018, he brought a Holocaust denier to the State of the Union address in the Congress. Later he tried to expel two fathers who lost children in a mass shooting from a hearing after they objected to a claim he made opposing gun control.

Last year, allegations arose that he violated sex trafficking laws during a trip he took to the Bahamas with escorts.

He is the subject of an ongoing ethics investigation in the House of Representatives into allegations of sexual misconduct, illicit drug use and misuse of campaign funds.

A woman testified in this investigation that she saw Gaetz “having sex with a minor”.

In a social media post, Trump claimed that Gaetz “will root out the systemic corruption at the department of justice”.

His appointment is a sign that Trump’s second term will be more organised and confrontational with the existing political establishment as he pushes through his far right agenda.

Elon Musk, Department of government efficiency

Musk is currently the world’s richest person as the boss of X, Tesla and SpaceX.

During the far right riots over the summer, Musk replied to a social media post claiming the riots were “the effects of mass migration and open borders” and that, “Civil war is inevitable.”

This isn’t just a one off as he has routinely shared far right posts. He has decried pandemic lockdowns as “fascist”. His department will slash what little public services and regulations there are.

Last year he agreed with a social media post that falsely claimed Jewish people are stoking hatred against white people. He said that the user who referenced the far right Great Replacement Theory was speaking the “actual truth”.

Marco Rubio, Secretary of state

“Israel cannot be expected to co-exist with these savages. They have to be eradicated,” said Marco Rubio when questioned about Palestinian civilian casualties in Gaza.

Rubio is a strong supporter of US imperialism fighting to maintain its world-wide domination.

For Rubio, the US’s greatest threats are China and Iran. As part of focusing the US efforts on Asia and the Middle East, Rubio wants to wind down US support for the Ukraine war. He was initially a strong supporter of the proxy war between US and Russian imperialism.

Rubio is a supporter of Nato and backed legislation that would make it harder to pull out of it, which may cause tensions within the Trump administration.

Previously, Rubio claimed his Cuban parents fled Fidel Castro’s left wing nationalist regime to carry favour with the Republican base. They actually immigrated to the US in 1956 when Cuba was ruled by a brutal US-backed dictatorship.

Pete Hegseth, Defence secretary

Pete Hegseth wants to change the name of his department from Defence Department to the War Department. And he wants top generals fired and soldiers accused of war crimes exonerated.

As a host on Fox News, Hegseth has hosted multiple programmes on Fox Nation, including Battle for the Holy Land which justified Israel’s war on Palestine. Hegseth said that the founding of Israel and the American Revolution against Great Britain represent “the story of God’s chosen people”.

He served in Iraq and Afghanistan before becoming a guard at the Guantanamo Bay torture camp in 2004.

Hegseth complains that “woke” generals and the leaders of “elite” military academies have promoted diversity and inclusion and left the military weak and “effeminate”.

He mocks and misgenders trans+ service people and argues that men are naturally drawn to war to compete and prove their masculinity.

Hegseth is a fierce opponent of any rules, laws or conventions that could get in the way of war crimes. When asked about the morality of dropping atomic bombs on Japan, Hegseth said, “They won—who cares?”   

Stephen Miller, White House deputy chief of staff

“Stephen actually enjoys seeing those pictures at the border.” That’s how one White House advisor described Miller looking at pictures of children being separated from their parents at the Mexican border.

The Trump administration’s policy of family separation tore apart thousands of migrant families when Miller was last in office. But he says “it was a simple decision” for him.

Now, Miller is one of the far right contributors to Project 2025.

He believes a “white genocide” is taking place and pushes the Great Replacement Theory. It’s a far right conspiracy that claims “liberal elites” are shipping in Muslim migrants to replace white people in North America and Europe. 

Miller clashed with immigration officials during Trump’s first presidency. He believed they were “not managing the machinery aggressively enough to do what Trump wants done at the border”, a former official said.