Editor’s Note: Washington Week With The Atlantic is a partnership between NewsHour Productions, WETA, and The Atlantic airing every Friday on PBS stations nationwide. Check your local listings or watch full episodes here.

Donald Trump hasn’t filled his Cabinet yet, but evidence suggests he’s looking for two main attributes in his picks: loyalty to him and a loathing for what he calls the “deep state.” On Washington Week With The Atlantic, panelists discussed why there’s a split in thinking over these nominees and their qualifications.

This week, Donald Trump named, among others, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a vaccine denier, to head Health and Human Services; Matt Gaetz, the subject of a federal sex-crimes investigation, as attorney general; and Tulsi Gabbard, an apologist for Vladimir Putin, as director of national intelligence.

Though Trump’s nominations have left some in Washington with a sense of shock, these potential Cabinet members should come as no surprise, Leigh Ann Caldwell explained last night. His picks are exactly what the president-elect promised on the campaign trail: “We have to reorient our mindset of what is normal, what has happened for decades in Washington within the guardrails of tradition, the law,” she said. “Trump is trying to throw all of that out, and he’s doing that by nominating people who will do exactly what he says.”

In addition to his quest for loyalty, Trump has also promised that he will hollow out many federal agencies. Between these potential mass firings and resignations, “it’s going to be night and day” compared with the last Trump administration, Mark Leibovich said last night. And especially because many of Trump’s nominees have never run massive agencies before, “it’s going to make the built-in chaos of what this administration is going to try to do all the more so.”

Joining the editor in chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, to discuss this and more: Elisabeth Bumiller, the assistant managing editor and Washington bureau chief for The New York Times; Leigh Ann Caldwell, the anchor of Washington Post Live; Mark Leibovich, a staff writer at The Atlantic; and Francesca Chambers, a White House correspondent at USA Today.

Watch the full episode here.

Editor’s Note: Washington Week With The Atlantic is a partnership between NewsHour Productions, WETA, and The Atlantic airing every Friday on PBS stations nationwide. Check your local listings or watch full episodes here.

This election marked, among other things, the birth of a new Republican-led multiracial working-class coalition and the beginning of an upheaval in the Democratic Party. On Washington Week With The Atlantic, panelists joined to discuss the voters who propelled Donald Trump’s win, Democrats’ reactions, and expectations for Trump’s second term.

Much of Trump’s win can be understood by looking at the seven key battleground states in this election. In many of these areas, Trump was able to turn out significantly more votes than he had in either the 2016 or 2020 election, especially among low-propensity voters, Tim Alberta explained last night.

“We’re not just talking about persuading erstwhile Democrats to flip and go Republican, we’re talking about turning out voters who had never been registered to vote before,” Alberta said. “Whether or not they will remain a durable piece of the Republican coalition remains to be seen, but in this election that proved to be the difference.”

Meanwhile, panelists discussed how, for some of these voters, especially a base of young men, their consumption of news related to Trump came primarily from online media spaces such as podcasts, as Helen Lewis explained last night. “For those younger people who are used to listening to TikTok, Instagram … they’re used to people talking to them face-to-face and being very open about their political views and trying to sell them things,” she said. As opposed to the mainstream media’s coverage of the election, these young voters were drawn to “people who just go, ‘Yeah, I’m for Trump.’”

Joining the editor in chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, to discuss this and more: Tim Alberta, a staff writer at The Atlantic; Susan Glasser, a staff writer at The New Yorker; Asma Khalid, a White House correspondent for NPR and a political contributor for ABC News; and Helen Lewis, a staff writer at The Atlantic.

Watch the full episode here.

Editor’s Note: Washington Week With The Atlantic is a partnership between NewsHour Productions, WETA, and The Atlantic airing every Friday on PBS stations nationwide. Check your local listings or watch full episodes here.

In their final pitches to voters, Donald Trump spent the week sowing doubt about election results, while Kamala Harris cast Trump as a threat to democracy. With Election Day less than a week away, panelists on Washington Week With The Atlantic discuss one of the closest presidential races in memory, and what the election could mean for the future of the Democratic and Republican Parties.

Since 2015, the Republican Party has reached multiple points when they could have coalesced and taken a stance against Trump, McKay Coppins explained last night. But “they couldn’t muster the collective action,” he said. As a result, Trump has been able to remake the Republican Party into one that “has become a cult of personality where his lies, and distortions, and conspiracy theories are indulged by almost every elected official in his party.”

Where Republicans go from here is still an open question, Coppins continued. “The party that [Trump] has remade in his image is not going to change overnight, no matter what happens next week.”

Meanwhile, Harris has been running a carefully calibrated, centrist campaign. “If this improbable campaign that started only four months ago essentially works, what does it mean for the future of the Democratic Party?” Jeffrey Goldberg asked panelists. According to Eugene Daniels, unlike the ideological aspects of Harris’s 2019 campaign, which felt, in part, disingenuous to watch, “the person you’re watching now and the policies that she’s talking about … that’s who Kamala Harris is” and “that is how she wants to govern.”  

If elected, Harris will also likely have to contend with at least one Republican-controlled chamber of Congress. This means she “will be forced into governing as a centrist,” Daniels continued. “She’s going to have to bend and try to compromise in ways that a ‘San Francisco liberal’ wouldn’t want to and would fight more on.”

Joining the editor in chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, to discuss this and more: Peter Baker, the chief White House correspondent for The New York Times; McKay Coppins, a staff writer at The Atlantic; Eugene Daniels, a White House correspondent at Politico; and Vivian Salama, a national politics reporter at The Wall Street Journal.

Watch the full episode here.