President-elect Donald Trump is wasting little time taking on the three government institutions that most thwarted his political ambitions during his first term, and he is making clear that he will brook no resistance in his second.
By choosing lieutenants to lead the Justice Department, the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies, Trump has passed over the establishment figures he put in those posts eight years ago in favor of fiery allies with unconventional biographies whose most important qualification may be loyalty to him.
The selection of Matt Getz as attorney general, Pete Headsett as secretary of defense and Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence in the past few days has shocked a capital that perhaps should not have been so surprised. Anyone who listened to Trump's promises and complaints during the campaign over the past few years could have easily predicted that he would elevate compatriots ready to carry out his hostile takeover of the government.
If confirmed, Mr. Gaetz, Mr. Headsett and Ms. Gabbard would represent the leading strike forces in Trump's self-declared war against the deep state. All three echo his belief that there are career civil servants in government who actively thwarted his priorities while he was in office and targeted him after he left. None of them has a track record comparable to that of their predecessors in both parties, but all of them can be expected to "set fire" to the status quo, to use Stephen K's term. Bannon for Gaetz.
"You tried to destroy Trump; you tried to put Trump in jail; you tried to break Trump," Bannon, a former Trump White House strategist, said in his podcast after Gaetz's nomination was announced. "He can't be broken. You couldn't destroy him. And now he's turned on you," he said.
Bannon pointed to MSNBC hosts, producers and guests, as well as former investigators and FBI officials, as examples of targets that Gates would pursue if given the power to prosecute. "I understood that they were afraid of us," he said. "And why are they afraid of us? Because we were coming to take down the globalists and the deep state."
The choice of Gaetz, in particular, was so surprising to many in Washington that even Republicans at first struggled to understand whether Trump was serious. He almost seemed to revel in the metaphorical heads exploding on Capitol Hill. "At this point, he's just trolling America," Alyssa Farrah Griffin, a former Trump White House adviser who broke with him, wrote on social media.
Trump's willingness to pick candidates who once would have been unthinkable extends beyond national security agencies. Yesterday, Trump picked Robert F. Kennedy Jr, a former presidential candidate who made a name for himself as a leader of the anti-vaccine movement, as secretary of Health and Human Services. For Homeland Security Secretary, Trump picked South Dakota Governor Christie Noem, whose vice presidential prospects vanished with her admission that she shot her own dog because it could not be tamed. But the Justice Department, the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies were the three areas of government that proved the most stubborn obstacles to Trump's previous efforts to legitimize his presidency and overturn his 2020 defeat to hold on to power.
Intelligence agencies have defended their assessment that Russia interfered in the 2016 election to help Trump defeat Hillary Clinton, despite fierce pushback from the president-elect, who has publicly said he believes President Vladimir Putin's denials instead. The Justice Department has refused Trump's requests to prosecute many of his opponents, including Clinton, former President Barack Obama and his vice president, Joseph R. Biden Jr, though it is investigating others who have angered the president. More critically, the department has rejected pressure to publicly declare that there were significant irregularities in the 2020 election to justify overturning Michael T. Flynn, a retired lieutenant general and Trump ally, tried to persuade the president in December 2020 to declare a form of martial law and order the military to seize voting equipment and rerun elections in states he lost. General Mark A. Miley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has been signaling for months that he will not allow the military to become a political weapon. "He wanted to use them as his leverage, and they were the ones that were the safety fences," said Olivia Troy, who served as national security adviser to Vice President Mike Pence during the Trump administration and has become a fierce critic of the president-elect. "And so I think this all stems from that."
By contrast, it is harder to imagine that Mr Gaetz, Mr Headsett or Ms Gabbard will oppose Trump once he is reinstated on January 20. Mr. Gaetz, a Florida Republican who just gave up his seat in the House of Representatives, is a fierce critic of the department he may take over, a department that investigated him for human trafficking for sexual exploitation before dropping the case.
This week, Gaetz proposed eliminating the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, which would report to him as attorney general. Trump is currently expected to fire Christopher A. after his inauguration. Wray, the FBI director he appointed in 2017, for being too independent.
Headsett, a Fox News host who got Trump's attention by defending a convicted war criminal, served as a major in the Army National Guard and was deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan, but has no experience running a large organization, much less an armed force of two million soldiers. He's also a fierce defender of Trump and attacks what he calls the modern "woke" military. Gabbard, a former Democratic congresswoman from Hawaii who left her party and endorsed Trump, spent two decades in the National Guard and Army Reserve, rising to lieutenant colonel, but has no experience in the intelligence agencies she will oversee. She has often echoed Russia's positions on Ukraine and NATO, to the point that a Russian state television host called her "our friend." Compare these three with the appointees Trump made to the same posts when he first took office in 2017: Jeff Sessions, a Republican senator and former judge, as attorney general; Jim Mattis, a retired Marine four-star general, as defense secretary; and Dan Coats, a longtime Republican senator from Indiana and ambassador to Germany, as director of national intelligence.
All three proved too independent for Trump. Sessions angered the president by recusing himself from the Russia investigation and refusing to help remove special counsel Robert S. Mueller III. He was eventually fired. Mattis opposed many of Trump's ideas that he considered dangerous to national security. He eventually resigned in protest of the decision to abandon Kurdish allies in Syria. Coats defended his intelligence analysts for their conclusions about Russia and was so stunned by Trump's deference to Putin that he privately wondered what the Russians had in store for the new president. He eventually resigned as well.
Trump learned from that experience. When he first arrived at the White House, he hadn't spent a single day in public service and so often relied on people he didn't know well. Eight years later, he returns with a much better understanding of how power works in the White House and a better idea of whom to trust. In the process, according to Troy, he invoked the Democrats' alleged weaponization of the government to turn it against its adversaries. "It's almost projection because he's doing exactly what he's accusing these people of doing," she said. "It's politicizing these communities. " | BGNES
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New York Times analysis
