The president-elect plans to surround himself with enemies of the environment, billions of dollars in net worth and people who are against their own agencies

Trump's cabinet picks: here are all of the appointments so far Read more

Barack Obama’s original cabinet was chockablock with historic firsts. The first African American attorney general. The first Nobel laureate upon appointment. The first female homeland security secretary, and the first African American to head the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

Donald Trump’s cabinet, if confirmed, also would advance multiple historic firsts. It would be the first cabinet of multiple billionaires. It would be the first cabinet to give pride of place to climate deniers. It would be the first cabinet whose members want to eliminate their own agencies. And it would raise the bar – a lot – for conspiracy theorists.

Before Trump’s team faces closer scrutiny from Congress in January, here’s your guide to understanding how these four categories define many of Trump’s major nominees and advisers.



Climate deniers and enemies

These nominees would lead the four most important agencies in combatting climate change.

Scott Pruitt, EPA

Oklahoma state attorney general

Pruitt wrote in a May 2016 editorial in the National Review that there was a climate change “debate” that was “far from settled. Scientists continue to disagree about the degree and extent of global warming and its connection to the actions of mankind. That debate should be encouraged …” He was part of a “secretive alliance” with fossil fuel companies to fight Obama administration environmental regulations, according to 2014 New York Times reporting.

Ryan Zinke, Department of the Interior

Congressman from Montana

In a 2014 interview, Zinke blamed the buildup of greenhouse gases on volcanoes. “I’m a conservationist, but when there’s a volcano in the Philippines that erupts and produces more CO2 than humans have produced in 200 years – is CO2 really the problem?”

Rick Perry, Department of Energy



Former Texas governor

Perry wrote in a 2010 book that “we have been experiencing a cooling trend”. “I don’t believe that we have the settled science,” he said in a 2014 interview, continuing: “Calling CO2 a pollutant is doing a disservice the country, and I believe a disservice to the world ... I’m not a scientist.”

Mike Pompeo, CIA

Congressman from Kansas

Pompeo has used congressional hearings to grandstand against “what you all call climate change today”. He told CSPAN in 2013: “There are scientists who think lots of different things about climate change. There’s some who think we’re warming, there’s some who think we’re cooling, there’s some who think that the last 16 years have shown a pretty stable climate environment.”

Rex Tillerson, secretary of state

CEO of ExxonMobil

Tillerson pays lip service to “risks of climate change” but runs the world’s biggest non-state oil and gas extraction company. Likewise, he has said ExxonMobil favors a climate tax and supports the Paris climate accords but has not backed those statements with action.

One-percenters

Trump’s billionaire cabinet could be the wealthiest administration ever. At least six appointees have net worths estimated in the nine figures. Collectively, they have more money than a third of American households combined, according to a Quartz calculation.

Wilbur Ross, Department of Commerce



Industrialist

Net worth: $2.5bn, according to Forbes. He made it the old-fashioned way: by buying, merging and selling large industrial concerns in steel, textiles and coal. He owns 40 Magrittes.

Linda McMahon, Small Business Administration

Entertainment executive

Forbes pegs the net worth of her husband, Vince McMahon, at $1.14bn; the couple has been married 50 years. Together they created the entertainment juggernaut now known as World Wrestling Entertainment.

Betsy DeVos, Department of Education

Philanthropist

Daughter-in-law of Richard DeVos, who co-founded the multi-level-marketing giant Amway, which specializes in beauty, home care and health products such as the dietary supplement Nutrilite.

Forbes pegs Richard DeVos’s family’s net worth at $5.1bn.

Steve Mnuchin, treasury secretary

Financier

Net worth: about $655m, according to Bloomberg. Former Goldman Sachs partner, hedge funder and Hollywood producer (Sully, American Sniper, The Legend of Tarzan).

Rex Tillerson

Net worth: around $365m, according to Bloomberg. Outgoing chairman of ExxonMobil after 41 years with the energy giant.

Elaine Chao, Department of Transportation

Public servant

Her net worth has faced scrutiny because her husband is Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell, who is subject to financial disclosure rules. Chao is a daughter of James SC Chao, a shipping magnate whose net worth PolitiFact had difficulty nailing down in 2014, except to note that the family foundation recently gave $40m to Harvard.

Divided loyalties

A noticeable Trump innovation in picking a cabinet: appointing leaders who have said they would like to destroy the agencies they’re supposed to lead. A variation is appointing leaders whose careers have undercut the agencies they’re supposed to lead.

Scott Pruitt

Pruitt has been involved in multiple lawsuits against the EPA. He is currently part of a legal action waged by 28 states against the EPA to halt the Clean Power Plan, an effort by Obama’s administration to curb greenhouse gas emissions from coal-fired power plants. Pruitt has said the American people “are tired of seeing billions of dollars drained from our economy due to unnecessary EPA regulations”, and he boasted on his LinkedIn page that he was “a leading advocate against the EPA’s activist agenda”.

Rick Perry

Perry famously suffered a memory lapse during a presidential debate in trying to name the Department of Energy as one of three federal agencies he would eliminate if elected. “Oops,” he said. Perry’s background in nuclear issues, which is the energy department’s main charge, appears to be limited to an effort to privatize the disposal of radioactive waste in Texas. Perry’s two immediate predecessors in the job were both nuclear physicists.

Andrew Puzder, Department of Labor

Fast food executive

Puzder is a vehement critic of government regulation and staunch opponent of minimum wage laws and the Fight for $15 movement. He blames Obamacare for increased labor costs and has diagnosed a “government-mandated restaurant recession”.

Rex Tillerson

As ExxonMobil’s main dealmaker around the world, Tillerson had interests that sometimes ran up against US interests. He continued (legally) to do business with Russia after the country became the target of continuing sanctions. During the Obama years, Tillerson defied the state department to cut an oil deal with the Iraqi Kurds, the New Yorker pointed out.

Betsy DeVos

DeVos has been an advocate for school vouchers, which critics say undercut public schools.

Conspiracists

Trump traffics in conspiracy theories and fake news – Barack Obama was born outside the US and sympathizes with terrorists, the election was rigged, Hillary Clinton is a criminal – so it’s only proper that his cabinet should too. Here are the three Trump nominees in competition for the tinfoil hat trophy.

Ben Carson, Department of Housing and Urban Development

Retired neurosurgeon

Carson believes pyramids were built by the biblical Joseph to store grain, that Vladimir Putin, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and Mahmoud Abbas attended school together in Moscow in 1968, that Jews with firearms might have been able to stop the Holocaust, that he personally could stop a mass shooting and that Osama bin Laden enjoyed Saudi protection after 9/11.

Photograph: Carlo Allegri

Stephen Bannon, chief strategist

Former CEO of Breitbart and Sirius XM radio host

Breitbart ran stories linking Hillary Clinton’s aide Huma Abedin to the Muslim Brotherhood in addition to stories stoking antisemitism, white supremacy and misogyny. As a Sirius host, Bannon made the “case that House speaker Paul Ryan is a liberal globalist trying to sell out the American worker to foreign Islamist shills”, the Daily Beast reported.

Michael Flynn, national security adviser

Retired general

Flynn tweeted that Hillary Clinton had ties to “money laundering, sex crimes with children, etc”. He told his Twitter followers to buy the book of a far-right troll who said Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta was part of a sex cult and the Orlando nightclub shooter did not act alone.

He once said there were signs in Arabic along the Mexican border, which he had seen pictures of, to guide “radicalized Muslims” into the United States. “On three occasions, Flynn tagged in his tweets Jared Wyland, an ‘alt-right’, antisemitic commentator who has tweeted about the ‘Liberal Jewish media’,” CNN reported.