5 highlights: Trump Cabinet’s historic and ideologically diverse nominations

President-elect Donald Trump named his remaining Cabinet picks on Friday, rounding out his nominees who appear to be an ideologically diverse group of people ready to take up the “Make America Great Again” banner.
Trump asked Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a lifelong Democrat turned independent, to lead the Health and Human Services Department, and tapped former Democratic Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, who switched her party affiliation to Republican this year, to be his director of national intelligence.
Entrepreneurs Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy are tasked with shrinking the federal government through a new efficiency department.
Trump’s incoming Cabinet also represents a few historic firsts — including the first female chief of staff and the first GOP Cabinet member who is openly gay — as well as an overall generational shift.
As the president-elect sets the record for being the oldest man elected to the highest office, he is also ushering in a new generation of politicians who might change the Republican Party for good. Here are the historic firsts of the Trump Cabinet 2.0.
Trump’s right-hand man, Sen. J.D. Vance is representative of the generational change within his party as he becomes the first millennial to be elected to the office of vice president.
The 40-year-old is the third youngest vice present in American history, behind John C. Breckinridge, who was 36 when elected under President James Buchanan in 1857, and Richard Nixon, who was 40 years and 11 days old in 1953 when Dwight D. Eisenhower won office, as PBS News reported.
At age 27, Karoline Leavitt will be the youngest White House press secretary to ever hold this position. She interned at Fox News and the Trump White House while still in school and began working for Trump’s first administration after graduating from Saint Anselm College, a Catholic college in New Hampshire.
She briefly served as the communications director for Elise Stefanik, a GOP representative Trump picked for the role of United Nations ambassador, and Leavitt also unsuccessfully ran for the U.S. House of Representatives seat in New Hampshire.
Trump originally chose former congressman Matt Gaetz for attorney general, but following scrutiny from Republicans over the Florida representative’s ethics report, Gaetz withdrew his name from consideration. Trump replaced him with another longtime ally, Pam Bondi.
The 59-year-old was the first woman to become Florida’s attorney general. At the time, Bondi received former vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s endorsement, which helped her seal the win.
Bondi served as a state prosecutor for nearly a decade, where she attempted to overturn Obamacare in the state and took on the case against former New York Mets pitcher Dwight Gooden, who, in 2006, faced a year in prison for violating his probation.
If confirmed, Rubio, the son of Cuban immigrants, is set to become the first Latino to hold the office of secretary of state. His job will entail overseeing the U.S. foreign service.
Rubio, the first Cuban-American senator, will head the State Department amid the ongoing Israel-Hamas and Russia-Ukraine conflicts. In the Senate, he is the top Republican on the Senate Foreign Intelligence Committee and a member of the Foreign Relations Committee.
The billionaire hedge fund manager, who has been well received as the incoming Treasury Department head, is the first openly gay Cabinet member in a GOP administration. He shares two children with his partner.
“In a certain geographic region at a certain economic level, being gay is not an issue,” Bessent told Yale Alumni Magazine in 2015. “If you had told me in 1984, when we graduated, and people were dying of AIDS, that 30 years later I’d be legally married and we would have two children via surrogacy, I wouldn’t have believed you.”
So far, Wall Street is celebrating the news of Bessent’s likely appointment, with Yale Chief Executive Institute Jeffrey Sonnenfeld saying he was “reasonable and pragmatic,” as CNN reported.