I think it is safe to say that we can only be more or less sure of some of the picks when Trump officially announces them. Everything else is just speculation that is maybe partly fueled by Trump himself.
I agree completely. So far, all of the real, official appointments have been posted by Trump on Truth Social (TS) first, specifically on the Trump Transition letterhead. Elon has then posted that on X each time.
Almost all of these other appointments that are mentioned but not confirmed were never posted by Trump on TS. I even noticed yesterday that some of the "fake" appointments were on Trump's Transition letterhead, but again, no official release from Trump on TS.
Several people on X suspect they, meaning Trump and team, are purposefully leaking names for positions to mainstream media- with a couple of different purposes. First, they can find out who is promoting these leaks by watching the trending posts on X and backtracking to the original poster. It also puts the names of nominees out there which then gets torn apart in every way imaginable by all of the anti- Neocons on X. They very quickly start posting voting records and policy support history of the supposed nominee which then opens even more people's eyes to the truth of The Swamp.
I've been weeding through all of the X posts since election day and it's clear there's a lot of people closely watching these nominations, but from what I've seen the last week, if it didn't come from Trump on TS, it's probably not real or official. I'm not into social media at all, but considering the importance of these events on the world stage at this particular moment, I felt it prudent to get into the weeds and start pay attention to minor details that could be missed or overlooked.
Who knows- perhaps Trump and team are the ones putting all these fake nominations out there to see the public's reaction. We all know the Deep State is not going to go quietly, so there's going to continue to be an enormous amount of disinformation injected into the public sphere the next few months especially. The level of vigilance required now is probably the highest it's ever been to discern truth from lies, and it's only going to get worse.
One other minor detail to note. I find the appointment of Elon and Vivek to the new DOGE (Dept of Govt Efficiency)interesting- not because of the new department created, but for the play on words. DOGE is also a crypto coin/currency that is discussed and supported very heavily on X. Not sure if the new department name was selected to be a play on that or not, but it's a curious similarity- even if not intended.