President-elect Donald Trump is wasting little time in taking on the three governmental institutions that most frustrated his political ambitions during his first term and making clear he will not brook resistance in his second.
With his selections of lieutenants to lead the Justice Department, Pentagon and intelligence agencies, Trump passed over the sorts of establishment figures he installed in those posts eight years ago in favor of firebrand allies with unconventional resumes whose most important qualification may be loyalty to him.
The choices of Matt Gaetz for attorney general, Pete Hegseth for defense secretary and Tulsi Gabbard for director of national intelligence in the past few days shocked a capital that perhaps should not have been all that surprised. Anyone who listened to Trump’s promises and grievances on the campaign trail over the past couple of years could have easily anticipated that he would elevate compatriots willing to execute his hostile takeover of government.
If confirmed, Gaetz, Hegseth and Gabbard would constitute the lead shock troops in Trump’s self-declared war on what he calls the “deep state.” All three have echoed his conviction that government is seeded with career public servants who actively thwarted his priorities while he was in office and targeted him after he left. None of them has the kind of experience relevant to these jobs comparable to predecessors of either party, but they can all be expected to take “a blowtorch” to the status quo, to use Steve Bannon’s term for Gaetz.
“You tried to destroy Trump; you tried to imprison Trump; you tried to break Trump,” Bannon, a onetime White House strategist for Trump, said on his podcast Wednesday after Gaetz’s nomination was announced. “He’s not breakable. You couldn’t destroy him. And now he has turned on you.”
Bannon singled out hosts, producers and guests on MSNBC as well as former investigators and FBI officials as an example of targets Gaetz would come after if given the power to prosecute. “I understood they feared us,” he went on. “And why do they fear us? Because we were coming to take down the globalists and the deep state.”
The choice of Gaetz especially was so astonishing to many in Washington that even Republicans had a hard time at first grasping whether Trump was serious. He seemed to almost relish the metaphorical heads exploding across Capitol Hill. “He’s just trolling America at this point,” Alyssa Farah Griffin, a former Trump White House aide who broke with him, wrote on social media.
Trump’s willingness to pick nominees who once would have been unimaginable has also extended beyond the national security agencies. On Thursday, Trump chose Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the former presidential candidate who made a name leading an anti-vaccine movement, to be the secretary of health and human services. For secretary of homeland security, Trump has tapped Gov. Kristi Noem of South Dakota, whose prospects for vice president vanished with her admission that she shot her own 14-month-old dog because it was “untrainable” and bit people.
But the Justice Department, Pentagon and intelligence agencies were the three areas of government that proved to be the most stubborn obstacles to Trump’s previous efforts to legitimize his presidency and overturn his defeat in 2020 to hold on to power.
The intelligence agencies stood by their assessment that Russia interfered in the 2016 election with the goal of helping Trump defeat Hillary Clinton, despite a fierce backlash from the newly elected president who publicly declared that he believed President Vladimir Putin’s denials instead.
The Justice Department refused Trump’s demands to prosecute many of his adversaries, including Clinton, former President Barack Obama and his vice president, Joe Biden, although it did investigate others who had angered the president. More critically, the department rebuffed pressure to publicly declare that there were substantial irregularities in the 2020 election to justify reversing Biden’s victory.
The Pentagon, for its part, made clear that it would not cooperate with an illegal effort to use troops against domestic opponents or help Trump stay in office. Michael 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 the election in states that he lost. Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had signaled for months that he would not allow the military to be turned into a political weapon.
“He wanted to use them as his lever, and they were the ones that were the guardrails,” said Olivia Troye, who served as a national security aide to Vice President Mike Pence during the Trump administration and has become a vocal critic of the president-elect. “And so I think this all stems from that.”
By contrast, it is harder to envision Gaetz, Hegseth or Gabbard defying Trump after he is inaugurated again on Jan. 20. Gaetz, a Florida Republican who just resigned his seat in the House, has been a fierce critic of the department he may take over — a department that investigated him for sex trafficking before dropping the matter.
Compare those three to the appointees Trump installed in those same posts when he first came to 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 oust special counsel Robert Mueller. He was eventually fired. Mattis resisted many ideas by Trump that he deemed dangerous for national security. He eventually resigned to protest a decision to abandon Kurdish allies in Syria. Coats defended his intelligence analysts over their Russia conclusions and was so stunned by Trump’s deference to Putin that he privately wondered what the Russians had on the new president. He too eventually resigned.
Trump learned from those experiences. When he first arrived at the White House, he had not spent a single day in public office and therefore often relied on people he did not know well. He returns eight years later with a much better understanding of how power works in the White House and a better sense of whom to trust.
In the process, according to Troye, he is citing the supposed weaponization of government by the Democrats to turn it around on his adversaries. “It’s almost projection because he does exactly what he accuses these people of doing,” she said. “It’s the politicization of these communities.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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