Trump’s Cabinet picks are appalling. Here are 3 reasons not to give up.

It’s been two weeks since Donald Trump won his reelection bid, and the president-elect’s appointments keep coming. Each announcement feels like the punchline of a morbid joke, culminating in a lineup of people who would do the president’s bidding.
Between the incoming administration and the Republican majority in both chambers of Congress, things are looking grim.
On Tuesday, Trump picked television personality Dr. Mehmet Oz for administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. He’s also chosen Project 2025 contributor Brendan Carr to lead the Federal Communications Commission, not the first Trump nominee with ties to the Heritage Foundation agenda.
Carr’s plans for the FEC include tackling the “censorship cartel,” the alleged anti-conservative bias of social media sites. He isn’t even the most concerning pick.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a known anti-vaxxer who thinks chemicals in the water could be making children gay or transgender, was nominated to lead the Department of Health and Human Services. Matt Gaetz, a former Florida congressman perhaps best known for allegations of sexual misconduct, was nominated to be attorney general. Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy have been tapped to lead the “Department of Government Efficiency,” a new Trump creation.
As someone who wants to see our country move forward, I’ve struggled to feel hopeful in the wake of the Democrats failing this election cycle. But now is not the time to lose hope or check out. We must continue to organize ahead of the 2026 midterm elections – in fact, we will need it if we want to survive another Trump presidency.
Here are some of the appointments that concern me the most.
For the people concerned about U.S. involvement in Gaza, things are going to get a lot worse. Trump has already said that he wants to be a “protector” of Israel. His picks show that he has no concern for the more than 43,800 Palestinians who have died as a result of the war between Israel and Hamas.
Rep. Elise Stefanik, Trump’s pick for U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, is a Trump loyalist from New York. She went viral last year for her questioning of university leaders at a congressional hearing, when she asked whether calling for the genocide of Jews would lead to disciplinary action by the schools.
Trump also chose former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, who opposes a cease-fire deal and doesn’t believe in a two-state solution, to be the U.S. ambassador to Israel.  
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My hope is that the pro-Palestinian protests on our college campuses didn’t end in the spring; I want to see young people continue to protest U.S. compliance in the massacre of Palestinians.
After all, they continued to protest the Harris campaign up until the final days of the election. Vice President Kamala Harris lost a lot of votes because of her stance on what’s happening in Gaza. I hope that a more conservative government does not scare people away from speaking up against what they believe is wrong. Because what they care about is about to get much worse.
In the first Trump administration, people on the left were outraged by the family separation policy at the border and subhuman treatment of immigrants. That energy needs to continue into the next Trump presidency – especially because the person who oversaw those plans is returning.
Trump has tapped Tom Homan, the former head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and another Project 2025 contributor, to be his “border czar.”
At the National Conservatism Conference in July, according to David Weigel of Semafor, Homan said on a panel that he’ll run “the biggest deportation force this country has ever seen.”
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Earlier this week, Trump also threatened to declare a national emergency and use the military to enforce his mass deportation plans, something he talked about repeatedly on the campaign trail.
This is the America nearly 77 million of Americans voted for, and we must live with that. But for the next two years, I hope progressives refuse to stop talking about the ways Trump has and will continue to harm immigrants.
For many of us, the ongoing climate crisis is a major concern. For Trump, that concern doesn’t exist. Perhaps that’s why he selected Lee Zeldin, a former U.S. congressman from New York, to lead the Environmental Protection Agency.  Zeldin consistently voted against environmental rights groups as a member of Congress. He vows to “restore US energy dominance” in his new role.
Trump has also selected oil industry executive Chris Wright to lead the Department of Energy. Last year, Wright posted a video to LinkedIn denying the existence of climate change and stating that the United States is “not in the midst of an energy transition, either.” It’s safe to say that the Green New Deal isn’t happening soon.
Nonetheless, we can’t give up hope. The midterm elections are just two years away. If Democrats can address the issues in their last election campaign and continue organizing through those two years, it’s possible that we can keep the United States from total right-wing dominance.
Right now everyone – but especially Generation Z, ages 12 to 27 – needs to remember that this fight for our future isn’t over. If we want to see the things we care about come to fruition, we have to mobilize. We can’t let the extremists win.

Follow USA TODAY elections columnist Sara Pequeño on X, formerly Twitter:@sara__pequeno