Trump Is Filling His Cabinet With People Who Have Lost Elections

Donald Trump has long boasted about how much he likes winners and how much he likes winning.

Lately, though, he seems to prefer losing — at least when it comes to staffing his cabinet.

The president-elect is assembling a second administration chock-full of Republicans who have found just about every way imaginable to lose an election, whether it be to him, to Democrats or to one another.

Trump has chosen people whom he demolished, personally and professionally, in Republican primaries, including Senator Marco Rubio of Florida and Gov. Doug Burgum of North Dakota. He has selected figures who lost critical seats for the G.O.P., such as Mehmet Oz, who lost a Pennsylvania Senate race in 2022. He has chosen people whose races seemed a bit doomed from the start, such as Linda McMahon’s two unsuccessful Senate runs in blue Connecticut. And he has chosen people whose losses were low-profile, down-ballot affairs, such as his pick for C.D.C. director, a former congressman who lost a race for a seat in the Florida Legislature this year — in the primary.

This week, Trump chose Harmeet Dhillon, who lost her 2023 bid to lead the Republican National Committee, to run the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division. He picked Representative Dan Bishop, who lost the race for attorney general in North Carolina last month, for an O.M.B. post. And that was just Monday and Tuesday.

It’s a surprising development for a political figure who has long deployed the word “loser” as an insult, and who tried to overturn the 2020 election rather than admit he lost it. But some of these Republicans lost their races in part because of their support for Trump — which means losing can make for winning politics in Washington when loyalty to Trump is the coin of the realm.

In the halls of the Capitol on Tuesday, I asked Senator Mitt Romney, Republican of Utah, about all this. He’s certainly no fan of Trump; on Tuesday, he knocked the president-elect for stocking his cabinet with billionaires. But he seemed to be speaking for all Republican also-rans and channeling his own loss to former President Barack Obama in 2012 when he said, “As someone who’s lost elections, I think we’re highly qualified.”