Secretary DeSanctimonious

All you need to know about the quality of Donald Trump’s Cabinet is that he’s reportedly considering someone for defense secretary whom he once accused of grooming underage girls for sex …

… and it’s universally agreed that person would be a major upgrade over his current nominee for the position.

Fox News talking head Pete Hegseth remains Trump’s pick to lead the Pentagon as I write this, but his candidacy has reached the “needing mom to vouch for him on television” stage of peril. His mother is on clean-up duty because the New York Times got hold of an email she sent her son in 2018 in which she accused him of having “abused in some way” many women in his life and urged him to “get some help” for his problem. Other stories have alleged repeated infidelity by Hegseth during his first marriage, bouts of off-hours drunkenness that alarmed colleagues at more than one workplace, and a confidential payoff to a woman who accused him of sexual assault.

“He didn’t disclose anything” to the Trump transition team either, a source told CNN.

For a man as morally upright as the president-elect, it might all be too much. He needs a nominee whose behavior is less objectionable. Having sex with girls under 18 just isn’t that objectionable to Donald Trump.

Numerous outlets reported on Tuesday that Trump and Ron DeSantis have discussed the Pentagon nomination in case Hegseth drops out. “I can’t say it’s definitely going to happen, but the governor is receptive and Trump is serious, too,” a Republican source told The Bulwark’s Marc Caputo. Like Hegseth, DeSantis is young, Ivy-credentialed, and a veteran. Unlike Hegseth, who couldn’t keep a small veterans lobby group afloat, DeSantis has successfully managed a sprawling state bureaucracy. His entire political brand, in fact, can be distilled to “Trump, but competent.”

“Trump, but competent” sounds like a pretty good match for a new Trump administration, no? “Ron DeSantis has exactly the right skills to be an excellent—and reformist—secretary of defense,” Jonah Goldberg tweeted on Wednesday in response to the news. “I think it would be good for the country if he did it and good for Trump to appoint him and let him have a lot of latitude to do the job. I’m not sure it would be good politically for DeSantis in large part because I don’t think Trump would give him that latitude.”

I don’t know if it’d be good for the country, but it’s a sensible arrangement for both men.

What Trump gets.

How you feel about “Trump, but competent” depends on where you stand in the debate between Steve Hayes and Tim Miller over whether the capable Cabinet appointees of Trump’s first term were ultimately good or bad for America.

Team Steve believes it’s always good to have immense power wielded by competent people. Team Tim counters that the competent people around Trump in his first term averted a lot of presidential incompetence which, had the country been forced to suffer through it, might have foreclosed Trump’s reelection. We’re in the mess that we’re in today only because many smart, well-meaning aides made authoritarianism seem less dangerous than it actually is. (Right, Sarah?)

Team Tim has won that argument, I think. If Trump wants the U.S. military reporting to an amoral blow-dried yes-man whose only qualification for the job is performative ruthlessness on Fox News, I think the people should get to see what that’s like in practice. Either Hegseth will be better in the job than anyone expects or he’ll be as incompetent as everyone fears and we’ll all learn a lesson about electing populists. Win-win.

But if you’re still on Team Steve, as Jonah seems to be, then of course you should prefer Secretary DeSantis to Secretary Hegseth.

Certainly, Donald Trump should. 

DeSantis would sail through the Senate confirmation process, no small thing for the incoming president given the wretched caliber of many of his other nominees. And insofar as hard feelings toward Trump remain from this year’s primary among the governor’s populist fans, handing him a “prestige” Cabinet job will soften them. Some on the New Right who preferred DeSantis as nominee are doubtless preparing to say “I told you so” if Trump’s presidency fails; giving them a stake in its success by installing their hero at the Pentagon will blunt that reaction.

Trump will also personally enjoy barking orders at a former critic who tried to usurp his throne, needless to say. He loves to reward former enemies for having seen the light and bent their knee. J.D. Vance will soon be a heartbeat away from the presidency because of it. The thought of having DeSantis bow and scrape before him doubtless tickles the president-elect in a way that having Hegseth do so wouldn’t.

More to the point, though, Trump should prefer DeSantis as defense secretary because he’s an effective leader. He’s self-disciplined, which Hegseth plainly is not. He’ll command respect at the Pentagon for his gubernatorial experience and electoral success whereas Hegseth, a chat-show host, would struggle to be taken seriously. And like Trump, DeSantis favors a politics of dominance that prides itself on imposing the executive’s will on recalcitrant opponents. If the White House is serious about purging “wokeness” from the Pentagon, which was also a staple of the governor’s presidential campaign, having a defense chief that is well-practiced at political combat with leftist resisters will be useful.

There’s something else Trump would get from appointing DeSantis. Namely, a Senate seat.

His camp is keen to have daughter-in-law Lara Trump appointed to replace Marco Rubio in Congress once Rubio is confirmed as secretary of state. Don’t ask me why Eric Trump’s wife rather than Eric himself—or Don Jr., or Ivanka, or Jared Kushner, or any other number of nepotist barnacles—should be the next-gen Trump elevated to major political office. It is what it is. And according to Caputo, DeSantis understandably has “resented” the pressure from Trumpworld to appoint an unqualified crony like Lara who hasn’t paid her dues in Florida politics to fill Rubio’s seat.

But I bet he resents it a lot less now that he knows a Cabinet position might be his if he plays ball. If there’s one thing Donald Trump loves, it’s a quid pro quo.

One more important advantage to Trump in adding DeSantis to the Cabinet has to do with the Federal Vacancies Reform Act. Under the Act, any Senate-confirmed official in the administration is eligible to serve temporarily in any other Senate-confirmed position that happens to be vacant—and I use the word “temporarily” loosely. Depending on the procedural machinations involved, an acting official could remain in the role for more than a year or even for more than two years. Defense Secretary Ron DeSantis could at some point become acting Attorney General Ron DeSantis or acting FBI Director Ron DeSantis and spend considerable time on the job.

It was the attorney general job that DeSantis most coveted, in fact, per Marc Caputo’s sources. 

It’s not hard to imagine the governor ending up in a game of Cabinet musical chairs as Trump’s term plays out, spending a year firing people at the Pentagon, then a year firing people at the FBI, then a year firing people at the main Justice Department, and so on. Trump’s administration is destined to have lots of turnover as various deputies cross him, immerse themselves in scandal, or simply grow tired of his chaotic nonsense and leave. Being able to lateral a bright, can-do authoritarian like DeSantis from one department to another to clean house as vacancies emerge without needing to find confirmable nominees for the positions would make things easy on a White House that doesn’t think much of the Senate’s “advice and consent” power.

All told, there are plenty of reasons for Team Trump to like the idea of Ron DeSantis as defense secretary. The same is true for Team Steve, which would be spared the incompetence of Secretary Hegseth and the America-First-ish foreign policy of Secretary Elbridge Colby, another Pentagon contender who blames the war in Ukraine squarely on, ahem, “the liberal-primacist alliance.” At least DeSantis is a Russia hawk! (Was a hawk?)

Even Team Tim would get something from it: the schadenfreude of watching MAGA pit bulls who were trained by their master to despise the governor in this year’s presidential primary having to pretend to love him again. It’s always fun when Trump embarrasses them.

What DeSantis gets.

As for what DeSantis gets from joining the Cabinet: Nothing more or less than an improbable lifeline for his faint presidential hopes.

His second and last term as governor of Florida will expire at the start of 2027. If he leaves public office, he’ll be faced with having to defeat incumbent Vice President J.D. Vance in the 2028 Republican primary as a private citizen and, to some degree, as yesterday’s news. And he’ll stand no chance at earning Trump’s endorsement. That will go to Vance or to Donald Trump Jr. or to Tucker Carlson or to some other au courant demagogue but assuredly not to the man who dared challenge Trump himself for the 2024 nomination.

Until this week it appeared that DeSantis’ only chance to remain politically relevant until 2028 was to take Rubio’s vacant Senate seat himself. But that option wasn’t ideal: Not only is it awkward for a governor to appoint himself to another state office, it would have antagonized Team Trump to see Lara Trump denied the seat. When DeSantis eventually ran for a full Senate term in 2026, Trumpworld likely would have mobilized to try to defeat him in a primary. Either it would have succeeded, ending his political career, or it would have failed and Team Trump would have borne him a grudge forever.

That too would have badly damaged DeSantis’ chances in the next presidential primary. And as a junior senator, there’d be only so much he could do to impress MAGA voters before 2028 besides casting rubber-stamp votes to advance Trump’s agenda. What would be the case, exactly, for rank-and-file Republicans to prefer Sen. DeSantis over Vice President Vance as their champion in the next cycle, especially with Trump himself destined to support the latter?

Realistically, the only path back to presidential contention that DeSantis has is to join Trump’s administration and prove himself to be the most ruthless and effective deputy the president has, eclipsing Vance as a “fighter” par excellence in the eyes of the post-Trump American right. Taking the reins of a “deep state” department like defense and waging war internally on Trump’s political enemies is just what the doctor ordered.

Maybe Jonah Goldberg is right that DeSantis would be a skillful “reformist” as defense secretary, prioritizing responsibly by retrenching the U.S. military to fight a great-powers conflict with China if need be. But right-wing voters don’t care about executive competence, as DeSantis learned the hard way during the presidential primary. They care about culture-war argle-bargle. And so my guess is that Secretary DeSantis would focus instead on purging “woke” generals and similar nonsense that plays well on Fox News, knowing that’s the path to unserious Republicans’ hearts.

For the same reason, I suspect he’d savor the opportunity to lateral eventually into the role of attorney general using the procedural chicanery I described earlier and carry out similar purges at the DOJ. Nothing would more endear DeSantis to GOP primary voters than seeing him become an all-purpose wrecking ball against numerous “deep state” agencies on Trump’s behalf, liquidating “disloyal” officials in one department with a burst of termination orders before moving on to another agency with a vacancy at the top in order to do the same there. 

That wouldn’t earn him Trump’s endorsement in 2028, but it might earn him Trump’s neutrality in the race—or possibly a dual endorsement along with Vance of the sort the president-elect has been known to issue occasionally. Any small chance DeSantis still has at the presidency depends on not being on the wrong side of Trump in the next primary; serving him faithfully and energetically in the Cabinet is the one thing that might do the trick.

Assuming, that is, that Trump truly is interested in having him join the Cabinet.

Maybe he isn’t. Maybe his chats with DeSantis about the Pentagon are little more than an elaborate prank to torment a man he dislikes for having challenged him for the Republican nomination. It would be very funny if he dangled the defense job at the governor long enough to persuade him to appoint Lara Trump to Rubio’s vacant seat only to yank it away and give it to someone else, hanging DeSantis out to dry. Or if he gave DeSantis the job and then fired him after a few months, conniving to scapegoat him for some administration failure and exiling him to political oblivion in the process. Remember “The Snake,” Ron!

But if Trump is serious about this, and DeSantis ends up accepting the job, we should all be clear-eyed about what the governor is committing himself to. 

Three men served as secretary of defense in Trump’s first term. The first, James Mattis, came away believing that his then-boss was a threat to the Constitution. The second, Mark Esper, concluded that Trump has “inclinations” toward fascism and refused to vote for him this year. The third, Christopher Miller, inherited the office when Esper was fired after Election Day 2020 and concluded his short tenure in January 2021 by telling reporters, “I cannot wait to leave this job.”

No sane, moral, competent person would want this role of all roles in this administration of all administrations. Trump’s next secretary of defense will be asked to do things even more dubious than his predecessors were asked to do, and some of those were awfully dubious. Ron DeSantis isn’t naive. If he accepts this position—particularly if he accepts it while eyeing it as a springboard to the 2028 presidential nomination—he’ll do so understanding that refusing Trump’s orders isn’t an option, no matter how appalling they might be or what the law might have to say about it.

DeSantis seems plenty sane and competent to me. If he takes a job that no sane, moral, competent person should want, what conclusion about him is left for us to draw?

He’ll fit right in.