The impending return of Donald Trump to the White House – with an almost lily-white team of cabinet appointees – follows an overwhelming victory in which his Republican Party also won the Senate and the House, and represents one of the greatest political comebacks in history.

The twice-impeached Trump is the first convicted felon to become president having been found guilty of  paying hush money to a porn star called Stormy Daniels.

Snow White

Trump is truly a phenomenon. He is, though, more like the wicked witch who has picked seven political dwarfs than Snow White. A billionaire businessman and reality show host who metamorphosed into a hate-spewing, white supremacist, nativist politician, he narrowly won the 2016 presidency.

Trump has now been able to convince a multi-racial working class and struggling middle-class majority to vote against their own interests through alchemic appeals to improving their economic condition by launching  tariff wars (against China and the rest of the world) and deporting – at an initial estimated cost of $315 billion – most of the 13 million illegal immigrants in America.

Just as during Trump’s first chaotic presidency (2017-2020), these policies are likely to cause self-inflicted harm, massively increasing the $35.4 trillion national debt, resulting in widespread labour shortages (an estimated half of U.S. farm workers are illegal), and raising food prices for the bottom 80 per cent of Americans. During his first tenure, Trump enacted $1.5 trillion of tax cuts, mostly for the super-rich.

It is highly unlikely that any other Republican politician could have achieved this improbable victory. Ironically, the Latinos and blacks who voted for Trump in larger than expected numbers, have scarcely seen themselves represented in the incoming president’s ministerial nominees. Without Trump at the head of the ticket in 2028, Republicans may well struggle to mobilise a majority from the shrinking white population. The Grand Old Party’s Faustian bargain to sell its soul to the Devil, could ironically damage its long-term electoral prospects. America’s misogyny must also be probed, having rejected two flawless campaigns by the entitled Hillary Clinton and the joyful Kamala Harris.

While disgruntled voters may well have liked Harris’s optimistic message, they rejected the messenger. Paradoxically, while they accepted Trump as the messenger who best embodied their anger and frustration, they did not necessarily embrace his message. America’s liberal elite also has profound questions to answer, having clearly lost the country through what many Americans feel is a Wokeish abandonment of traditional values. The talking heads on CNN and MSNBC as well as the pundits in the New York Times and the Washington Post must finally realise that America has tuned out of their self-obsessed, rambling echo chamber, and that what is going on in their newsrooms and studios is totally detached from what is actually happening across the country. This election definitively showed that Beyoncé, Taylor Swift, and George Clooney may be talented artists, but have zero political clout.

The vengeful Trump has recently made cabinet appointments which suggest he has learned nothing from his first presidency. As he painfully discovered during his first term, running a government as complicated as America’s is not like running Facebook where you hire the best talent and get out of their way.

Trump recruited capable politicians, generals, and technocrats in his first term, but then fell out with many of them as they refused to enforce his sometimes autocratic whims, insisting on allegiance to the U.S. Constitution rather than to a mercurial King.

This time, he is picking adherents of his right-wing MAGA (Make America Great Again) gospel, shamelessly prioritising loyalty over competence. Many of these nominees, however, have little experience of heading large bureaucracies. We can therefore expect more scandals, sackings, and stepping downs.

 Four flawed dwarfs

There has already been an early casualty among Trump’s four flawed political dwarfs: his controversial pick for Attorney-General, Matt Gaetz, a Congressman who survived charges of child-trafficking before a report  of a Congressional investigation into alleged sexual misconduct with a 17-year old minor, drug use, and illegal acceptance of gifts was recently concluded.

Gaetz threatened to defund or close down the Justice Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). Deeply unpopular even among Republican legislators, he recently stepped down amidst much unease in the Senate which confirms cabinet appointments.

Defence Secretary nominee, Peter Hegseth, is singularly unqualified to lead the three million-strong $2 trillion a year department. A presenter on the right-wing Fox News, Hegseth is a neo-conservative who was “radicalised” by the September 2001 terrorist attacks on the U.S. into supporting crusading wars in Afghanistan and Iraq which he now considers to have been a $5 trillion exercise in profligacy. Hegseth has thus opposed American spending in Ukraine, and described NATO as “totally corrupted.”

Trump’s pick for Defence Secretary wears prominent tattoos associated with Islamophobic crusading white Christian neo-Nazis, and has threatened to fire wokeish generals who promote diversity and inclusion in the military. Hegseth has vociferously attacked women and “trans-lesbian” soldiers who have patriotically served their country. He has defended American soldiers accused of war crimes. He has compared anti-racist U.S. civil society groups like Black Lives Matter and Antifa to Islamic terrorists. His second wife divorced him after he impregnated a fellow Fox news producer, and he also settled a rape allegation through a non-disclosure financial payment.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is the scion of the legendary Democratic family, chosen by Trump to head the Department of Health and Human Services with an annual budget of $1.7 trillion. Kennedy has argued that no vaccine is safe and effective. He was a one-time heroin-snorting addict and self-confessed sex addict who accused his family of being victims of “hypnosis”. Kennedy had an adulterous affair with journalist, Olivia Nuzzi, and three other women have since claimed sexual affairs with him.

Trump’s nominee for national intelligence director, Tulsi Gabbard, transformed from being a liberal Democrat to a right-wing Republican Trump loyalist. She has often been portrayed as a Putin-supporting Russian intelligence asset. Gabbard has also reportedly been involved with a secretive Hare Krishna-linked sect called the Science of Identity Foundation renowned for its Islamophobia, homophobia, and vegetarianism.

 Three troublesome dwarfs

Among Trump’s three troublesome dwarfs, Secretary of State nominee, Hispanic Senator Marco Rubio, has experience but lacks substance. The Reversible Rubio has become a sycophantic Trump loyalist, having previously been one of his strongest critics during the 2016 Republican primaries. The Cuban-descended Rubio is an anti-China hawk who strongly despises the Chinese Communist Party which actually practices unbridled capitalism. Rubio also backs Trump’s calls for reducing American spending in Ukraine and getting Europeans to stump up more cash for their own defence. However, he previously led senatorial efforts to stall any American withdrawal from NATO.

National Security Adviser nominee, Mike Waltz, was a former Green Beret and former U.S. Congressman. A Trump loyalist, he has backed vice-president J.D. Vance’s MAGA approach of reducing spending on Ukraine and the Middle East to counter China more effectively. Waltz, however, has solid experience in this field, having served on Congressional committees on foreign affairs, armed services, and intelligence. He regards America’s military missions in Afghanistan and Iraq to have been hubristic, and has argued that ill-equipped NATO troops did more harm than good in Afghanistan.

The seventh dwarf is Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, who used Twitter/X to spread disinformation and spent $130 million to help Trump regain the White House.

An émigré whose formative years were spent in the militaristic milieu of apartheid South Africa, Musk appears to have embraced Trump’s white supremacy. He has long benefitted from U.S. government contracts, and has pending investigations with its Securities and Exchange Commission.

Musk has been tasked with heading up the Orwellian-sounding Department of Government Efficiency, with a pledge to slash $2 trillion (nearly a third of the budget) in government spending.

This would be politically suicidal given that popular programmes like Social Security and Medicare, which Trump has promised to protect, account for much of these costs.  Trump also seems determined to launch an ill-advised purge against what he calls the “deep state” by removing the job security of over 50,000 federal bureaucrats.

MAGA lunatics are about to take over the American asylum. This horror show is coming soon to a theatre near you. This will be no fairytale with a happy ending.

Professor Adebajo is a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Pretoria’s Centre for the Advancement of Scholarship in South Africa.