A Chaotic Start

Donald Trump has named most of the advisers and cabinet officials whom he wants to surround him in a second term.To make sense of the team, I asked for help from three of my colleagues who cover Trump: Maggie Haberman, Charlie Savage and Jonathan Swan.

Our exchange follows.David: I’ve talked with you three in the past about the likelihood that Trump’s second term would be more consequential than his first because his team would have more experience and more detailed plans.But does his list of cabinet selections make you wonder whether the second term may end up being almost as chaotic as the first? Pete Hegseth (the Fox News host Trump wants to run the Pentagon) and Robert F.

Kennedy Jr.(the pick for Health and Human Services) don’t have much experience operating a bureaucracy.Maggie: There are some people with minimal government experience running large organizations in positions of power, so there will be a basic question about their preparation to oversee complex departments.

But cabinet secretaries aren’t the only people who matter.The team that Trump is putting in place, as deputies or chiefs of staff or senior advisers at agencies, are people who’ve proved some form of loyalty to him in other situations.All administrations do that to some degree.

This version is much more sweeping.Charlie: For all the chaos of Trump’s first term, he was occasionally constrained — by traditional Republicans in Congress and inside his own administration, by a federal judiciary he had not yet transformed and by career officials.All those constraints will be weaker this time.An important thing is that Trump is planning to reinstate a change from the end of the first administration, one that the Biden administration rolled back.

This change, known as Schedule F, would make it easier for cabinet officials to fire career civil servants and replace them with loyalists.So there is reason to believe that the second Trump administration will be more chaotic — but al...