Your boss would ask one question before hiring you: does your last job look anything like this one? I ran that test on ten of Trump’s most prominent hires from both terms, using nothing but public résumés.
Here’s my rubric, and yes, it’s subjective. I compared the size and type of what each person had run before against what they were hired to run. Small gap means they’d done something close. Big gap means they hadn’t come near it. Grade my grading yourself.
| Name | Job | Most relevant prior experience | Gap |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pete Hegseth | Defense Secretary | Army National Guard officer, Fox News host, ran two veterans advocacy groups | Big |
| Kash Patel | FBI Director | Public defender, Justice Department national security prosecutor, House Intelligence Committee aide | Big |
| Robert F. Kennedy Jr. | HHS Secretary | Environmental lawyer, no medical degree | Big |
| Steve Witkoff | Middle East special envoy | Real estate developer and Trump friend | Big |
| Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump | Senior White House advisers (first term) | Family real estate and fashion businesses, no government experience | Big |
| Kimberly Guilfoyle | Ambassador to Greece (resigned Oct. 13) | Former prosecutor and Fox host | Big |
| Karoline Leavitt | Press secretary (27 at hire, left in August) | First-term assistant press secretary, campaign spokesperson | Moderate |
| Katie Zacharia | Press secretary (named this month) | Trump Media communications adviser, brief DHS spokesperson, law degree | Moderate |
| Kristi Noem | DHS Secretary (fired in March) | Governor of South Dakota, U.S. House member | Small |
| Pam Bondi | Attorney General (fired April 2) | Florida attorney general | Small |
The Pentagon is the cleanest example. According to Sen. Richard Blumenthal, the most people Pete Hegseth ever managed at his veterans groups was “maybe 50,” on budgets of $10 million to $15 million, while he put the Pentagon’s budget at $850 billion. Hegseth disputes that account of his record, and those are Blumenthal’s numbers, not an audit. Kash Patel now runs an FBI of more than 35,000 people after working as a public defender and a Justice Department prosecutor. That’s a jump.
The fair counterpoint is that presidents get to pick people they trust, and loyalty is a stated reason for plenty of these choices. Noem ran a state and sat in the House. Bondi was Florida’s attorney general. Their résumés fit the jobs, and both got fired anyway, Noem days after testimony about government ads featuring her. Government ad money has been a running theme here, including the judge who ordered Trump ads off the air. A good résumé didn’t protect anyone, and a thin one didn’t stop anyone from getting hired.
The replacements are worth a look. Markwayne Mullin is a sitting senator, and Todd Blanche had already been running the Justice Department as acting attorney general. Those backgrounds match their jobs better than several first-round picks matched theirs.
Now the part I keep coming back to. A lot of the women Trump puts in front of the cameras look like his daughter, young and blonde. That’s my observation, not a finding, and I can’t tell you anyone’s motive. When Katie Zacharia got the press secretary job, social media users said she looked like Ivanka, in posts that included one from journalist Aaron Rupar. The White House says Trump picks on merit, not “immutable characteristics,” according to spokesperson Taylor Rogers.
Zacharia has a law degree and real communications work behind her, so I rated her a moderate gap. The men in my chart miss the mark as badly or worse, which is why this isn’t about gender. It’s about what happens when loyalty and camera-readiness do the sorting and the résumé is optional.
My two cents: I don’t care who looks like whom, I care whether you’ve ever run the thing you’re about to run.