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Frank Bruni

By Frank Bruni

Mr. Bruni is a contributing Opinion writer who was on the staff of The Times for more than 25 years.

If you watched any of Donald Trump’s recent rally in Butler, Pa., you probably noticed Elon Musk beside him — jumping, jiving, arms raised, belly bared — and wondered what in the name of Tesla the chronically overstimulated gazillionaire was doing. Impromptu aerobics? A cheerleading audition? Charades?

If only. Musk, I fear, was previewing a second Trump administration — in which Trump would embrace and embolden a crew of self-impressed eccentrics and ideological outliers who are happy, even eager, to make confounding and fawning spectacles of themselves. Consider Musk their spirit animal. Multiply him by about two dozen and you have the Trump cabinet of tomorrow — or an only slightly exaggerated cartoon of it.

Much of the fallout of a Trump victory is unknowable. But this much is certain: Returned to the White House, Trump would get input from — and award key positions to — a bestiary of nihilists, destructionists and even criminals unlike any collection of advisers that any other president assembled. They’d be unscrupulous in all fashions but one: unswerving loyalty to Trump. He fumed about what he saw as a lack of that among his previous cadre of helpmates. The coming coterie would affirm Trump’s worst impulses, nurture his nuttiest ideas and gleefully carry out his orders.

The first time around, Trump cared about impressing the Washington crowd and was fixated on what he believed to be the high I.Q.’s of his department and agency heads. He made them sound like the Incredibles.

The current team in waiting? They’re the Unconfirmables.

I’m not saying that Trump would fail to fill crucial government jobs. If Republicans get very lucky, prevail in most of the closest Senate races and wind up with a three- or four-seat majority in that chamber, he might be able to get its sign-off on a cockapoo as Treasury secretary. Or, worse yet, Jared Kushner. And even without such a majority, Trump could find ways to circumvent Senate involvement and oversight. That would be utterly in character for a president who’d have zero regard for precedent and even less for propriety.

But whatever the legislative arithmetic, I have a hard time seeing some cast members of “Trump: The Sequel” passing an F.B.I. background check, let alone winning Senate approval or getting high-level security clearances. And while a right-wing provocateur like Laura Loomer wouldn’t find herself as an assistant secretary of the interior, she and the rest of the Unconfirmables would quite possibly find themselves in the Oval Office when they sought Trump’s ear, and he sought their adulation.

Trump’s staffing process would be messy, ugly and scary in part because he would hardly have his pick of shining political stars: His quickness to torment, fire and then publicly vilify the people who worked for him between 2017 and 2021 — when he burned through chiefs of staff and reportedly shrugged at a gathering mob’s pledge to execute his vice president — would........

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