Trump’s Cabinet speaks for America

OPINION:

Actions speak louder than words. That’s the clear message of President-elect Donald Trump’s Cabinet selections thus far. He has clearly signaled his intention to fulfill campaign promises on a number of issues.

Mr. Trump’s first appointment wasn’t a Cabinet selection. On Nov. 10, Tom Homan, former acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, was named border czar. This signaled in no uncertain terms that Mr. Trump intends to secure the border and begin mass deportations.

Together, Mr. Homan and Mr. Trump’s pick for secretary of homeland security, South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, will constitute the velvet hammer when the far left starts to whine about a more muscular immigration policy.

Mr. Trump has also nominated Army National Guard veteran and Fox News star Pete Hegseth for secretary of defense and former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe for CIA director.

Mr. Ratcliffe signals a long-overdue cleanup of the intelligence community, which has waged war against Mr. Trump since the 2016 Russia hoax — which Mr. Ratcliffe, along with Kash Patel, helped expose.

It was unforgivable for key members of the intelligence community to dismiss Hunter Biden’s laptop as Russian misinformation during the 2020 campaign. The spurious claim, together with the refusal of the FBI to verify that the laptop was genuine, likely cost Mr. Trump the 2020 election.

Mr. Ratcliffe oversaw the nation’s intelligence agencies as a member of Congress and was director of national intelligence from 2020 to 2021. He will be joined in his fight by former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, who was nominated to be director of national intelligence. Ms. Gabbard will bring her military background and independent perspective to the job.

As for Mr. Hegseth, the signal here — amid the hand-wringing and “woke” noise — is that national defense will again be the Department of Defense’s top priority, that combat readiness will eclipse diversity, equity and inclusion as a primary DOD goal and that the Trump mission is not war but rather peace. The president-elect knows that peace is attained only through strength. Mr. Hegseth, a combat veteran and Princeton and Harvard graduate, fits the Trump mold.

Sen. Marco Rubio has gotten the nod for secretary of state. The Florida Republican brings a wealth of experience to the post as a longtime member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. Like Mr. Trump, Mr. Rubio signals to China, Iran, Russia and North Korea the stiffest of backbones. With his Cuban heritage, Mr. Rubio also signals what will be little tolerance in the Trump administration for socialist and communist regimes.

Mr. Trump has also nominated former Rep. Matt Gaetz for attorney general. This unleashed a stream of wailing and whining from a justice bureaucracy complex that includes the Department of Justice and the FBI.

Together, DOJ and the FBI, with the help of the aforementioned intelligence community and egged on by left-wing cable news networks, have terrorized Mr. Trump and many of his closest advisers since 2016. This one gets me a little hot because I went to prison because of these partisans.

The obvious signal of the Gaetz nomination is that those who would abuse our justice system will be held accountable. This will be done not for retribution’s sake but to ensure that such partisan injustice never happens again. Only if Mr. Gaetz succeeds on behalf of Mr. Trump will our democracy be secure going forward.

Mr. Trump has supported his pledge to make America healthy again by nominating Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for health and human services secretary. As with Mr. Gaetz and Mr. Hegseth, the fake news outlets have been doing their best at character assassination.

Yet the longer the debate goes on about Mr. Kennedy, the more Americans become informed about the risks of obesity, cancer, heart disease and all manner of illnesses we face because of some of the food we eat, some of the medicines we take and some vaccines — certainly not all of them, as Mr. Kennedy knows — that are administered. Mr. Trump is signaling that it is time for a national debate about America’s health and that Mr. Kennedy will do something about it

Mr. Trump has nominated North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum as his secretary of the interior and energy executive Chris Wright as secretary of energy. Mr. Burgum will unleash the leasing of public lands for oil and gas drilling. At the same time, Mr. Wright will orchestrate everything from rebooting the Keystone XL pipeline and removing restrictions on the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to exporting liquefied natural gas again.

As for the latest, on Nov. 18, my old boss appointed former Rep. Sean Duffy as secretary of transportation. I hope this delights America as much as it delights me. The Department of Transportation is one of the most important government agencies that implement the Buy American, Hire American policies. As director of the Office of Trade and Manufacturing during Mr. Trump’s first term, I had endless problems with DOT implementing those policies; under President Biden, those policies are dead. Look for a resurrection of Buy American under Mr. Duffy.

More broadly, Mr. Duffy is the antithesis of Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, who was famously missing in action early in the Biden term when our supply chains were falling apart and inflation began to rage. Expect Mr. Duffy to hit the ground running, and even with 10 children, don’t expect him to disappear on family leave if the nation is in crisis.

This is not just a quick start for the Trump administration but a damn good one. The only way this gets screwed up is in the Senate. Stand down, Sen. Mitch McConnell. Stand up, Sen. John Thune.

• Peter Navarro served as director of Trade and Manufacturing in the first Trump White House and is the author of “The New MAGA Deal: The Unofficial Deplorables Guide to Donald Trump’s 2024 Policy Platform.”