The enemies of America in Trump’s White House

When I heard that Donald Trump wanted Marco Rubio to be his secretary of state, I wondered whether the worst-case scenarios being bandied around for his second presidency were going to be avoided. There are lots of reasons to disdain Rubio, not least for his spineless kowtow to Trump, who continues to belittle him. But Rubio has a measure of seriousness about him. He has been Senator for one of America’s biggest states for over a decade. His Cuban heritage and his work as a Senator mean that he has involved himself with foreign policy questions over the years. I don’t agree with much of what he stands for, but, in the pre-Trump era, he was seen as someone who could work with Democrats on things like immigration reform.

In a normal world, Marco Rubio could be a credible Republican secretary of state. I don’t expect him to show any independence from Trump given his evident spinelessness, but he has the capacity not to be terrible.

Things are very different when we consider Trump’s picks for defense and the CIA. John Ratcliffe, his nominee to head the agency, is a two-bit prosecutor from Texas who did a couple of low-level counter-terrorism cases and has, ever since, claimed he was basically Jack Bauer from 24. He has no real intelligence experience, but he was, briefly under the first Trump administration, Director for National Intelligence. This coincided with a low point in that role during which he released fake intelligence that sought to frame Hilary Clinton with having connived with Russia to bring down Donald Trump, an interesting case study of bureaucratic narcissistic projection. Ratcliffe is a grifter who will do what he is told by Trump in order to advance his career. This is not good for someone running the CIA.

In a similar category we find Peter Hegseth, Trump’s pick for secretary of defense. Hegseth was a low-level army officer who became convinced, whilst being a Fox News presenter, that the “woke agenda” was destroying America’s military. What he says he wants to do is seriously disturbing (see quote below) but still seems to be part of the MAGA-world culture wars, albeit at the extreme end of that.

Trump’s picks for attorney general and director of national intelligence are in a different league altogether. For the former, Matt Gaetz, a junior congressman from Florida who had a brief and undistinguished legal career, represents nothing more than extreme MAGA loyalty. He was under a lengthy investigation for sex trafficking minors and drug abuse as well as a range of other credible allegations against him. To say that he is inappropriate for the role is a massive understatement. He is the sort of person a mafia boss picks to be their lawyer: tainted, compromised and therefore likely to show absolute loyalty. Trump’s department of justice will be a tool of repression, seeking out and destroying perceived opponents.

The nominee for director of national intelligence is worse still. Tulsi Gabbard is a Russian agent of influence. It seems almost unbelievable that I am typing these words, but there is no other sensible way to describe her. She has repeatedly used her public platform to parrot Kremlin lies, including crazy conspiracy theories such as the idea that the US had funded Ukraine to develop bioweapons. Mitt Romney was clear that her actions were “treasonous”, an opinion he seemed to share with Hilary Clinton.

One of Gabbard’s key funders is a businesswoman whose mainstay is improving US-Russia relations and who is herself a prominent pro-Putin voice in America. When she’s not supporting Russia, Gabbard has been a prominent proponent of Russia’s ally Syria, even meeting the bloodthirsty dictator Bashar Al-Assad in 2017. The most generous thing you can say about Gabbard is that she is a naive contrarian. Useful idiot or agent of influence seems a more accurate description.

In any normal situation, someone like this would fail the most basic vetting clearance that you might put an entry-level security guard through. She is about to become the superintendent of the United States’ intelligence agencies. This of course includes all the agencies that cooperate with the UK as part of the Five-Eyes network and with a far longer list of global intelligence players.

No intelligence agency anywhere in America’s long list of allies will want to risk sharing anything of a sensitive nature with an intelligence community overseen by this dangerous friend of foreign dictators. It’s genuinely hard to describe just how bad this is.

There were the worst-case appointments, the ones you idly speculate about but don’t believe he’d actually go through with, and then there were these. Gaetz and Gabbard: enemies of America in positions of ultimate power.

Arthur Snell’s substack is available here