Saturday, November 16, 2024
Friday, November 15, 2024
Trump’s National Security Wrecking Crew
American voters gave Donald Trump a solid win on Election Day. But they didn’t give him a wrecking ball to destroy the country’s military and intelligence agencies.
That’s what’s so scary about Trump’s nominations of Pete Hegseth and Tulsi Gabbard as secretary of defense and director of national intelligence, respectively. Neither is remotely qualified for two of the most important management jobs in government. They’re polemicists and ideologues — wreckers, to be blunt, rather than builders. If confirmed, they would do more to doom Trump’s presidency than Democrats ever could.
Trump is a disrupter, and this latest set of nominations (including Matt Gaetz for attorney general) has shown that he hopes to overturn what he imagines as the “deep state.” Trump’s bark was worse than his bite during his first term. But now he is gathering a war cabinet for what seems to be a serious assault on the leadership of the military and the intelligence community.
Hegseth’s nomination is especially dangerous. On Fox News, he has made a career out of denouncing the senior military leaders he would direct as defense secretary. His recent book, “The War on Warriors,” includes personal attacks on Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Adm. Lisa Franchetti, chief of naval operations. He smears them, in effect, as diversity hires.
He describes what he regards as the current military ethos with an imaginary call to arms, “We will not stop until trans-lesbian black females run everything!” This is crazy nonsense.
Hegseth won’t be running a Fox talk show if he’s confirmed. He will have absolute power to fire any general officer who doesn’t meet Trump’s political standards. The Wall Street Journal reports that the transition team is already drafting an executive order for a “warrior board” to recommend generals and admirals for dismissal. A Journal editorial Thursday sounded the right warning: “The military isn’t Mr. Trump’s enemy, and a purge mentality will court political trouble and demoralize the ranks.”
Trump started off with reasonable enough nominees for his national security team. Sen. Marco Rubio and Rep. Michael Waltz, both of Florida, are solid choices for secretary of state and national security adviser. Both have worked with Democrats on defense and intelligence issues, and neither would send America’s allies and partners rushing for the exits.
Rubio, like most Republicans, has been swept up in the Trump tornado. But he worked effectively as vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee with Chairman Mark R. Warner (D-Virginia) And in private, he’s said to be a solid supporter of Ukraine’s struggle to resist Russia’s invasion. It’s a mark of Rubio’s good sense that the MAGA right reportedly wants to derail his nomination.
Waltz is a surprise choice but not a terrible one. With his service as an Army Green Beret in Iraq and Afghanistan and four Bronze Stars, he has “a high degree of respect within the SOF community,” a former head of Special Operations Command told me. During three terms as a Florida congressman, he was more than a MAGA mouthpiece, working across the aisle on some issues.
But as national security adviser, Waltz will have a vastly greater challenge. This job involves coordinating the immense overt and covert powers of the U.S. government — the “interagency” — to frame and achieve our foreign policy goals. . . . . Let’s hope Waltz is a fast learner, with a good staff.
John Ratcliffe, Trump’s choice for CIA director, won’t arrive with a meat cleaver, either. He was deferential to Trump when he served as director of national intelligence in 2020, but he didn’t undermine the 18 agencies he supervised. Ratcliffe’s biggest problem will be stemming a rush to the exits of senior CIA officers who are telling colleagues they can’t stomach four more years of serving Trump — and sustaining liaison relationships with foreign intelligence partners who are wondering whether America is a trustworthy ally.
Gabbard is a bizarre choice for DNI. This ought to be a job for an intelligence professional with enough experience to review the budgets and priorities of an intelligence community that, frankly, is too big and barely manageable. At a minimum, you’d expect any prospective DNI to have a record of standing firm against America’s adversaries.
Not Gabbard. She visited Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in 2017, said she was “skeptical” of the deeply documented evidence that Assad used chemical weapons on his people, and later claimed it was an “undeniable fact” that America funded biological weapons labs in Ukraine, even though critics said she was parroting Kremlin propaganda.
Trump doesn’t want war — except, perhaps, when it comes to China and Iran. Most of his appointees, the good, bad and ugly, have hawkish views about Beijing and Tehran. Those countries are in the firing line. But tragically, so are U.S. military and intelligence officers. That can’t be what voters wanted on Nov. 5. It’s up to the Senate to prevent it by denying confirmation of Hegseth and Gabbard.
Thursday, November 14, 2024
Trump's Unqualified - and Frightening - Cabinet Picks
Donald Trump spent much of the 2024 presidential campaign promising to wreak vengeance on his enemies and upend the federal government. Three Cabinet picks in the past two days are starting to show what that might look like.
Since last night, Trump has announced plans to nominate Pete Hegseth for secretary of defense, Tulsi Gabbard for director of national intelligence, and Matt Gaetz for attorney general. On the face of it, the trio seem to possess little in common except having scant qualification on paper for the jobs he wants them to fill. (Gabbard and Gaetz are also widely disliked by members of the respective parties in which they served in the U.S. House.) . . . today, none of them share an ideology: Hegseth is a culture warrior, Gaetz a libertine with an unusual mix of political views, and Gabbard an ostensible dove with her own strange commitments.
What brings them together is not just fidelity to Trump, but a shared sense of having been persecuted by the departments they’ve been nominated to lead. It’s what they share with Trump as well as one another, and it’s their main credential to serve under him.
After the January 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol, Hegseth defended the rioters on Fox News. “ . . . Two weeks later, the National Guard said it had removed 12 members from duty on the day of Joe Biden’s inauguration because of worries about extremist groups. . . . By his own account, Hegseth was one of the dozen. He said a tattoo of a Jerusalem cross had gotten him flagged. He soon left the military, then wrote a book attacking the military as a bastion of “wokeness” and decay. . . . including suggesting that General C. Q. Brown, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is in his role only because he is Black.
Gabbard seems like an odd choice for DNI, a role created after 9/11 to try to solve problems of siloed information between intelligence agencies. Though a veteran and former representative, she has no clear interest in intelligence and did not serve on the House Intelligence Committee. She does, however, have a grudge against the intelligence community. She says that this summer, she was placed on a watch list for domestic terrorism, resulting in frequent extra screening at airports. . . . . Confirming any of this is impossible, because the watch lists really are a civil-liberties nightmare: They are not public, the reasons anyone gets on them are opaque, and the process for challenging them is enigmatic.
Gaetz is somehow an even more improbable pick to be the nation’s chief law-enforcement officer than Gabbard is for DNI. He has extensive experience with law enforcement, but generally he’s been the suspect. In 2008, he was pulled over for speeding and suspected of driving drunk, but he refused a Breathalyzer test and charges were dropped. Court papers have alleged that Gaetz attended drug- and sex-fueled parties involving underage girls, which Gaetz denies. He’s currently being investigated by the House Ethics Committee for a variety of alleged offenses.
More to the point, Gaetz was also the subject of a lengthy Justice Department probe into possible sex-trafficking. A top Trump aide told the House January 6 committee that Gaetz had sought a pardon from Trump at the close of his first presidency. After years of investigation, the DOJ informed Gaetz’s lawyers in 2023 that he would not be charged. The experience left Gaetz furious at the Justice Department.
What each of these appointments would offer, if the nominees are confirmed, is a chance to get their revenge on the people they feel have done them wrong. Whether they can get confirmed will be a good test of just how acquiescent the GOP Senate, under incoming Majority Leader John Thune, will be to Trump’s agenda.
Hegseth would be the least traditionally qualified nominee to lead the Defense Department in memory; it’s a sprawling bureaucracy, and he has no experience with it except as a low-ranking officer.
Gabbard’s past record of criticizing Republicans may raise some eyebrows, though she has become a loyal member of Trump’s inner circle. Gaetz will be the biggest test, in part because many Republicans personally despise him, and because the probes into him make him radioactive. (Perhaps these nominees are why Trump has so avidly demanded recess-appointment power.)
If Trump can get Hegseth, Gabbard, and Gaetz confirmed, he’ll be on the way to the retribution he promised. And if any of them falls, he’s still made his intentions crystal clear.
Wednesday, November 13, 2024
Get Ready for Trump’s Massive New Tariffs
President-elect Donald Trump’s former trade chief and those close to him are preparing to aggressively sell their plans for massive new tariffs on imports that will go far beyond anything seen in Trump’s first term.
Robert Lighthizer, a gruff, Ohio-born trade lawyer, and his allies have been circulating memos among themselves as they prepare to convince lawmakers and the public that their plans for dramatically higher tariffs will energize the economy instead of tanking it, according to a document viewed by POLITICO, provided by a person close to the policy planning.
Advisers close to Lighthizer and the Trump transition also have been talking to key lawmakers and congressional staff about how Congress might even take a role in imposing the incoming administration’s tariff plans through legislation — an action that would signify a break from mainstream economic policymaking embraced by both parties for decades, but would also prevent the tariffs from being unilaterally revoked by a future president.
The economic justification for the tariffs could be released by Trump allies in the coming weeks, said the person, and will show “the failures of economic models to accurately predict changes to the economy” as a result of tariffs. Trump’s proposals, which aim to promote domestic manufacturing and lessen reliance on foreign countries, include a “universal” tariff of up to 20 percent on all goods coming into the U.S. and at least a 60 percent tariff on all imports from China.
Those discussions and preemptive efforts to counter criticism signal an even greater shake-up on trade during Trump’s second term and show how Lighthizer’s ideologically driven mission to reorder the global trading system has gained a level of acceptance among Republicans not seen during the president-elect’s first term. Congress, which has constitutional jurisdiction over trade matters, has not imposed tariffs in nearly 100 years, instead granting the president the power to do so — under extraordinary circumstances —through decades-old laws.
For months, Lighthizer and his inner circle have been preparing trade and economic policy actions for the administration’s first 100 days. Part of that effort has included getting Congress on board to consider a legislative approach to tariffs, which could provide a revenue source to pay for a plethora of expected new tax cuts.
More buy-in from Congress could be key for Lighthizer to deliver on a more aggressive tariff strategy that Trump has touted on the campaign trail. Additional action could be taken against the European Union, which Trump has described as a “mini China” and Lighthizer has accused of enjoying an unfair trading advantage against the U.S.
Lighthizer has also been hitting the road as an unofficial Trump surrogate — sometimes with chilling effects for wary U.S. allies. A few months ago, Lighthizer unexpectedly attended a meeting of the Bilderberg group — an annual meeting of the transatlantic political and financial elite — delivering comments that were “terrifying to everybody who was there,” according to an attendee.
A familiar cast of characters is likely to be implementing and defending that tariff agenda in Trump’s second term. Many of Lighthizer’s deputies from the first term are on the short list for USTR or other economic posts . . . . .
Though no final decisions have been made, Trump could start, as early as Day 1 of his term, to impose tariffs through executive action under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, a law that gives the president broad authority to take trade actions. Other tariff actions Trump is expected to take are being explored under laws he used during his first term to impose duties on China and other countries.
Trump team members close to Lighthizer are also having conversations with House Ways and Means Committee staff under Chair Jason Smith (R-Mo.) on whether House rules need to be changed to allow tariffs to be used to offset any lost revenue from a potential extension of Trump’s 2017 tax cut package, according to two people granted anonymity to describe internal discussions.
“We’re likely to see in a reconciliation bill … that’s raising revenue through tariffs on imports and taking that savings and using it to cut taxes and create incentives for domestic production,” said the person familiar with conversations between Trump’s team and Congress.
Tuesday, November 12, 2024
Monday, November 11, 2024
Sunday, November 10, 2024
Autocracy: It Can Happen Here
On the morning after Donald Trump was elected President for the first time, in 2016, the White House was a funereal place. For weeks, Barack Obama and his inner circle had worried about Hillary Clinton’s campaign—the failure to visit crucial battleground states with sufficient frequency, the snooty crack about “deplorables,” James Comey’s last-minute letter to Congress about her e-mails. But, for all the troubling signs and missteps, they were optimistic that, in a tighter-than-expected race, America would elect the first woman to the Presidency. A legacy, a continuity, would prevail.
Trump’s shocking victory shattered those assumptions, and that day, as many young, stricken staffers crowded into the Oval Office, Obama tried to raise their morale and convince them that the election of an aspiring autocrat did not spell the end of America’s long, if profoundly imperfect, experiment in liberal democracy. . . . Two days later, in an interview with The New Yorker, he again tried to keep despair at bay: “I think nothing is the end of the world until the end of the world.”
Privately, Obama, the first Black man elected to the White House, allowed himself to wonder if he had “come along too soon.” . . . . But now he was being succeeded by a figure of unmistakable reaction—a poisonous demagogue, a bigot, who proposed a very different American story. . . . “Maybe we pushed too far,” he went on, according to a memoir by one of his advisers, Benjamin Rhodes. “Maybe people just want to fall back into their tribe.”
Just as Obama struggled to understand the social and political roots of Trumpism, many Americans failed to grasp fully his character, the dimensions of his malevolence. It was impossible for them to absorb just what a threat he posed to international alliances and domestic institutions, how contemptuous he was of the truth, science, the press, and so many of his fellow-citizens. Surely, his most extreme rhetoric was an act.
Trump’s reëlection, his victory over Kamala Harris, can no longer be ascribed to a failure of the collective imagination. He is the least mysterious public figure alive; he has been announcing his every disquieting tendency, relentlessly, publicly, for decades. Who is left, supporter or detractor, who does not acknowledge, at least to some degree, his cynicism and divisiveness, his disrespect for selfless sacrifice? To him, fallen American soldiers are “suckers.” Many of his former closest advisers—Vice-President Mike Pence; his chief of staff John Kelly; Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff—have described him as unfit, unstable, and, in the case of Kelly and Milley, a fascist. n the closing weeks of the campaign, Trump went out of his way to dismiss his consultants’ blandishments to moderate his tone.
In the end, there was nothing Trump would not say, no invective or insult he would not hurl. At Madison Square Garden, he gave the platform over to supporters who spoke grotesquely about Puerto Rico, Jews, trans people—no indecency was impermissible. His most distinctive television ad was pure cruelty: “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you.” His disdain for women, which has been in evidence all his adult life, was only amplified in the last weeks of the campaign . . .
Trump was equally brazen about policy. There is no longer any excuse for failing to see what a second Trump Administration may bring: The mass deportation of undocumented immigrants. A federal government stocked with mediocrities whose highest qualification is fealty to the Great Leader. A contempt for climate policy, human rights, and gun control. A weakening of NATO. An even more reactionary Supreme Court and federal judiciary. An assault on the press. These are not the imaginings of a paranoiac. These are campaign promises announced from the podium.
How you interpret and prioritize the cascade of reasons for Trump’s reëlection is a kind of Rorschach test. It will require a long reckoning before anyone can conclude which of the leading factors—economic anxiety, cultural politics, racism, misogyny, Biden’s decline, Harris’s late start—was determinative.
Everyone who realizes with proper alarm that this is a deeply dangerous moment in American life must think hard about where we are. Rueful musings like Obama’s in 2016—What if we were wrong?—hardly did the job then and will not suffice now. With self-critical rigor and modesty, the Democrats need to assess how to regain the inclusive kind of coalition that F.D.R. built in the teeth of the Depression or that Robert Kennedy (the father, not the unfortunate son) sought in 1968.
That is one imperative. There is another. After the tens of millions of Americans who feared Trump’s return rise from the couch of gloom, it will be time to consider what must be done, assuming that Trump follows through on his most draconian pledges. One of the perils of life under authoritarian rule is that the leader seeks to drain people of their strength. A defeatism takes hold. There is an urge to pull back from civic life.
An American retreat from liberal democracy—a precious yet vulnerable inheritance—would be a calamity. Indifference is a form of surrender. Indifference to mass deportations would signal an abnegation of one of the nation’s guiding promises. Vladimir Putin welcomes Trump’s return not only because it makes his life immeasurably easier in his determination to subjugate a free and sovereign Ukraine but because it validates his assertion that American democracy is a sham—that there is no democracy.
One of the great spirits of modern times, the Czech playwright and dissident Václav Havel, wrote in “Summer Meditations,” “There is only one thing I will not concede: that it might be meaningless to strive in a good cause.” During the long Soviet domination of his country, Havel fought valiantly for liberal democracy, inspiring in others acts of resilience and protest. He was imprisoned for that. Then came a time when things changed, when Havel was elected President and, in a Kafka tale turned on its head, inhabited the Castle, in Prague. Together with a people challenged by years of autocracy, he helped lead his country out of a long, dark time. Our time is now dark, but that, too, can change. It happened elsewhere. It can happen here.
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