Trump’s Cosplay Cabinet

The president’s appointees often appear to be acting out a made-for-television version of their jobs rather than actually doing them. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth posts photos of himself doing snowy push-ups with U.S. troops in Poland and deadlifting with them in predawn Germany. But such are the risks of Trump’s Cosplay Cabinet, in which his underlings perform near-daily tone poems to a certain type of MAGA masculinity, publicly pantomiming their professional responsibilities. “I’m old school, but I don’t think our Cabinet Secretaries should cosplay as armed agents,” the conservative radio host Erick Erickson wrote on X above Noem’s video of herself with the poorly placed gun. Even the more serious Cabinet secretaries sometimes appear to be playacting, if not cosplaying—all scrambling to embody whatever it is they think Trump wants them to be.