 "Queasy pickings: Trump’s unconventional nominations show America is at war with itself")
In his second term, Donald Trump has two clear goals. Taking on what he considers to be his enemies within the American state apparatus and implementing his MAGA agenda. Once we get a clear picture of these two goals, the logic underlying Trump’s nominations becomes evident.
There has been a lot of chatter and countless hit pieces in the media (some of it no doubt warranted) about Trump’s nominees – be it his daughters’ fathers-in-law for crucial ambassadorial posts, anti-Deep State crusaders as heads of national security institutions, a Fox News anchor at the head of the Pentagon, or firebrand Congressman Matt Gaetz as the attorney general, who has since withdrawn his candidature.
The men and women that Trump has picked so far to run his administrative machinery are unsettlingly unconventional: a motley crew of mavericks, dissidents and outsiders united in their loyalty to Trump and rage against the establishment – the eponymous Deep State.
The job that Trump is trying to do demands nothing less. Most of Trump’s picks so far are aimed at furthering his core agenda of systemic overhaul. While carrying out his role as the change agent – the task for which millions of ordinary Americans have entrusted him with their votes, ensuring wins in every swing state as well as the popular vote – Trump cannot abide by the ‘Washington consensus’.
Leading a popular revolt – against inflation; the Deep State, its endless wars and the profiteering of the military-industrial complex; illegal immigration; the greed of the Big Pharma or the suffocating identity politics of the Left – Trump must necessarily take a torch to the establishment and burn to cinders the ruling class and its entrenched ecosystem that operates independently of the political leadership and manages to eternally stay in power regardless of the dispensation at the White House.
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More ShortsAs Hamid Alizadeh and Ben Curry observe in The Communist: “While administrations would come and administrations would go, the state itself remained. The real day-to-day business of the ruling class would be administered by a carefully selected bureaucracy: senior army and intelligence officers, judges, police chiefs, top civil servants, all linked by a thousand threads to big business, a completely closed circle holding real power, depicted as the impartial, innocuous servants of the people.”
Trump is acutely aware of this phenomenon. He appears better prepared now than his first term when many of his decisions were slow rolled, thwarted, denied and he faced frequent sabotage from within his own administration, parts of which did everything in their power to foil Trump’s agendas.
For instance, a top military general during his first tenure, General Mark Milley, conducted a top-secret meeting on January 8, 2020, at Pentagon and hatched a conspiracy to deny access of the nuclear codes to then President Trump in an extraordinary act of insubordination.
Trump’s scepticism about American involvement in Syria is well known. His old tweets on Syria in 2013: “What I am saying is stay out of Syria” bear testimony to his thinking.
On Saturday, just ahead of the fall of Bashar Al-Assad regime, Trump’s post on Truth Social reinforced his antipathy for endless wars. He ended a long post by saying, “In any event, Syria is a mess, but is not our friend, & THE UNITED STATES SHOULD HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH IT. THIS IS NOT OUR FIGHT. LET IT PLAY OUT. DO NOT GET INVOLVED! The letters were capped for conveying his repulsion for foreign intervention. His sentiments were echoed by the vice president-elect JD Vance on Sunday, after the flight of Assad from Damascus. “As President Trump said, this is not our fight and we should stay out of it… Aside from that, opinions like the below make me nervous. The last time this guy was celebrating events in Syria we saw the mass slaughter of Christians and a refugee crisis that destabilized Europe.” Whereas in the first term, senior military officers thwarted Trump’s troop withdrawal plan from Syria and the president was lied to on number of American troops stationed in the troubled West Asian nation.
This time, Trump is ready for a radical reengineering of the state apparatus including the national security establishment and his nominees provide a glimpse into his plan to drain the swamp.
In an interview to Fox News in October, a few weeks before the won the presidential elections, Trump had said he won’t let bureaucrats undermine him if elected and he is geared up to tackle the “enemy within”. “We have two enemies: We have the outside enemy, and then we have the enemy from within. And the enemy from within, in my opinion, is more dangerous than China, Russia and all these countries”.
Along with this grievance narrative that dictates the choices of Trump, one other factor that weighs heavy in his selection procedure is loyalty. Trump places great score on family ties, close relationships and considers loyalty as a standard metric of selection.
He is sending as ambassador to France Charles Kushner, a wealthy real estate mogul and father of his son-in-law, Jared. The senior Kushner is a controversial figure, having served two years in prison before getting released in 2006 owing to 16 counts of tax evasion and a bunch of other crimes that included, according to a New York Times report, hiring a prostitute to seduce his brother-in-law William Schulder, a witness in a federal campaign finance investigation, and sending a videotape of the encounter to his sister. Kushner also received a pardon from Trump in 2020 in the final few days of his first term and became a major donor in Trump campaign.
Trump’s choice for adviser on Arab and Middle Eastern affairs, a region that is in deep turmoil, is billionaire Massad Boulos, another relative. Boulos, who has business interests in West Africa, is the father-in-law of his daughter Tiffany.
The Lebanese-American was instrumental in helping Trump secure the support of Arab Americans and Muslim voters in swing states who were disgruntled with Biden administration’s role in Israel-Gaza war. The trusting of family members with key diplomatic roles reveals the high degree of faith that Trump imposes in family members and conversely, his inherent distrust of career diplomats.
Similarly, Trump has leaned on his friend and fellow real estate magnate Steve Witkoff as “special envoy” for the Middle East.
While these choices portray Trump’s preference of family ties, the majority of his cabinet picks are an open declaration of war against specific arms of the establishment – the heart of the Deep State – that in the years following his defeat at the hands of Joe Biden, threw the kitchen sink at Trump. From lawfare to media witch hunt to “intelligence leaks”, Trump’s adversaries went all in, and the president-elect is now relishing the prospect of returning the favour with interest.
Towards that end, he has nominated Tulsi Gabbard to helm the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), the first Hindu elected to Congress. Gabbard, a war veteran who served in the Army National Guard for more than two decades and was deployed to Iraq and Kuwait, is the recipient of Combat Medical Badge in 2005 for her role in the Iraq war.
As the head of DNI, Gabbard, a war sceptic and a severe critic of the military industrial complex, walked out of the Democratic Party accusing it to be an “elitist cabal of warmongers”, and subsequently joined the Republicans and boosted the Trump campaign. She will sit atop America’s powerful spy services such as the CIA, FBI and the National Security Agency along with 18 agencies and oversee a budget of $70 billion, if confirmed by the Senate.
Trump sees America’s intelligence agencies as the shadiest part of the Deep State that aimed to cripple him during his tenure and finish him off as a politician, and he has vowed to take the battle to the most covert and potent part of the administrative state. In Gabbard, Trump has found a fellow sceptic of the intelligence community who will aid him in mission to “clean out all of the corrupt actors in national security and intelligence apparatus” and the “departments and agencies that have been weaponized will be completely overhauled.”
Gabbard’s Senate confirmation won’t be easy though.
Apart from the intelligence community members who are viscerally spooked at the prospect and has embarked on a smear campaign against the war veteran, a number of Republicans who have received huge donations from the defence industry might block her nomination.
Then there is Kash Patel, the designated FBI director who wants to ravage the Deep State, fire its “top tanks”, shut down the FBI headquarters, turn it into a museum of the Deep State and dramatically limit FBI’s authority. Patel, a former US defence department chief of staff in the first Trump administration when he demonstrated his loyalty for Trump, has written a book called ‘Government Gangsters’ where he expanded on the weaponization of the federal government.
Patel shares Trump’s feral distrust of the FBI and the Department of Justice – populated by unelected bureaucrats who are immovable, an amorphous organism that wields real, perpetual power and lies at the core of the Deep State.
The intelligence committee might be fuming, the pharmaceutical industry that poured huge amounts of cash into the Kamala Harris campaign won’t be sleeping easy either. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., vaccine sceptic, is Trump’s pick for health secretary’s role who wants to take on the Big Pharma and has vowed to cleanse the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). As Reuters reports, “Kennedy has been most vocal about the FDA, an agency that oversees nearly $3 trillion in medicines, food and tobacco products. In interviews and on social media, Kennedy has accused agency staff of doing the bidding of Big Pharma and Big Food.”
Trump also wants to dismantle the US Department of Education altogether, calling it a den of “radicals, zealots and Marxists” and has picked Linda McMahon, a former wrestling executive, to rid American schools of the disease of wokeness and Left-wing indoctrination that promotes “gender-affirmation surgery” among minors. He has called it a process that “includes giving kids puberty blockers, mutating their physical appearance, and ultimately performing surgery on minor children.”
Through Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), Trump’s ‘volunteers’ Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy have been tasked with culling the vast bureaucratic apparatus of the federal government, the civil servants that form another part of the amorphous Deep State.
It remains to be seen whether Trump succeeds in his mission. His nominees are already facing a barrage of criticism in Democrat-friendly liberal media – that also forms a part of the Deep State’s propaganda wing – and some may fail to clear the confirmation hurdle due to certain Republican leaders who are also a part of the ‘Uniparty’ that runs the administrative state and have vested interests in keeping alive the current superstructure.
One thing is certain. The internecine war within the American state will make for remarkable political theatre.
Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.
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