Nationalist Security

On Thursday, Harvard law professor Jack Goldsmith flagged an unlikely common thread among Donald Trump’s nominees for top national security positions. None seem terribly interested in, er, national security.

Kristi Noem, Trump’s nominee to lead the Department of Homeland Security, has zero relevant experience. His FBI pick, Kash Patel, and director of intelligence choice, Tulsi Gabbard, are marginally qualified but betray no zeal for the nuts-and-bolts “catching bad guys” elements of the job. And attorney general candidate Pam Bondi, while credentialed, has had little to say about national security despite having spent eight years as Florida’s top prosecutor. (She’ll talk your ear off about the supposedly rigged election of 2020, though.)

Goldsmith didn’t mention Defense Department nominee Pete Hegseth, as his portfolio will focus on external rather than internal threats—let’s hope!—but he fits right in. He’s unqualified, conspiratorial, and more interested in purging leftists from the agency he’s been tapped to lead than with how to use U.S. military power to advance national interests.

All five are terrible selections if your priority is protecting Americans from dangerous threats, but they’re exemplary if your priority is co-opting the federal bureaucracy to harass your political enemies and to carry out an authoritarian’s wishes, lawful or not. Nationalist security, not national security, is Trump’s utmost ambition for his second term and he’s staffing up accordingly.

Nothing new about any of that. We’ve been over the defects in Trump’s nominees many times in this newsletter. What’s new, and what inspired Goldsmith to write, are the terror attacks in New Orleans and Las Vegas on New Year’s Day. Nationalist security is all fun and games until things start blowing up; now that they have, the need for serious, qualified people atop the executive branch’s natsec agencies might weigh more heavily on the Senate than it did a week ago.

After the attacks, Dispatch staffers began debating whether Patel et al. are now more or less likely to be confirmed. Can you guess where a demoralized pessimist lands on that question?

Rolling over.

It’s an easy one to answer if we assume that the highest calling of Senate Republicans is to avoid being targeted by Trump and his base, politically or perhaps literally, rather than to do what’s best for the country.

Maybe it isn’t fair to assume. They showed some spine by quietly rejecting Matt Gaetz, Trump’s first choice for attorney general, didn’t they? They’ve resisted the idea of adjourning so that Trump can fill his Cabinet with unconfirmed recess appointees. And three of the seven Republicans who voted to convict him at his 2021 impeachment trial—Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, and Bill Cassidy—are still there. Three GOP defections is all the new administration can afford in confirmation votes.

But.

Trump is at the height of his political power, returning to office with a near-majority of the national popular vote to boost him this time. Cassidy is up for reelection in the next cycle and already faces a serious primary challenge. And if another terror attack occurs while Republican senators are dragging their feet on confirming Patel et al., they’ll be demagogued by Trump and his fans into oblivion for the carnage and they know it. Americans are dead because the RINOs left the FBI leaderless for too long.

The more badly Trump and his base want something, the less likely it is that Senate Republicans will go to war to deny them. Consider the bipartisan immigration bill that was negotiated last year by conservative Sen. James Lankford and went down in flames instantly once Trump informed the conference that passing the bill would be bad for his reelection bid. Few dared risk being scapegoated by him for having “sold out” on an issue as critical to populists as border enforcement.

MAGA influencers ran a similar playbook last month against Sen. Joni Ernst when she said she wasn’t (yet) supporting Hegseth for the Pentagon job. Ernst seemed to be under the impression that grassroots loudmouths weren’t particularly invested in his candidacy. The social media campaign against her proved otherwise, allegedly leading her to whine to a Trump adviser, “How do I make this go away?” After a few days of pressure, she crumbled and vowed publicly to “support Pete through this process.”

Trump and his base badly want U.S. intelligence agencies, the heart of the so-called “deep state,” to be controlled by Jacobin cronies like Patel and Gabbard. They didn’t make much of a fuss about Gaetz going down because they didn’t expect him to be the pick for attorney general and probably can’t stomach his sleaziness much more than the average American can. But now that that scalp has been taken, there’s even less excuse for Senate “RINOs” to deny them Trump’s other picks.

The New Year’s attacks have made the case for confirmation simple: With America under threat, the Senate must approve Trump’s nominees urgently so that intelligence bureaus are operating at full capacity. (Never mind that the entire point of nominating these people is to purge “disloyal” deputies willy-nilly, depriving the agencies of expertise.) Exploiting national emergencies to gain power is Authoritarianism 101; the fact that Patel et al. sound a lot angrier about Liz Cheney than about ISIS is beside the point.

If anything, the New Year’s attacks bolster the “what do you have to lose?” case for confirming Trump’s picks to Cabinet positions. We’ll hear a lot this month, I suspect, about how the FBI agent in charge in New Orleans foolishly denied that the rampage there was a terror attack initially, another black mark against a bureau that’s covered in them. In a post titled “Kash Patel, Now More Than Ever,” radio host Erick Erickson alleged that the feds overlooked the jihadist menace because they’re obsessed with white-nationalist terror and need a “disrupter” like Patel to challenge their political correctness. You might not agree with that logic—racist white guys going ballistic are a major threat—but I wouldn’t underestimate its ability to pressure wary Republicans like Mitch McConnell and John Curtis into rubber-stamping Trump’s nominees. Unserious about jihad is not a label any Senate Republican wants to wear, even those like Mitch who are (almost certainly) in their final term.

Combine all of the above with the fact that shirking responsibility for policymaking has become part of Congress’ institutional culture over the last 30 years, bleeding ever more authority to the executive, and we should bet on Senate Republicans using the attacks in New Orleans and Las Vegas as a pretext to defer to Trump on his Cabinet nominees rather than as grounds to resist him.

Risk for Trump.

In that sense, life got easier for the president-elect politically this week. In another, it got harder.

Senate Democrats were destined to confront Trump’s nominees during their confirmation hearings, but the terror attacks will help them build a comprehensive case along Goldsmith’s lines. These people aren’t merely unqualified, Chuck Schumer’s party will tell the public, they’re outright disinterested in the basic work of the departments they’ve been nominated to lead. Expect lots of questions at the hearings drilling down on what they would have done differently to try to avert what happened on New Year’s Day, each aimed at exposing how far out of their depth the candidate is in basic counterintelligence. That probably won’t keep Senate Republicans from voting yes, but it’ll make the vote considerably more painful.

Another problem for Trump: Assuming his nominees are confirmed, what happens when, inevitably, another lunatic goes off on a terrorist rampage?

Governments always take heat when they fail to prevent an attack, but this must be the first administration in U.S. history where there’s not even a pretense of filling the most important jobs with eminently qualified people. Patel plainly wasn’t chosen to head the FBI because he has cunning ideas about how to smoke out ISIS “lone wolves” before they strike; he was chosen because he’s eager to persecute Trump’s enemies in politics and the media and isn’t bashful about admitting it. 

Lots of people, left and right, will be on television to remind viewers of that the next time a bunch of Americans die at a terrorist’s hand, especially if the FBI is short-staffed at the time due to Patel’s purges. In fact, some of the harshest criticism of him has come from former colleagues during Trump’s first presidency, in fact. Charles Kupperman, a deputy national security adviser who worked with Patel, labeled him “unqualified” and “untrustworthy” and claimed it was an “absolute disgrace to American citizens to even consider an individual of this nature.” Not to be outdone, former national security adviser John Bolton compared Patel to the infamous Soviet secret police chief Lavrentiy Beria.

What does Trump say when someone asks him, with innocents lying dead in the street, why he insisted upon an FBI chief who worries more about Sarah Isgur than about ISIS? How does he respond when reporters ask why it was necessary to let Charlie Kirk administer a loyalty test to his nominees (yes, really) but not necessary to listen to former aides like Bolton and Kupperman and find a nominee with more national-security chops?

This is no small thing. Perceptions of unseriousness about law and order are dangerous for a strongman whose appeal derives from the belief that he’ll keep the country safe. The more vulnerable Americans feel during his presidency, the more fragile that appeal might become.

Ironically, in other contexts Trump has seemed to understand that he owes his reelection not to personal hobby horses like “retribution” against his enemies but to quality-of-life issues. When he was asked last month what his keys to victory were, he named an insecure border and the price of groceries. But his Cabinet nominees contradict that lesson: The swing voters who decided the race surely care less about persecuting the “deep state” than they care about being safe.

So why is he giving them an FBI chief, an intelligence chief, a homeland security chief, and an attorney general who don’t share those priorities? Why place nationalist security, which matters only to a segment of his base, over national security, which matters to everyone?

The answer is partly a function of his worldview and partly a function of his confidence in being able to talk his way out of anything.

Nationalism is a tribal ideology that seeks supremacy over other domestic tribes, so it’s necessarily preoccupied with “the enemies from within,” to borrow a phrase. Its hot rhetoric toward foreign rivals is usually just a patriotic smokescreen for its true priorities. For all of Trump’s tough talk about China, for example, he’s barreling toward a capitulation on TikTok and can’t stop slobbering over Xi Jinping every time he mentions him. An easy prediction for his second term is that Beijing will persuade him, probably by brokering some sort of “deal,” not to intervene when it finally launches a blockade of Taiwan. It won’t take much to convince an America First-er that he’s better off with a Sudetenland bargain than with a major-powers war.

In MAGA politics, the most poisonous venom is reserved for anti-Trump Republicans, then for Democrats and the “deep state,” and only eventually for foreign adversaries—assuming there’s even a consensus anymore on the right as to which countries are adversaries and which are allies. Trump might understand intellectually that swing voters want him to focus on ISIS, not on hollowing out the FBI, but his nationalist nature will lead him irresistibly back to the “enemy from within.” Especially now that he’s term-limited: What does he stand to lose if a future jihadist manages to shoot up Bourbon Street because the entire FBI counterterrorism division was reassigned to investigate Adam Schiff?

But if worse comes to worst and he does face a nascent backlash for not preventing a terror attack, there’s no reason to have any confidence that the public will ultimately turn against him for appointing clowns to fill intelligence positions on which life and death depend. The shining lesson of Election Day is that if he and his propaganda organs could talk a a majority of American voters into believing that he’s fit for a second term after a coup plot and an attempted insurrection, they can talk Americans into believing anything.

When a bomb goes off on his watch, it’ll be a straightforward matter of finding and flogging a scapegoat—or, better yet, many scapegoats. He’ll blame the incompetent holdovers in the “deep state” who missed the warning signs and who haven’t yet been purged by Kash Patel but will be soon, rest assured. He’ll whatabout prior administrations: Why should his intelligence bureaus be expected to perform better than the “serious” establishment professionals who gave us 9/11 and the Iraq war under George W. Bush?

And he’ll find some way to drag immigrants into it, as he always does. He did it this week, in fact, screeching about Biden’s “open borders policy” after the attack in New Orleans—even though the shooter was born in Texas. If someone grumbles to you about the FBI being slow to call that incident terrorism, remind them that the guy to whom the bureau will answer in 17 days was busy lying out-and-out about what happened to serve his agenda at the same time.

Trump’s only real genius is his ability to shift blame, at least enough to turn what should be catastrophic, disqualifying failures into politically manageable ones. He’s a convicted felon who had three indictments still pending against him when he persuaded the great and good American people to reelect him: They’re not going to suddenly sober up because he prefers nationalist security to national security.

So Senate Republicans might as well confirm Patel and the rest of his nominees. Democrats and irrelevant Never Trumpers like me will blame them for the resulting disasters of Trump’s Cabinet, but so what? We also blamed them for not convicting Trump at his second impeachment trial and it hasn’t hurt the party at all. On the contrary, just a few hours ago the GOP officially gained majorities in both houses of Congress. And if the answer to all that is, “Senators should do what’s best for the country!” then consider the possibility that confirming Trump’s candidates is what’s best for the country—long-term, at least.

We deserve populist government, red in tooth and claw. We voted for it. We’ll learn from it. Let’s have it.