The Court of Trump

A guide to the key people around him and the fights they’ll have

One of the many exhausting things about Trump is the second guessing. Which of his throwaway comments does he mean? Which are pure fantasy and which have a kernel of truth? As David Brooks wrote during his first term:

“We’ve got this perverse situation in which the vast analytic powers of the entire world are being spent trying to understand a guy whose thoughts are often just six fireflies beeping randomly in a jar.”

On tariffs, on deportations, on healthcare, on Ukraine, all sorts of things have been said and promised but the world is left guessing as to what any of it means. Markets bounce around on every contradictory pronouncement, prime ministers are forced into rapid press conferences, journalists find themselves needing to read up on Greenland. All very tiring.

It's impossible to know how much of this is intentional on Trump’s part – a deliberate strategy to confuse everyone and maximise leverage. We can’t see into his brain. But motivation doesn’t really matter. It’s what he does and it can be effective, if you’re running the most powerful country in the world, though it’s also an approach with serious costs.

He takes a similar approach to his staff – who are set up as a court of factions rather than a team (again, who knows how deliberate any of this is). Proximity to the principal becomes even more important than usual in politics: stars rise and fall as Trump chooses new favourites and changes his mind.

The turmoil in his first term was extraordinary. A mere 8% of his initial White House appointments survived to the end, and 14 cabinet members left too, twice as many as any other president from the last 50 years. He went through four Chiefs of Staff, five deputy Chiefs of Staff, six Communications Secretaries, four Press Secretaries and four National Security Advisers. Notably almost none of these people endorsed him for President second time around (and his Vice-President stood against him in the Republican primaries).

This time around we’re already seeing factional fights break out. Another feature of Trump’s court is that it includes a lot of people without formal roles whose influence is even less clear, including many members of his own family. Laura Loomer, a conspiracist crank, spent a lot of time with Trump during the campaign, and inspired his line that Haitian immigrants were eating cats and dogs. She led a multi-day MAGA online assault on the appointment of Indian-American Sriram Krishnan as an AI adviser on the grounds he supports H-1b high-skilled visas.

This broadened out in a wider war as Trump’s new techbro friends, most notably Elon Musk, defending the visas (which they need for their businesses), leading to others accusing them of betraying the movement. So far Trump has sided with Musk (noting, typically, that he also uses the visas for his businesses). But he’s entirely capable of switching position depending on how the row plays out in the media given he’s repeatedly changed his mind on it before.

All of which makes the composition of his court unusually important, in that it helps us understand where the big internal fights are going to be and who’s in the strongest position to win them. So in the rest of this post, and in part two coming next week, I’m going to look at his key teams, where they agree and disagree, and what this might mean for policy choices.

I’m going to cover six areas: in this post the central White House staff, the economy, and immigration. In the second post I’ll look at foreign affairs, justice and healthcare.