It’s Pretty Clear Why Trump Wants Total Crackpots to Run the Military and Intelligence Agencies
Pete Hegseth and Tulsi Gabbard are bananas Cabinet picks. But don’t overlook the CIA nominee.
In his first few picks for Cabinet secretaries, President-elect Donald Trump has made it clear—even clearer than many had predicted—that his main criterion for selection is blind loyalty. Qualities such as competence or experience have no bearing whatsoever.
One of the nominees, a combat veteran and Fox News host named Pete Hegseth, is so blatantly unqualified—a caricature of MAGA fidelity—that some insiders say even the Senate sworn in this January, with its 53 Republicans, may vote not to confirm him as leader of the Defense Department.
The same might be true (one can always hope) of Trump’s pick for director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, the far-right Democrat turned MAGA Republican, who has no relevant experience except, perhaps, that she has avidly parroted Russian propaganda lines to explain a wide variety of international developments.
Only somewhat less jaw-dropping is Trump’s choice of former Texas Rep. John Ratcliffe to be CIA director. An even slightly less lopsided Senate would likely reject Ratcliffe out of fear that he’d politicize intelligence—as indeed he did during the brief spell, at the end of Trump’s first term, when he was director of national intelligence, the office that oversees and coordinates the 18 U.S. intel agencies. But especially if enough Republicans feel they can’t stomach Hegseth or Gabbard in high offices, they’ll probably let Ratcliffe go through.
Other beneficiaries of political payback include South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, nominated to be secretary of homeland security, and New York Rep. Elise Stefanik, who is slated to be United Nations ambassador. Neither has any experience remotely related to the job they’ll be handling. Both, however, have been ardent supporters and defenders of Trump; Stefanik enjoys the special distinction of rising to become chair of the House Republican Conference after Rep. Liz Cheney was ousted for criticizing Trump over the Jan. 6 riots.
The oddball of them all, the nominee who emerged out of nowhere, is Hegseth, a complete unknown to anyone who doesn’t watch Fox & Friends Weekend, which he has co-hosted for a decade. Of course, Trump is one of that show’s regular viewers, and, to the surprise of his advisers, he picked Hegseth to run the Department of Defense—the country’s largest bureaucracy, with 2.8 million employees and a budget this year of $841 billion—because he liked a lot of what the rugged-looking co-host was saying.
Hegseth fought in Afghanistan and Iraq, but his rank—a major in the Army National Guard—wasn’t exactly a leadership slot. He has written some bestselling books, notably The War on Warriors: Behind the Betrayal of the Men Who Keep Us Free. In it, as well as on several Fox broadcasts, he decried the introduction of diversity requirements in the military, saying that they brought on the rise of “woke generals,” who in turn weakened the Army’s fighting spirit. He has also said that lowering admission requirements, in order to let women join combat units, has had the same deleterious effect. (Many Army officers say that critics such as Hegseth exaggerate the amount of time spent on diversity training and that the women serving in combat—in some cases in elite units like the Rangers and Green Berets—have had to pass the same grueling tests as the men.)
The anti-woke attitude may be what appealed most to Trump, who wants to fire generals who display insufficient loyalty to him. Hegseth has said he would appoint a board of retired officers, no doubt of like mind, to draw up lists of active officers who should be dismissed.
On his Fox show, Hegseth also vigorously protested the prosecutions of soldiers for war crimes, even to the point of persuading Trump, while he was president, to pardon two perpetrators of particularly heinous murders of civilians.
But when it comes to a defense secretary’s main jobs—forming budgets, assessing weapons systems, managing interservice rivalries, engaging in interagency policymaking, conducting diplomacy with foreign counterparts, and so forth—Hegseth has no apparent qualifications whatever.
Even some MAGA Republicans see the merits of having someone with at least a bit of political acumen and organizational talent run an enterprise as large, complex, and vital as the Defense Department. It would take four Republican senators to reject his nomination. Some on Capitol Hill think four could be rallied to vote their conscience. If not, and if Hegseth is sworn in, others doubt he would last more than six months on the job. The Pentagon bureaucracy is deeply entrenched; it can wear out far more agile players than Hegseth.
Before launching a political crusade against military officers, Trump might also want to review the biography of his own early business lawyer and mentor Roy Cohn, who began his career as the counsel for Sen. Joseph McCarthy. Cohn, who died in 1986, could have told Trump that McCarthy—who rose to prominence by rooting out and prosecuting suspected Communists in government—made his big misstep when he went after Army officers. It was during the nationally televised Army–McCarthy hearings of 1954 that Joseph Welch, the lawyer for an accused officer, snapped back at the senator, “Have you no sense of decency, sir?” And that was the end not only of McCarthy’s witch hunts but also of his career—and, three years later, of his life, from excessive drinking.
Hegseth probably read some history as an undergrad at Princeton and a master’s student at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, so he might want to ponder the takeaways from this tale: Is anti-woke the new anti-communism? Will Hegseth be its Cohn or McCarthy?
As for Gabbard, picked to oversee and coordinate the 18 U.S. intelligence agencies, not much need be said beyond “Holy shit!” If confirmed, she will replace Avril Haines, who had been—in contrast to Gabbard’s slim résumé—deputy director of the CIA and deputy national security adviser before President Joe Biden nominated her for the job. Haines also has degrees in law and theoretical physics.
If the Senate doesn’t dismiss Gabbard’s nomination as an insult to the enterprise of intelligence gathering and analysis, then we are in serious trouble as a nation. At the very least, one can expect hundreds of intelligence professionals to resign—which may be Trump’s intention. He wants to destroy “the administrative state,” as his erstwhile strategist Steve Bannon once put it. Putting Gabbard in charge of the intelligence apparatus is one way of doing that.
Ratcliffe’s nomination as CIA director is only slightly less egregious. In many ways, his and Gabbard’s selections are more appalling than even that of Hegseth. Although defense secretaries are expected to carry out the president’s policies, the chief of the main intelligence agency is supposed to be rigorously independent—and Ratcliffe is anything but that.
He first came to Trump’s fond attention as the congressman who most virulently spoke out against the officials probing the then president’s various alleged improprieties, most notably the Mueller commission delving into tales of Trump’s collusion with Russia. Trump wanted to nominate Ratcliffe as director of national intelligence until even Republican senators warned him that the Texas congressman was too partisan and inexperienced for the job. Trump nominated a more moderate congressman, Dan Coats, who filed too many honest reports that were at odds with Trump’s own talking points about Iran, North Korea, and Russia. In his final year as president, Trump fired Coats and nominated Ratcliffe, this time sticking by his defender. The Republicans, riding Trump’s coattails as the 2020 elections approached, relented. Ratcliffe was confirmed by a narrow margin, 49–44.
In his 18 months on the job, Ratcliffe confirmed every fear about him, using his office to validate several conspiracy theories, many of them about Trump’s political opponents. Among them was a claim that in the 2016 election, the Russians had backed Hillary Clinton more than they backed Trump, and that in the 2020 election, the Iranians had hacked into the servers of the pro-Trump Proud Boys militia group and sent emails to voters in three battleground states, warning them, “You will vote for Trump on Election Day, or we will come after you.” In fact, other intel agencies concluded that the Russians had backed Trump, not Clinton, in 2016. And even Ratcliffe had to admit, in the report on the battleground-state emails, that the evidence on Iranian involvement was inconclusive.
Just over a week into Trump’s transition to the White House, the once and future president is making good on his most hair-raising threats. Those who dismissed his agenda as theatrics, telling us not to worry, that he doesn’t mean them, or that institutional guardrails will keep them from happening—well, we shall see. It’s up to four Republican senators out of 53 to play hero, and as Liz Cheney learned, playing hero in defiance of Donald Trump can end your career. Be very nervous.
