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The Atlantic

Tulsi Gabbard’s Nomination Is a National-Security Risk

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President-elect Donald Trump has nominated former Representative Tulsi Gabbard as the director of national intelligence. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence was created after 9/11 to remedy what American policy makers believed was a lack of coordination among the various national-intelligence agencies, and the DNI sits atop all of America’s intelligence services, including the CIA.Gabbard is stunningly unqualified for almost any Cabinet post (as are some of Trump’s other picks), but especially for ODNI. She has no qualifications as an intelligence professional—literally none. (She is a reserve lieutenant colonel who previously served in the Hawaii Army National Guard, with assignments in medical, police, and civil-affairs-support positions. She has won some local elections and also represented Hawaii in Congress.) She has no significant experience directing or managing much of anything.But leave aside for the moment that she is manifestly unprepared to run any kind of agency. Americans usually accept that presidents reward loyalists with jobs, and Trump has the right to stash Gabbard at some make-work office in the bureaucracy if he feels he owes her. It’s not a pretty tradition, but it’s not unprecedented, either.To make Tulsi Gabbard the DNI, however, is not merely handing a bouquet to a political gadfly. Her appointment would be a threat to the security of the United States.Gabbard ran for president as a Democrat in 2020, attempting to position herself as something like a peace candidate. But she’s no peacemaker: She’s been an apologist for both the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad and Russia’s Vladimir Putin. Her politics, which are otherwise incoherent, tend to be sympathetic to these two strongmen, painting America as the problem and the dictators as misunderstood. Hawaii voters have long been perplexed by the way she’s positioned herself politically. But Gabbard is a classic case of “horseshoe” politics: Her views can seem both extremely left and extremely right, which is probably why people such as Tucker Carlson—a conservative who has turned into … whatever pro-Russia right-wingers are called now—have taken a liking to the former Democrat (who was previously a Republican and is now again a member of the GOP).In early 2017, while still a member of Congress, Gabbard met with Assad, saying that peace in Syria was only possible if the international community would have a conversation with him. “Let the Syrian people themselves determine their future, not the United States, not some foreign country,” Gabbard said, after chatting with a man who had stopped the Syrian people from determining their own future by using chemical weapons on them. Two years later, she added that Assad was “not the enemy of the United States, because Syria does not pose a direct threat to the United States,” and that her critics were merely “warmongers.”Gabbard’s shilling for Assad is a mystery, but she’s even more dedicated to carrying Putin’s water. Tom Rogan, a conservative writer and hardly a liberal handwringer, summed up her record succinctly in the Washington Examiner today:She has blamed NATO and the U.S. for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine (again, to the celebration of both Russian and Chinese state media), has repeated Russian propaganda claims that the U.S. has set up secret bioweapons labs in that country, and has argued that the U.S. not Russia is wholly responsible for Putin’s nuclear brinkmanship.When she appeared on Sean Hannity’s show in 2022, even Hannity blanched at Gabbard floating off in a haze of Kremlin talking points and cheerleading for Russia. When Hannity is trying to shepherd you back toward the air lock before your oxygen runs out, you’ve gone pretty far out there.A person with Gabbard’s views should not be allowed anywhere near the crown jewels of American intelligence. I have no idea why Trump nominated Gabbard; she’s been a supporter, but she hasn’t been central to his campaign, and he owes her very little. For someone as grubbily transactional as Trump, it’s not an appointment that makes much sense. It’s possible that Trump hates the intelligence community—which he blames for many of his first-term troubles—so much that Gabbard is his revenge. Or maybe he just likes the way she handles herself on television.But Trump could also be engaging in a ploy to bring in someone else. He may suspect that Gabbard is unconfirmable by the Senate. Once she’s turfed, he could then slide in an even more appalling nominee and claim that he has no choice but to use a recess appointment as a backstop. (Hard to imagine who might be worse as DNI than Gabbard, but remember that Trump has promised at various times to bring retired General Mike Flynn back into government. Flynn is a decorated veteran who was fired from Trump’s White House in a scandal about lying to the FBI; he is now a conspiracist who is fully on board with Trump’s desire for revenge on his enemies.Gabbard has every right to her personal views, however inscrutable they may be. As a private citizen, she can apologize for Assad and Putin to her heart’s content. But as a security risk, Gabbard is a walking Christmas tree of warning lights. If she is nominated to be America’s top intelligence officer, that’s everyone’s business.Last spring, I described how U.S.-government employees with clearances are trained every year to spot “insider threats,” people who might for various reasons compromise classified information. Trump’s open and continuing affection for Putin and other dictators, I said, would be a matter of concern for any security organization. Gabbard’s behavior and her admiration for dictators is no less of a worry—especially because she would be at the apex of the entire American intelligence community.Presidents should be given deference in staffing their Cabinet. But this nomination should be one of the handful of Trump appointments where soon-to-be Majority Leader John Thune and his Republican colleagues draw a hard line and say no—at least if they still care at all about exercising the Senate’s constitutional duty of advice and consent.Related: Why Trump chose Gaetz, Hegseth, and Gabbard: retribution Donald Trump is a national-security risk.

The New Mitch McConnell

John Thune, the new Senate majority leader, might not be a critic of Trump anymore, but he’s still no loyalist.

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Trump Gets His Second Trifecta

Here’s what he can—and likely can’t—accomplish with GOP majorities in the House and Senate.

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Government by Meme

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theatlantic.com

The announcements of Donald Trump’s early picks for his administration have been like the limbo: The bar keeps dropping and the dance keeps going.One of the first nominees was Marco Rubio for secretary of state; the Floridian holds some questionable views but is at least a second-term senator and member of the foreign relations committee, and is not the nihilist troll Ric Grenell. Then there was Representative Michael Waltz for national security adviser; he has no experience running anything like the National Security Council but he does have expertise in national security. Former Representative Lee Zeldin for EPA? The bar kept sinking, but hey, he has worked in government and isn’t a current oil company executive.By yesterday afternoon, though, the bar was hitting amazing new lows. Former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe was one of the least-qualified appointees in the first Trump regime; he might be one of the more experienced this time around, though Trump’s statement putting him forward for CIA director, which cited not his resume but his sycophancy, was not reassuring. For the Department of Homeland Security, one of the largest and most complicated parts of the federal government, Trump selected Kristi Noem, a small businesswoman and governor of a lightly populated state—but a diehard MAGA loyalist. The low point, so far, was reached when the president-elect announced Pete Hegseth for secretary of defense. Hegseth is a National Guard veteran who has lambasted the military for being “woke” and lobbied for pardons for convicted war criminals. He once bragged that he hadn’t washed his hands in 10 years, but he still hawks soap shaped like grenades. His major qualifications to run one of the most complicated bureaucracies in human history are that he looks the part and Trump has seen him a lot on Fox News.[Tom Nichols: The loyalists are collecting their rewards in Trump’s cabinet]Perhaps the bar cannot get lower from there—at least not in terms of positions of immense consequence with real power to do a lot of damage in the world. But another appointment announced yesterday was in a sense even more ridiculous: Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to head a Department of Government Efficiency. That’s DOGE for short. Get it? Such efficient. Very slash. Wow. Welcome to the era of government by meme.Memes are slippery, neither serious nor quite joking. Try to pin them down and they slide through your fingers. DOGE, like doge, is no different. Why is this thing called a department when only Congress has the power to stand up a new body by that name? Is it because Trump doesn’t know or because he doesn’t care? Why does a government-efficiency panel have two chairs? Maybe it’s a joke. Who can tell? Is DOGE a clever way to sideline two annoying loudmouths who can’t or won’t get through the Senate confirmation process, or could it radically reshape the federal government? Like the meme says, why not both? The whole thing is vaporware, concocted by three people—Musk, Ramaswamy, and Trump—who are all terminally online.“Waste, fraud, and abuse” is something of a meme itself—an idea that gets repeated and used in many different formats, but offers more of a symbolic meaning and cultural connotation than specific denotation. Like most memes, this one is neither serious nor joking. Who could possibly want waste, fraud, or abuse of taxpayer money? The problem, as Eric Schnurer has explained in The Atlantic, is that there simply isn’t as much of it as people think. The way to radically cut government spending is to slash whole categories of things. (As a contractor, it must be noted, Musk is a huge beneficiary of government largesse.)[Read: Trump’s ‘deep state’ revenge]Trump has not provided a great deal of detail about how the DOGE would work, though Musk has, naturally, already produced a dank meme. Ironically, we don’t know how DOGE will work or how it will be funded. Trump says it will “provide advice and guidance from outside of Government” to the White House and Office of Management and Budget, making recommendations no later than the nation’s semiquincentennial on July 4, 2026.In the absence of real info, Musk’s takeover of Twitter is probably a pretty good model for understanding how this might function. When Musk bought the social-media network, he made many promises. He said he’d eliminate bots, improve the user base, fine-tune the business, and reduce political interference, so that Twitter could function as “a common digital town square.” Judged by those metrics, the takeover has been a failure. The service is awash in bots. Users and advertisers have fled. Many technical functions have degraded. Rather than becoming a more politically neutral venue, it’s become a playground for the hard right, with Musk using it to spread conspiracy theories and aid Trump. He has given it a slick rebrand as X and slashed the workforce.We can expect much the same from DOGE. Will it successfully achieve the stated policy goal of reconfiguring the federal workforce to reduce waste and fraud and improve provision of services? Almost certainly not. Will it work to drive out dedicated employees? Probably. The surest bet is that it will be a highly effective vehicle for furthering Musk and Trump’s political agenda. Such winning. Very chaos. Much bleak.

Pardon Trump’s Critics Now

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Over the past several years, courageous Americans have risked their careers and perhaps even their liberty in an effort to stop Donald Trump’s return to power. Our collective failure to avoid that result now gives Trump an opportunity to exact revenge on them. President Joe Biden, in the remaining two months of his term in office, can and must prevent this by using one of the most powerful tools available to the president: the pardon power.The risk of retribution is very real. One hallmark of Trump’s recently completed campaign was his regular calls for vengeance against his enemies. Over the past few months, he has said, for example, that Liz Cheney was a traitor. He’s also said that she is a “war hawk.” “Let’s put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her,” he said. Likewise, Trump has floated the idea of executing General Mark Milley, calling him treasonous. Meanwhile, Trump has identified his political opponents and the press as “enemies of the people” and has threatened his perceived enemies with prosecution or punishment more than 100 times. There can be little doubt that Trump has an enemies list, and the people on it are in danger—most likely legal, though I shudder to think of other possibilities.Biden has the unfettered power to issue pardons, and he should use it liberally. He should offer pardons, in addition to Cheney and Milley, to all of Trump’s most prominent opponents: Republican critics, such as Adam Kinzinger, who put country before party to tell the truth about January 6; their Democratic colleagues from the House special committee; military leaders such as Jim Mattis, H. R. McMaster, and William McRaven; witnesses to Trump’s conduct who worked for him and have since condemned him, including Miles Taylor, Olivia Troye, Alyssa Farah Griffin, Cassidy Hutchinson, and Sarah Matthews; political opponents such as Nancy Pelosi and Adam Schiff; and others who have been vocal in their negative views, such as George Conway and Bill Kristol. [Mark Leibovich: In praise of clarity]The power to pardon is grounded in Article II, Section 2 of the Constitution, which gives a nearly unlimited power to the president. It says the president “shall have Power to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offences against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment.” That’s it. A president’s authority to pardon is pretty much without limitation as to reason, subject, scope, or timing. Historically, for example, Gerald Ford gave Richard Nixon a “full, free, and absolute pardon” for any offense that he “has committed or may have committed or taken part in during the period from January 20, 1969 through August 9, 1974.” If Biden were willing, he could issue a set of pardons similar in scope and form to Trump’s critics, and they would be enforced by the courts as a protection against retaliation.There are, naturally, reasons to be skeptical of this approach. First, one might argue that pardons are unnecessary. After all, the argument would go, none of the people whom Trump might target have actually done anything wrong. They are innocent of anything except opposing Trump, and the judicial system will protect them.This argument is almost certainly correct; the likelihood of a jury convicting Liz Cheney of a criminal offense is laughably close to zero. But a verdict of innocence does not negate the harm that can be done. In a narrow, personal sense, Cheney would be exonerated. But along the way she would no doubt suffer—the reputational harm of indictment, the financial harm of having to defend herself, and the psychic harm of having to bear the pressure of an investigation and charges.In the criminal-justice system, prosecutors and investigators have a cynical but accurate way of describing this: “You can beat the rap, but you can’t beat the ride.” By this they mean that even the costs of ultimate victory tend to be very high. Biden owes it to Trump’s most prominent critics to save them from that burden.More abstractly, the inevitable societal impact of politicized prosecutions will be to deter criticism. Not everyone has the strength of will to forge ahead in the face of potential criminal charges, and Trump’s threats have the implicit purpose of silencing his opposition. Preventing these prosecutions would blunt those threats. The benefit is real, but limited—a retrospective pardon cannot, after all, protect future dissent, but as a symbol it may still have significant value.A second reason for skepticism involves whether a federal pardon is enough protection. Even a pardon cannot prevent state-based investigations. Nothing is going to stop Trump from pressuring his state-level supporters, such as Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, to use their offices for his revenge. And they, quite surely, will be accommodating.But finding state charges will be much more difficult, if only because most of the putative defendants may never have visited a particular state. More important, even if there is some doubt about the efficaciousness of federal pardons, that is no reason to eschew the step. Make Trump’s abuse of power more difficult in every way you can.The third and final objection is, to my mind at least, the most substantial and meritorious—that a president pardoning his political allies is illegitimate and a transgression of American political norms. Although that is, formally, an accurate description of what Biden would be doing, to me any potential Biden pardons are distinct from what has come before. When Trump pardoned his own political allies, such as Steve Bannon, the move was widely (and rightly) regarded as a significant divergence from the rule of law, because it protected them from criminal prosecutions that involved genuine underlying criminality. By contrast, a Biden pardon would short-circuit bad-faith efforts by Trump to punish his opponents with frivolous claims of wrongdoing.[Daniel Block: The Democrats’ Senate nightmare is only beginning]Still, pardons from Biden would be another step down the unfortunate road of politicizing the rule of law. It is reasonable to argue that Democrats should forgo that step, that one cannot defend norms of behavior by breaking norms of behavior.Perhaps that once was true, but no longer. For the past eight years, while Democrats have held their fire and acted responsibly, Trump has destroyed almost every vestige of behavioral limits on his exercises of power. It has become painfully self-evident that Democratic self-restraint is a form of unilateral disarmament that neither persuades Trump to refrain from bad behavior nor wins points among the undecided. It is time—well past time—for responsible Democrats to use every tool in their tool kit.What cannot be debated is that Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris owe a debt not just of gratitude but of loyalty to those who are now in Trump’s investigative sights. They have a moral and ethical obligation to do what they can to protect those who have taken a great risk trying to stop Trump. If that means a further diminution of legal norms, that is unfortunate, but it is not Biden’s fault; the cause is Trump’s odious plans and those who support them.

The Loyalists Are Collecting Their Rewards in Trump’s Cabinet

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This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.A note from Tom:As we were about to publish this newsletter, Donald Trump announced that he has asked the Fox News personality Pete Hegseth, a military veteran who has no experience in leading large organizations and no serious background as a senior leader in national-security affairs, to be his secretary of defense. This is exactly the kind of unqualified nomination that I was warning could be looming after this first group of nominees were announced—and it explains why Trump is determined to bypass the U.S. Senate to get some of his nominees confirmed. I will have more to say about Hegseth soon.So far, the new Trump administration has a chief of staff, a “border czar,” and a national security adviser; all three are White House positions controlled by the president. Donald Trump has also reportedly named six people to senior positions that require Senate confirmation: secretary of state, United Nations ambassador, secretary of homeland security, secretary of defense, CIA director, and administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency. (He has also chosen an ambassador to Israel.) His first picks are neither very surprising nor very impressive, but this is only the beginning.His co–campaign manager Susie Wiles will make White House history by becoming the first female chief of staff. People around Trump seem relieved at this appointment, but she’ll likely be saddled with Stephen Miller as a deputy, which could get interesting because Miller apparently has a tendency to get out of his lane. (According to a book by the New York Times reporter Michael Bender, Miller attended a tense meeting that included Trump, Attorney General Bill Barr, and General Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, during the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020. As the nation’s leaders debated what to do, Miller interjected and said that America’s major cities had been turned into war zones. General Milley, Bender writes, turned to Miller, pointed at him, and said: “Shut the fuck up, Stephen.”)The rest of the appointments are unsurprising, given the limited pool of Republicans willing to serve in another Trump administration. (Some Trump loyalists such as Senator Tom Cotton have reportedly declined a role in the administration, likely protecting their future for the 2028 GOP race to succeed Trump.) Marco Rubio, who sits on the Foreign Relations and Intelligence Committees in the Senate, was a reasonable choice among the Trump coterie to become America’s top diplomat as secretary of state.Likewise, Representative Mike Waltz of Florida is a reasonable choice for national security adviser—but again, that’s in the context of the now-smaller universe of national-security conservatives in politics or academia willing to work for Trump at this point. He is a veteran, and like Rubio, he has served on relevant committees in Congress, including Armed Services, Foreign Affairs, and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. Waltz may be a credible voice on national security, but he was also a 2020 election denier. He pledged to oppose certifying Joe Biden’s 2020 win and signed on to an amicus brief supporting a Texas lawsuit to overturn the election. He changed his mind—but only after the events of January 6.Representative Elise Stefanik of New York, meanwhile, was bound to be rewarded for her loyalty. Although Vice President–elect J. D. Vance took the gold in the race to replace the disowned Mike Pence, Stefanik was a comer even by the standards of the sycophantic circle around Trump, and so she’ll head to the United Nations, a low-priority post for Trump and a GOP that has little use for the institution. A former member of Congress from New York, Lee Zeldin (who was defeated in the 2022 New York governor’s race) will head up the EPA, another institution hated by MAGA Republicans, thus making Zeldin’s weak—or strong, depending on your view—legislative record on environmental issues a good fit for this administration.This afternoon, Trump announced that John Ratcliffe will serve as CIA director. Ratcliffe previously served as director of national intelligence and will now be in a post that is functionally subordinate to his old job. Ratcliffe is a reliable partisan but an unreliable intelligence chief. The most baffling move Trump has made so far is the appointment of South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem to lead the Department of Homeland Security. Noem served four terms in Congress and is in her second as governor. She has very little relevant experience, especially as a government executive. (South Dakota might be a big place, but it’s a small state; DHS has more than 260,000 employees, making it a bit more than a quarter the size of the entire population of Noem’s home state.) DHS is a giant glob of a department—one I have long argued should never have existed in the first place and should be abolished—that has seeped across the jurisdictional lines of multiple institutions and, unlike some other Cabinet posts, requires someone with serious leadership chops.DHS will also be central to some of Trump’s most abominable plans regarding undocumented immigrants—and, potentially, against others the president-elect views as “enemies from within.” (The “border czar” Trump has named, Tom Homan, once falsely implied that some California wildfires were worsened by an undocumented immigrant.) In that light, Noem is perfect: She is inexperienced but loyal, a political lightweight with no independent base of support or particularly long experience in Washington, and she can be counted on to do what she’s told. She will be no John Kelly or Kirstjen Nielsen, her confirmed predecessors at DHS, both of whom were on occasion willing to speak up, even if ineffectively.This first passel of nominees should gain Senate confirmation easily, especially Rubio. (Sitting members of the chamber usually have an easier time, as do people who have close associations with the Senate.) And given Trump’s history and proclivity for mercurial and humiliating firings, few of them are likely to be very long in their post, and are probably better than the people who will later replace them.But that in itself raises a troubling question. If Trump intends to nominate these kinds of fellow Republicans, why is he insistent that the new Senate allow him to make recess appointments?For those of you who do not follow the arcana of American government, Article II of the Constitution includes a provision by which the president can make appointments on his own if the Senate is in recess and therefore unable to meet. The Founders didn’t think this was a controversial provision; sometimes, presidents need to keep the government running (by choosing, say, an ambassador) even when the Senate might not be around—a real problem in the days when convening the Senate could take weeks of travel. Such appointments last until the end of the next legislative session.For obvious reasons, the Senate itself was never a big fan of a device—one that presidents routinely used—that circumvents constitutional authority to confirm executive appointments, especially once the practice got out of hand. (Bill Clinton made 139 recess appointments, George W. Bush made 171, and Barack Obama made 32.) The Senate’s response was basically to be wilier about not declaring itself in recess even when there’s no one around, and when President Obama tried to push through some of these appointments in 2012, the Supreme Court sided with the Senate.Now Trump wants to bring back the practice. The obvious inference to draw here is that after some fairly uncontroversial nominations, he intends to nominate people who couldn’t be confirmed even in a supine and obedient Republican Senate. Perhaps this is too clever, but I am concerned that this first pass is a head fake, in which Trump nominates people he knows are controversial (such as Zeldin) but who are still confirmable, and then sends far worse candidates forward for even more important posts. Kash Patel—a man who is dangerous precisely because his only interest is serving Trump, as my colleague Elaina Plott Calabro has reported—keeps bubbling up for various intelligence posts.“Ambassador Elise Stefanik” and “EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin” might not be great ideas, but they are not immediate threats to U.S. national security or American democracy. “CIA Director John Ratcliffe,” by contrast, is cause for serious concern. If Trump is serious about his authoritarian plans—the ones he announced at every campaign stop—then he’ll need the rest of the intelligence community, the Justice Department, and the Defense Department all under firm control.Those are the next nominations to watch.Related: Trump signals that he’s serious about mass deportation. Stephen Miller is Trump’s right-hand troll. (From 2018) Here are three new stories from The Atlantic: The HR-ification of the Democratic Party Anne Applebaum: Putin isn’t fighting for land in Ukraine. Genetic discrimination is coming for us all. Today’s News The judge in Trump’s hush-money criminal case delayed his decision on whether Trump’s conviction on 34 felonies should be overturned after his reelection. A federal judge temporarily blocked a new Louisiana law that would have required the display of the Ten Commandments in all public classrooms, calling the legislation “unconstitutional on its face.” Louisiana’s attorney general said that she will appeal the ruling. The Archbishop of Canterbury announced his resignation. An independent review found that he failed to sufficiently report the late barrister John Smyth, who ran Christian summer camps and abused more than 100 boys and young men, according to the review. Evening Read Illustration by Mark Pernice AI Can Save Humanity—Or End ItBy Henry A. Kissinger, Eric Schmidt and Craig Mundie The world’s strongest nation might no longer be the one with the most Albert Einsteins and J. Robert Oppenheimers. Instead, the world’s strongest nations will be those that can bring AI to its fullest potential. But with that potential comes tremendous danger. No existing innovation can come close to what AI might soon achieve: intelligence that is greater than that of any human on the planet. Might the last polymathic invention—namely computing, which amplified the power of the human mind in a way fundamentally different from any previous machine—be remembered for replacing its own inventors? Read the full article.More From The Atlantic Good on Paper: A former Republican strategist on why Harris lost Trump’s “deep state” revenge The great conspiracy-theorist flip-flop The two Donald Trumps “Dear James”: How can I find more satisfaction in work? Culture Break The Atlantic; Getty; HBO Max Watch. These 13 feel-good TV shows are perfect to watch as the weather gets colder.Read. “The first thing you need to know about the writer Dorothy Allison, who died last week at 75, is that she could flirt you into a stupor,” Lily Burana writes.Play our daily crossword.Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.Explore all of our newsletters here.When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

How Can I Find More Satisfaction in Work?

My job consumes and torments me. There has to be a better way.

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Trump’s ‘Deep State’ Revenge

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The panic set in just before midnight last Tuesday. “She’s in trouble,” one U.S. intelligence officer fretted as Kamala Harris’s blue wall looked ready to crumble, all but ensuring that Donald Trump would head back to the White House. “This is a disaster,” said another, who is retired but served during the first Trump administration and bears the scars.Neither of these men who contacted me on Election Night is a partisan. Like most intelligence officers I know, they prefer to steer clear of politics. But based on their experiences during Trump’s first four years in office, they dreaded what was coming.“We will demolish the deep state,” Trump repeatedly promised on the campaign trail this year, wielding his term of abuse for the career national-security workforce he thinks is secretly pulling the strings of American policy in service of sinister ends. Many federal-government employees have worked reliably for presidents they didn’t vote for. But this is not enough for Trump, who demands personal loyalty and has sought to oust those who don’t give it. He called government employees “crooked” and “dishonest” and pledged to hold them “accountable” during an interview with a right-wing YouTuber in August.[Read: Bye-bye, Jack Smith]“We will clean out all of the corrupt actors in our national-security and intelligence apparatus, and there are plenty of them,” Trump promised in a video on his campaign website last year. Trump has nursed this grudge against America’s spies for a long time. Shortly before he first took office, in 2017, he accused intelligence-agency leaders of using “Nazi” tactics, insisting that they had leaked the so-called Steele dossier, with its unsubstantiated, salacious claims about his dealings with Russia.Ten days later, on his first full day as president, he visited CIA headquarters, in Langley, Virginia. He stood in front of the Memorial Wall—a marble shrine engraved with stars representing officers who died in the line of duty—and boasted about the size of the crowd that had attended his inauguration. As he meandered through a version of his campaign stump speech, my phone blew up with messages from intelligence professionals, many of whom had known some of the people those stars commemorated. They were outraged and appalled, but none called for revenge or even hinted at it.And yet, Trump took office convinced that malevolent bureaucrats had sabotaged his campaign and were bent on undermining his presidency. He still believes it. Rooting out these perceived resisters and replacing them with avowed loyalists ranks high on his agenda in the second term. How will he do it? I’ve been asking current and former intelligence officials that question for the past few months, and with new urgency over the past few days. Here are three scenarios they fear.Trump attacks “targets.”Trump could go after a curated list of people whom he’s identified as unreliable. Some of these targets have high profiles nationally: He has long railed against James Comey, the onetime FBI director he fired, as well as other senior intelligence officials from the Obama administration, including James Clapper, the former director of national intelligence, and John Brennan, the ex–CIA director. These men became voluble public critics of Trump’s attacks on the intelligence community while he was in office. Their outspokenness was controversial in the intelligence community, and it underscored the extraordinary risk they felt that Trump posed to national security.But when Trump demonizes bureaucrats, he’s not talking just about these bold-faced names. He and his allies have also singled out many lesser-known officials and lower-level employees for their alleged sins against the once and future president. Recently, The Washington Post reported that the American Accountability Foundation had compiled a “DHS Bureaucrat Watch List” of officials who it said should be fired for failing to secure the U.S. border. The nonprofit group—funded by the conservative Heritage Foundation—says it “deploys aggressive research and investigations to advance conservative messaging, rapid response, and Congressional investigations.” It has published the officials’ names and faces online. Two currently serving officials who know people on that list told me they feared that their colleagues could be subjected to additional harassment from Trump or his political supporters.[Read: Trump’s ‘secretary of retribution’]Ivan Raiklin, a retired Green Beret and an associate of Michael Flynn, Trump’s first national security adviser, has compiled his own “deep-state target list” and promotes it on right-wing podcasts and social media. Raiklin’s list includes FBI officials who worked on the investigation into potential links between Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and Russia, as well as lawmakers and congressional staff who managed both Trump impeachments. It even names some of these people’s family members.Trump, once in office, may come after the people on these lists with the authority of the federal government. He could subject them to capricious tax audits, or harass them with investigations that force them to acquire expensive legal representation. He could also revoke the security clearance of any current or former official, making it difficult, if not impossible, for them to do their job as a government employee or contractor who requires access to classified information. There’s a precedent for this method: In 2018, Trump said he had revoked the clearance still held by Brennan, the ex–CIA director, because of his criticism of the administration.Trump fires employees en masse. Shortly before he left office, Trump issued an executive order that would let him fire, essentially at will, tens of thousands of federal employees who enjoy civil-service protections. The ostensible grounds for dismissal would be resistance to the administration’s policies. Joe Biden canceled Trump’s order with one of his own. But Trump has promised to reinstate the order on the first day of his administration, enabling him to fire large swaths of federal employees and replace them with allies who support his goals.Emptying national-security agencies of thousands of experienced workers could jeopardize U.S. national security, according to Asha Rangappa, a former FBI agent, and Marc Polymeropoulos, a retired CIA officer. “The institution of a ‘loyalty test’ in any part of the civil service would drastically undermine the effectiveness of our agencies and erode the public’s faith in their legitimacy,” they wrote in an article for Just Security. “As a more specific concern, the politicization of the intelligence community would wreak havoc on our national security and be profoundly dangerous for America.”One obvious shortcoming of this strategy: If Trump jettisons layers of government employees and managers who run the national-security apparatus—the people who keep tabs on foreign terrorists, monitor Chinese espionage against the United States, and the like—who will replace them? Presuming Trump even has a long list, quickly installing thousands of possibly inexperienced personnel into vital national-security positions would be disruptive and distracting.Officials leave under pressure. Employees of the national-security agencies who conclude that, on principle, they can’t work for Trump could voluntarily resign in large numbers. Having witnessed the president-elect’s serial attacks on alleged deep-state plotters, these officials may not wish to stick around to find out whether they’ll be next.Several current and former officials I spoke with in recent days said they either were contemplating retirement, some earlier than they had planned, or knew people who were. Some suspect that remaining in their job could put them at risk. In his first term, Trump sought to declassify information about the FBI’s investigation of Russian interference and possible links to his campaign. Officials worried then, and still do, that this could jeopardize people who worked on the case, as well as human sources overseas.A vindictive new attorney general could publish the names of those in the Justice Department and the FBI who investigated Trump’s alleged removal of classified documents from the White House—for which he was charged with felonies. Intelligence officers who have worked undercover face the particularly unnerving possibility that public exposure could jeopardize their sources.Officials might tough it out, but if they opt to resign before Inauguration Day, they will create vacancies at the upper echelons of the national-security establishment during what promises to be a tumultuous transition from Biden to Trump.In our conversations, officials clung to one sliver of hope, and not unreasonably. Many of the national-security leaders Trump appointed in his first term were politically divisive and lacked experience, but they were not out to dismantle the organizations they led. John Ratcliffe, the director of national intelligence and Robert O’Brien, the national security adviser, have been on the proverbial shortlist to have top positions in the next administration. Yesterday, The Wall Street Journal reported that Trump has selected Mike Waltz, a Republican congressman from Florida, to serve as his national security adviser. Waltz is a retired Army colonel who argues that the United States should help end the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East so that it can focus on the strategic challenge that China poses.[Nicholas Florko: There really is a deep state]Career employees would probably feel relieved by these choices, if only in comparison with the more extreme candidates who have surfaced in recent months. But other signs suggest that Trump is heading in a less moderate direction. On Saturday, he announced that he would not ask Mike Pompeo, his former CIA director and secretary of state, to serve in the Cabinet. Pompeo, who was expected to be a top candidate for defense secretary, is a staunch advocate of assistance to Ukraine, arguably putting him on the wrong side of Trump’s plans to end the war with Russia “24 hours” after taking office. Trump has also said that he will not ask former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley to join his administration.Trump also insisted over the weekend that Senate Republicans agree to recess appointments, a signal that he intends to staff the executive branch with people who might not be able to win Senate confirmation if their nomination were put to a vote.Senator Rick Scott of Florida, whom Trump allies support for majority leader, publicly embraced the idea. “I will do whatever it takes to get your nominations through as quickly as possible,” Scott wrote on X.Turning away from broadly palatable Republicans and trying to skirt confirmation battles raise the chances that Trump will turn to hard-core loyalists, such as Kash Patel, a former administration official who fantasizes about deep-state conspiracies; Richard Grenell, an online pugilist who alienated foreign allies as ambassador to Germany; and Flynn, Trump’s onetime White House adviser who pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his contacts with Russia and was later pardoned. The appointment of those officials would signal that the revenge campaign is in full swing. One sign that it could already be under way came yesterday. Trump tapped Stephen Miller to be his deputy chief of staff, where he would be well situated to oversee the implementation of the executive order removing civil-service protections. Miller is well known as an architect of Trump’s earlier immigration policies. He would presumably work closely with Thomas Homan, whom Trump has announced as his new “border czar,” on the president-elect’s promised mass deportation of undocumented people in the United States. But during the first administration, Miller also oversaw the ouster of top officials at the Homeland Security Department whom he and Trump deemed insufficiently loyal and not committed to the president’s agenda, particularly on border security. If Trump is looking for an aide to mount a campaign against ostensibly intransigent personnel, this time across the whole government, Miller is perfect for the job.

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