Donald Trump is pitting members of his presidential Cabinet against one another in a last-ditch effort to score points ahead of the midterm elections.
Dubbed the Cabinet Travel Competition, the president’s Cabinet members score points based on the number of visits they make to swing states and congressional districts with tight races to campaign for Republicans ahead of Nov. 5, The Atlantic reports.
In the White House, it is rumored that the Cabinet member with the most points will earn a dinner with Trump, 80, though officials told the outlet that the winner walks away with mere bragging rights. White House officials did not immediately respond to detailed questions from the Daily Beast.
The Atlantic calculated that the likely winner of the competition is Small Business Administration head Kelly Loeffler, who traveled 18 times to competitive states between Memorial Day and Labor Day weekends, the purported timeline of the race. The competition, however, is rumored to continue until November.
Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins, Acting Secretary of Labor Keith Sonderling, and Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy followed Loeffler. Duffy’s fourth-place standing comes as a surprise after his summer YouTube series, “The Great American Road Trip,” which featured his wife, Fox & Friends weekend co-host Rachel Campos Duffy, and several of his nine children embarking on a noncontinuous trip across the United States.
Secretaries’ trips are paid for with taxpayer dollars if they are related to their official Cabinet duties. Political trips are expected to be footed by the politicians themselves. But in Trump’s game, it’s not clear if the White House is violating the Hatch Act, a 1939 law limiting federal appointees’ engagement in partisan politics.
It’s also not the first time such a question has been raised: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth was lambasted for campaigning against Trump foe and GOP Rep. Thomas Massie in Kentucky in May. Then, in August, Hegseth endorsed Rep. Zach Nunn at the Iowa State Fair, quipping: “According to the lawyers, I’m only here in a personal capacity.”
Donald Sherman, the president of watchdog organization Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics, told The Atlantic that it was “hard to imagine that that compliance is being prioritized in a competition-like scenario, particularly in an administration that has been hostile to the Hatch Act in pretty much every other instance.”
Something Trump does appear to prioritize, notably, is competition between his appointees. It is widely known that one of the president’s favorite pastimes was polling people about potential successors JD Vance and Marco Rubio, for instance, before he reportedly settled on the vice president.
