During his first administration, President Donald Trump’s cabinet included some questionable appointments like Betsy Devos, a billionaire businesswoman for education secretary and Ben Carson, a retired neurosurgeon for secretary of housing and urban development.
At the same time, that administration had some serious individuals working in high positions that were willing to push back on Trump’s most dangerous impulses.
I am thinking about people like James Mattis and Mark Esper who served as secretary of defense, Steve Mnuchin in treasury, Rex Tillerson as secretary of state, and James Comey followed by Christopher Wray as FBI director. The first Trump administration also included Vice President Mike Pence who refused his boss’s multiple demands not to certify the results of the 2020 elections in which Trump had lost to Joe Biden.
However, in the current administration one would be hard pressed to find a single cabinet member or high-level official who will be courageous enough to stand up to Trump and say the word no to him. Take, for instance, Vice President JD Vance who in 2016 compared Trump to Hitler, called  him reprehensible and referred to his current boss as an idiot. Yet these days Vance has been fulfilling the role of chief Trump sycophant as he did during the recent oval office meeting in which he berated Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky for not thanking the American president.
In that same disastrous oval office meeting with Zelensky, we all watch Secretary of State Marco Rubio frozen in his seat looking as though he was trying to hide from the cameras. The same Rubio who, when he was a United States senator, was one of the harshest critics of Russian President Vladimir Putin was utterly silent as Trump tried to cast himself and the Russian president as victims of some conspiracy by the Democrats. Worse, after Zelensky was asked abruptly to leave the White House, Rubio went on the weekend cable shows to defend Trump’s efforts to appease Putin.
It is difficult to imagine a situation in which the current Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth will be willing to stand up to an unlawful or crazy directive by his boss. What will Hegseth do if Trump orders him to invade Greenland or to use the U.S. armed forces to take control of the Panama Canal without first securing congressional approval? The recent decision by the Trump administration to pause aid to Ukraine even as Russia continues its indiscriminate bombing of this Western ally suggests that Hegseth will not put up any resistance to Trump’s demands.
Likewise, I don’t believe that FBI director Kash Patel will refuse to obey an unlawful order by his boss to open an investigation into someone that merely rubbed Trump the wrong way. Indeed, even before Patel was confirmed for this important position, he referred to the FBI as the deep state and floated the idea of targeting journalists and media professionals that challenge Trump’s agenda.
The available evidence that we have thus far about the current chief of staff Susie Wiles suggests that she too has not bothered to put up any significant resistance to some of the crazy scenes that we have witnessed in the first six weeks of the second Trump term. For example, Wiles was not able to prevent the surreal spectacle of Elon Musk with his 4-year old son on his shoulders talking for a long time to reporters while Trump was seated at the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office.
One cannot imagine any other chief of staff in the modern era lending support for such a spectacle. Nor can we picture a scenario in which the conservative media —that chastised President Barack Obama for the color of the suit he once wore— would have remained silent in the face of some other U.S. president comporting himself in such disrespectful manner in the Oval Office.
To date, we have not seen a single cabinet member or high-level official in the Trump administration be willing to voice public opposition to the chaos that has ensued from the massive, indiscriminate firings of employees in many government offices and federal organizations initiated by Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Trumps officials have sat idly by as thousands of federal employees received termination letters without due process, for dubious reasons rather than ones based on just cause like low performance.
Any opposition to the chaos and destruction wrought by the current Trump government will not come from inside his administration. Rather, such resistance will have to come from three important forces working outside the administration.
First, we have already seen numerous lawsuits filed against Trump’s erratic decisions like the dismantling of USAID, which had been funded by Congress and does essential work here and abroad.
Second, congressional Democrats will need to resist every attempt by the Trump administration to pass laws that undermine the social safety net and hurt ordinary Americans.
Finally, and most importantly, it is up to ordinary citizens to engage in civic action like demonstrations and attending town halls that hold their representatives accountable.
Mordechai Gordon is a Professor of Education School of Education at Quinnipiac University.
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