A little over a week ago, Donald Trump became the first Republican presidential candidate to win both the Electoral College and the national popular vote since George W Bush in 2004.

And he appears to be repeating one of Bush’s most infamous mistakes.

Bush, who four years earlier had squeaked by the Supreme Court to win the Electoral College, took his victory over then-Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts as a mandate to make sweeping changes to the nation’s social safety net.

At a press conference shortly after his 2004 victory, he told reporters that the victory gave “a sense that people have spoken and embraced your point of view” and said he would communicate that attitude to the next Congress controlled by Republicans.

“I gained capital — political capital — in the campaign and now I intend to spend it,” he said.

What Bush wanted to “spend” was a bold plan to gradually replace Social Security with a system of private retirement accounts that would allow Americans to trade that guaranteed benefit for a bet on the stock market.

It never left the ground. Democrats, led by then-minority leaders Nancy Pelosi in the House and Harry Reid in the Senate, were fierce in their pushback. They made an early decision not to even consider Bush’s plan or engage with GOP efforts to negotiate any sort of compromise legislation, let alone offer a Democratic alternative.

More importantly, a critical mass of the Republican Party realized that their leader’s plan was, in short, extremely unpopular. Combined with unified Democratic opposition, the pushback was so great that neither the House nor the Senate ever considered legislation to create Bush’s private retirement accounts.

Twenty years later, Trump appears to be misreading the public’s appetite to remake the entire government in his image.

On Wednesday, he stunned much of the world by choosing the former congresswoman from Hawaii Tulsi Gabbarda former Democrat with no foreign policy or intelligence experience and a history of talking about Russian propaganda, as the nominee to replace the widely respected Avril Haines as director of national intelligence.

He left the American legal establishment equally amazed by the choice of the Floridian brand Matt Gaetzwho up until that point had been a Republican congressman with a lingering cloud of scandal around him as the incoming attorney general.

Gaetz, a 42-year-old graduate of the renowned College of William and Mary Law School in Virginia, has no experience as a prosecutor or a long history of legal scholarship. But he has a track record in the public arena as a fierce defender of Trump in the face of the multiple criminal and congressional investigations that have dogged the president-elect over the years.

He also pledged to bring law enforcement “to heel” and keep criminal investigations away from the president-elect and his allies and, by implication, targeting Trump’s enemies.

Trump further stoked criticism Thursday when he announced that the Department of Health and Human Services — a sprawling organization that regulates food, drugs and funds billions in medical research in addition to operating the Medicare and Medicaid health insurance systems for elderly and poor Americans – would be led by Robert F Kennedy Jr.

Kennedy, the son of slain New York senator and former attorney general Robert F Kennedy Sr., was once a well-respected environmental law specialist until he began peddling discredited theories about a nonexistent link between vaccines and autism. He signaled plans to lay off hundreds of scientific experts currently employed by HHS and scrap the approval process required for new drugs and medical treatments in favor of refocusing the government’s regulatory efforts on food safety and the unproven links between environmental toxins and chronic diseases.

Selections by Gabbard, Gaetz, and Kennedy they angered all the Democrats who condemned them as frivolous and even dangerous.

Trump’s decision to table the controversial picks could jeopardize any goodwill he has among more centrist-minded members of his own party in the Senate, as they will be tasked with approving him for cabinet picks.

In particular, Gaetz drew the most revenue from members of the Senate Republican Conference, where many members are still bitter with him for his role in the ouster of then-House Speaker Kevin McCarthy last October. The unprecedented resignation of the top House Republican plunged the chamber into chaos for months, with McCarthy attributing Gaetz’s actions to his desire to investigate an ethics investigation into his conduct.

The former House member (he resigned Thursday, possibly to prevent the release of a report on that ethics investigation) is widely despised among his former colleagues, and several GOP senators have suggested Gaetz has a tough road ahead of him. it even gets a vote in the Senate.

But it could be Kennedy, the anti-vaccine activist and conspiracy theorist, which causes the most headaches for Trump’s political operation.

As a scion of America’s most famous Democratic family, Kennedy has long toed his ancestral party’s line on reproductive freedom and LGBT+ rights issues — positions that are at odds with the party he will serve if he is brought into the new Trump administration.

Matt Bowman, director of regulatory affairs at the anti-abortion, anti-LGBT+ legal group Alliance Defending Freedom, said in a statement that his group “hopes President-elect Trump will appoint leaders who uphold the law and promote the lives and health of those on who is charged with protecting them.”

“When it comes to HHS, the Biden administration has radicalized its bureaucracy to order and promote illegal abortion and dangerous gender procedures, so we hope its leaders will restore the rule of law, respect biological reality, and allow states to protect children at any stage of life,” he added.

Although Republicans have been willing to tolerate some heterodoxy on some social issues, Kennedy’s pro-choice history could prove as much of a dealbreaker for him among the Senate GOP as Gaetz’s alleged history of sexual misconduct.

While Trump has a history of successfully intimidating Republicans into giving him what he wants, Republican senators may not have the appetite for the negative headlines that will accompany yes votes to confirm this latest election Trump’s.