Assessing the Picks for the Trump Administration 2.0
Donald Trump’s cabinet picks are a clear sign that his second term will likely not be a repeat of his first. Old-guard Republicans like former Vice President Mike Pence, Nikki Haley, and Mike Pompeo are on the outside looking in (Pompeo won’t be joining per the influence of Tucker Carlson and Donald Trump, Jr.). In their place is an eclectic group of individuals who are seeking to disrupt the uniparty consensus and reverse America’s managed decline that political elites of both parties, like Mitch McConnell and Chuck Schumer, have been overseeing for decades. Rather than sticking to tired talking points about maintaining the three-legged stool of Reaganism, Trump’s cabinet nominees want to finally address the most pressing political challenges of our day.
Given this change in direction compared to Trump’s first term—which looked far more like a conventional Republican administration—it’s not surprising that specific cabinet picks have made some voters nervous, evangelicals included.
One such nominee is Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Nominated to be Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, Kennedy desires to implement a Make America Healthy Again agenda. He wants to examine the health risks associated with the mass consumption of ultra-processed foods, confront Big Pharma and the agriculture lobby, and work toward solving America’s crisis with chronic disease and weight gain. (The depth of the latter problem can be seen in the San Francisco Department of Public Health’s recent hiring of Virgie Tovar, who wrote a book with the title, You Have the Right to Remain Fat.)
While RFK’s stances on vaccines are controversial in certain corners (he recently assured senators he backs the Polio vaccine), he maintains he’s focused on vaccine safety above all, ensuring that Americans have all the information they need to make an informed decision.
The central controversy for evangelicals, of course, swirls around RFK’s abortion stance. During his presidential campaign last year, he once supported abortion up to full term. He then walked back that stance, explaining in a lengthy X post that he changed his mind after finding out that women abort healthy babies, not just ones who have a “fatal condition that ensures it will survive just hours or days after birth.” By the end of his presidential campaign, Kennedy supported abortion up to viability (around 21-23 weeks).
Though that position is not what pro-lifers want to see from any of Trump’s cabinet nominees—especially at HHS—RFK has said during meetings with senators this week that he won’t be implementing his own views on abortion should he be confirmed. Instead, he’ll be implementing Trump’s views on abortion “100 percent,” as he told Alabama Senator Tommy Tuberville.
Senator Josh Hawley also met with RFK, covering the gamut of pro-life policy issues he’d be overseeing as HHS secretary.
Hawley said that RFK is “committed” to “reinstating the Mexico City policy and ending taxpayer funding for abortions domestically.” Furthermore, RFK supports prohibiting “Title X funds going to organizations that promote abortion” and will “reinstate conscience protections for healthcare providers.” Kennedy also promised Hawley that “all of his deputies at HHS would be pro-life.”
“He told me he believes there are far too many abortions in the US and that we cannot be the moral leader of the free world with abortion rates so high,” Hawley said of their conversation.
Though some evangelicals were somewhat alarmed that Trump chose Kennedy for a cabinet position that oversees abortion policy given his past views, this may assuage their fears.
But it’s doubtful this will quiet old-guard Republicans and Big Eva leaders who rushed to condemn RFK’s nomination right after it was announced. Their anger ultimately stems from their longtime dislike of Trump going back to when he first entered the 2016 presidential race, and that he’s taken the Republican Party in a new direction.
Rather than acknowledge how the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade fundamentally altered the political landscape when it comes to abortion, this group seems content to argue that Trump swindled pro-lifers and adopted a pro-choice platform because he’s really a leftist at heart, a contested political judgment they simply assert as fact. This speaks to their more general confusion of seeing politics as a vehicle for moralizing rather than a means to secure the common good of U.S. citizens.
Another aspect of Trump’s cabinet picks should be a warning light for Protestants: the number of Roman Catholics he’s nominated for high-profile positions within his administration.
Earlier this week, Politico noted that Trump has chosen at least a dozen Catholics, including Marco Rubio (State Department), Sean Duffy (Transportation Department), Linda McMahon (Education Department), Elise Stefanik (United Nations), John Ratcliffe (CIA), and Tom Homan (ICE). Rachel Bovard, vice president of programs at the Conservative Partnership Institute, said that this speaks to “a very specific sort of Catholic paradigm” that seems to be taking hold in Trump’s second administration. American Principles Project President Terry Schilling told Politico that President Trump’s goal of returning “the family to the center of public policy again” coincides “with Catholic principles and Catholic teaching.”
Of course, while Trump is also picking Protestants like Russ Vought (Office of Management and Budget) and Pete Hegseth (Defense Secretary), the influence of orthodox Protestantism in the upper echelons of his administration doesn’t seem to be quite as pronounced this time around. White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles has been called a “soft-spoken Episcopalian.” And while Scott Bessent, Trump’s nominee for Treasury Secretary, attends the French Huguenot Church in Charleston, South Carolina (his family was founding members in the 1680s), he is openly gay.
Though 82% of evangelical voters went with Trump in 2024 (an increase from his two previous presidential runs), and evangelicals remain an extremely important voting bloc for his coalition, Catholics seem to have a larger influence on the day-to-day operation of his White House. Unlike Protestants, Catholics don’t simply vote for him and then watch the next four years from the sidelines.
After all, putting Catholics in prominent positions is also good politics for Trump. In 2024, Trump’s share of the Catholic vote jumped nearly ten points compared to 2020, which surely factored into why he made the selections he did this time around. Roman Catholics clearly continue to exert outsized influence on the political Right and the realigning Republican Party.
As the WASP influence gradually deteriorated over the last half of the 20th century, Catholics took advantage and filled the leadership vacuum. In a chapter in Up From Conservatism, American Reformer’s own Aaron Renn and Georgetown Professor Joshua Mitchell made a convincing case that Catholics have been dominating the conservative movement for decades, filling top positions at think tanks and guiding many policy initiatives. Meanwhile, Protestants have accepted their role mostly as foot soldiers, giving their votes but essentially ceding the intellectual and political leadership to Catholics.
The influence of Catholicism today in the federal government is very visible. Six of the nine Supreme Court justices are Roman Catholic (Clarence Thomas wanted to become a priest before turning to the law). And Catholics also make up a quarter of Congress, which Politico points out is “overrepresented compared to the American population.”
This begs an important question: Can the WASP legacy be carried on without WASPs? Catholic convert Casey Chalk thinks so. He’s argued that “even if they do not share the same religion of the nation’s once dominant culture, right-leaning Catholics represent the largest and most faithful inheritors of that older WASP understanding of the good life. It’s also very possible they represent the best hope for its survival.”
That may be true in the short term, but Catholics will also inevitably change the WASP character they want to preserve, subtly altering it to be more in line with Catholic practices, traditions, and ways of life. This is not a criticism but the way these things work.
Without a fundamental reorientation in how they view politics, the influence of historic Protestantism in America will continue to wane. Going back to the sources of Reformed political theology is a necessary first step in reinvigorating the Protestant will in our nation.
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