Sooner or later, both marital and political honeymoons come to an end. It’s rare, however, for a honeymoon to end before the nuptials have been exchanged. With the nominations of Tulsi Gabbard as national intelligence director, former Rep. Matt Gaetz as attorney general, Pete Hegseth as Defense secretary, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as Health and Human Services secretary, President-elect Trump would seem to be trying to cancel the airline and hotel reservations before the ceremony has even commenced.
Some of Trump’s other nominees, such as Sen. Marco Rubio as secretary of State and North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum as Interior secretary, are ones that many more-conventional Republican presidents-elect might have chosen. But it is a decent bet that Gabbard, Gaetz, Hegseth, and Kennedy will not all be seated around the Cabinet Room table. How many the Senate will reject isn’t yet clear.
For what it is worth, the last time the Senate rejected a Cabinet nominee was in 1989, when President George H.W. Bush nominated Sen. John Tower of Texas to be Defense secretary. The nomination failed on a
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