‘I trust Donald Trump’s cabinet picks to get the job done’, says former Republican governor candidate

Krishnan Guru-Murthy: What message do you take from these cabinet posts? Because they’re obviously, they are not experts in the fields in which they’ve been appointed, but they are disruptors and they’re big Trump fans.
Heidi Ganahl: I believe that the Americans voted in a big way to disrupt the status quo in Washington DC and that’s exactly what we’re getting with these picks. I spoke to Rasmussen polling this morning, and Mark Mitchell, who’s the lead pollster there, said that they’ve been looking at this and 80% of conservatives across America agree that these cabinet picks are good. It’s exactly what they want. They want him to go in and just reconfigure Washington DC – and he needs people that are willing to take the heat.
Krishnan Guru-Murthy: Do you worry at all about Matt Gaetz and the allegations against him and what that report might say? I mean, does it matter what that report says?
Heidi Ganahl: At this point, Republicans and conservatives are so used to being accused of everything under the sun that we take it with a grain of salt. Lawfare has been the name of the game for the past few years with the other administration. And so we’ve gotten to the point where it’s the boy who cried wolf. It’s like, what is true? I don’t know. But I trust our president, our incoming president, Donald Trump, to make the right decision to get the job done.
Krishnan Guru-Murthy: But this is not a partisan committee. I mean, it’s got Republicans on it as well. Do you regard them as equally within the establishment, you don’t believe them?
Heidi Ganahl: You know, I think that we’ve got a problem with trust in DC. One of the other things the pollster told me this morning was that a big issue in the swing states wasn’t even necessarily the specific candidates – it was this distrust of the federal government. And we feel, as Americans, many Americans feel like we’ve been lied to and that the government has grown far too big, far too powerful. And we’ve got to pull that in, to rein it in. In America, we love free markets. We love free speech. We love free enterprise. We like to be left alone. That’s the way we roll. And that’s where I believe voters in just this last election said enough is enough. We want our freedoms back and we want to be able to run our lives the way we like.
Krishnan Guru-Murthy: But you don’t worry that some of these people just won’t be able to do what you expect of them. I mean, what quite often happens in big bureaucracies is that you put somebody in who doesn’t know how it works, and the senior people in that bureaucracy run rings around them. And they don’t really achieve what they’re trying to achieve. I mean, if you put Dr Oz in charge of Medicaid and Medicare, I mean, he is not really qualified to run that place. Do you think he’ll know enough to actually reform it?
Heidi Ganahl: As someone who helped lead a $5 billion university system in Colorado, I was on the Regent Board, which is a statewide elected office. Most of the people in administrative roles or the higher bureaucracy roles, they don’t have experience doing that exact job, but they may have good experience being leaders or being disruptors or getting the job done, which is what we want right now. And I think Trump learned a lot in his first term in 2016 about how not to do things. And I think it’s interesting to think about what would have happened if Trump had won in 2020. I don’t think we would be seeing the disruption that we’re seeing now. We wouldn’t have had the allies that he does now, with Elon Musk and Robert Kennedy Jr and Vivek and Tulsi. A Lot of Democrats are surrounding him that have come around to his way of thinking. I think it’s going to be a very interesting time in American history to see how this plays out.
Krishnan Guru-Murthy: That is certainly true. No one’s going to argue with that.