Out goes a Florida man, in comes a Florida woman. Hours after Matt Gaetz, Donald Trump’s pick for attorney general, withdrew from consideration, the president-elect last night announced that he will nominate Pam Bondi to lead the Justice Department.

Bondi, a former attorney general of Florida, is widely viewed as a more serious and confirmable pick, and although that is partly a statement of what a ridiculous choice Gaetz was, it also shows how far expectations—and standards—have been lowered since the start of the first Trump administration. In 2017, Bondi was passed over for an administration role for fear that she was too scandal-tainted. This time around, she’s the safe, acceptable fallback choice.

If Bondi’s name means anything to you, you’re probably either a Floridian or a real Trump-news obsessive. After a stint as a local prosecutor, Bondi was elected as Florida attorney general in 2010 and served two terms. She left that office in 2019 and worked on Trump’s defense teams for both of his impeachment trials. Bondi also worked as a lobbyist in that period, with clients including the Qatari government, Amazon, and Uber. (You really don’t hear much about “draining the swamp” these days.) She also joined the America First Policy Institute, a Trump-aligned nonprofit.

[David A. Graham: Trump’s first defeat]

Bondi’s highest-profile connection to Trump began in 2013, during her first term as Florida attorney general. Several state attorneys general had probed Trump University, a souped-up real-estate seminar suspected of advertising itself with fraudulent claims. In September 2013, Bondi announced that she was considering joining a lawsuit in New York. Within days, Trump’s personal putative charity, the Trump Foundation, had written a $25,000 check to And Justice for All, a group supporting her reelection—a donation that Bondi had personally solicited several weeks earlier. Bondi then declined to join the suit. (Bondi denies that the payment affected her decision.)

In the kaleidoscopic way of Trumplandia, the foundation itself was a kind of scam; it was later forced to shut down, and Trump admitted to 19 violations, including self-dealing. The Trump Foundation was not legally permitted to make political donations, and instead of reporting the pro-Bondi donation as such, it reported it as a gift to Justice for All, a similarly named nonprofit in Kansas. After The Washington Post uncovered the details, a Trump aide insisted that the mistake was innocent, but the IRS fined Trump $2,500.

When Trump won the presidency in 2016, Bondi was widely expected to land a job in his administration. In January 2017, Bloomberg even reported that an appointment was imminent, but nothing ever materialized—apparently because Trump staffers were concerned that questions about the donation would make confirmation hearings difficult and damaging. How quaint—now she’s the person Trump is relying on to sail through confirmation. And given the scale of Gaetz’s problems, the weaknesses of other Cabinet nominees, and the fatigue among the press and populace, that seems likely to work.

She is similar in this way to John Ratcliffe, whom Trump last week nominated to lead the CIA. During Trump’s first term, in 2019, he nominated Ratcliffe to be director of national intelligence, a job that helps coordinate all U.S. intelligence agencies. Ratcliffe was forced to withdraw once it was clear that the Senate wouldn’t confirm him, because he had no real qualifications for the job, and had exaggerated what little he did have. (I wrote at the time that Ratcliffe “would have been the least qualified DNI in the position’s short history,” but the current nominee for that post, Tulsi Gabbard, gives him a run for his money.) A year later, Trump nominated him again, and this time the Senate sighed heavily and confirmed him, despite concerns that he would improperly politicize the job. This is precisely what he did: In the last weeks of the 2020 campaign, Ratcliffe disclosed unverified information about the 2016 election, which career officials worried was disinformation, in a blatant attempt to boost Trump’s reelection.

[Read: The art of the swindle]

And yet when Trump announced Ratcliffe’s nomination this time around, it was met with something between a shrug and relief. After all, compared with Gaetz and Gabbard, here was a guy with actual experience in his appointed subject and in the executive branch! Trump has managed to move the goalposts so far, they’re in the budget parking lot.

Pete Hegseth, his nominee to lead the Defense Department, fits the same pattern. He was considered to lead the Department of Veterans Affairs in the first Trump administration, but not chosen. Now he’s been picked to lead an even more important and sprawling bureaucracy, though the only new qualifications he’s picked up in the ensuing years are three vitriolic books, many hours on Fox, and dismissal from guarding Joe Biden’s inauguration. (Hegseth’s nomination seems rickety after revelations of a sexual-assault accusation, but he may yet make it through.)

If confirmed, Bondi will likely be a more effective and reasonable attorney general than Gaetz. She is not driven by personal grievance in the way he seems to be, and she has experience as both a prosecutor and a state attorney general. Like Gaetz, however, she is unlikely to defend the independence of the Justice Department from presidential interference. In addition to her past loyalty, she backed Trump’s bogus claims of election fraud in 2020. Trump has also already named three of his personal criminal-defense attorneys to top DOJ positions. At this stage, perhaps less bad news is the best anyone can desire, but none of this is good.

The announcements of Donald Trump’s early picks for his administration have been like the limbo: The bar keeps dropping and the dance keeps going.

One of the first nominees was Marco Rubio for secretary of state; the Floridian holds some questionable views but is at least a second-term senator and member of the foreign relations committee, and is not the nihilist troll Ric Grenell. Then there was Representative Michael Waltz for national security adviser; he has no experience running anything like the National Security Council but he does have expertise in national security. Former Representative Lee Zeldin for EPA? The bar kept sinking, but hey, he has worked in government and isn’t a current oil company executive.

By yesterday afternoon, though, the bar was hitting amazing new lows. Former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe was one of the least-qualified appointees in the first Trump regime; he might be one of the more experienced this time around, though Trump’s statement putting him forward for CIA director, which cited not his resume but his sycophancy, was not reassuring. For the Department of Homeland Security, one of the largest and most complicated parts of the federal government, Trump selected Kristi Noem, a small businesswoman and governor of a lightly populated state—but a diehard MAGA loyalist. The low point, so far, was reached when the president-elect announced Pete Hegseth for secretary of defense. Hegseth is a National Guard veteran who has lambasted the military for being “woke” and lobbied for pardons for convicted war criminals. He once bragged that he hadn’t washed his hands in 10 years, but he still hawks soap shaped like grenades. His major qualifications to run one of the most complicated bureaucracies in human history are that he looks the part and Trump has seen him a lot on Fox News.

[Tom Nichols: The loyalists are collecting their rewards in Trump’s cabinet]

Perhaps the bar cannot get lower from there—at least not in terms of positions of immense consequence with real power to do a lot of damage in the world. But another appointment announced yesterday was in a sense even more ridiculous: Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to head a Department of Government Efficiency. That’s DOGE for short. Get it? Such efficient. Very slash. Wow. Welcome to the era of government by meme.

Memes are slippery, neither serious nor quite joking. Try to pin them down and they slide through your fingers. DOGE, like doge, is no different. Why is this thing called a department when only Congress has the power to stand up a new body by that name? Is it because Trump doesn’t know or because he doesn’t care? Why does a government-efficiency panel have two chairs? Maybe it’s a joke. Who can tell? Is DOGE a clever way to sideline two annoying loudmouths who can’t or won’t get through the Senate confirmation process, or could it radically reshape the federal government? Like the meme says, why not both? The whole thing is vaporware, concocted by three people—Musk, Ramaswamy, and Trump—who are all terminally online.

“Waste, fraud, and abuse” is something of a meme itself—an idea that gets repeated and used in many different formats, but offers more of a symbolic meaning and cultural connotation than specific denotation. Like most memes, this one is neither serious nor joking. Who could possibly want waste, fraud, or abuse of taxpayer money? The problem, as Eric Schnurer has explained in The Atlantic, is that there simply isn’t as much of it as people think. The way to radically cut government spending is to slash whole categories of things. (As a contractor, it must be noted, Musk is a huge beneficiary of government largesse.)

[Read: Trump’s ‘deep state’ revenge]

Trump has not provided a great deal of detail about how the DOGE would work, though Musk has, naturally, already produced a dank meme. Ironically, we don’t know how DOGE will work or how it will be funded. Trump says it will “provide advice and guidance from outside of Government” to the White House and Office of Management and Budget, making recommendations no later than the nation’s semiquincentennial on July 4, 2026.

In the absence of real info, Musk’s takeover of Twitter is probably a pretty good model for understanding how this might function. When Musk bought the social-media network, he made many promises. He said he’d eliminate bots, improve the user base, fine-tune the business, and reduce political interference, so that Twitter could function as “a common digital town square.” Judged by those metrics, the takeover has been a failure. The service is awash in bots. Users and advertisers have fled. Many technical functions have degraded. Rather than becoming a more politically neutral venue, it’s become a playground for the hard right, with Musk using it to spread conspiracy theories and aid Trump. He has given it a slick rebrand as X and slashed the workforce.

We can expect much the same from DOGE. Will it successfully achieve the stated policy goal of reconfiguring the federal workforce to reduce waste and fraud and improve provision of services? Almost certainly not. Will it work to drive out dedicated employees? Probably. The surest bet is that it will be a highly effective vehicle for furthering Musk and Trump’s political agenda. Such winning. Very chaos. Much bleak.