President-elect Donald Trump does everything dramatically, often shockingly. So it is with his rapid-fire nominations for senior positions in his administration two months before he takes office.
Several have been excellent, involving people who will bring in fresh thinking and greatly needed energy. Others, picked for vitally important posts, have been highly questionable at best, however, and a couple are utterly appalling.
We will adopt Descartes’s principle of proceeding from the easy to the difficult. Thus, starting with what is easy, Trump is to be congratulated on the nomination of Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) as secretary of state and of his fellow Floridian Rep. Mike Waltz (R-FL) to be national security adviser. Rubio and Waltz are well qualified for these posts, expert and experienced in their new fields of operation, and appropriately hawkish on China. Their nominations acknowledge that the rising superpower in the East will pose the greatest policy, national security, and diplomatic challenges of the second Trump administration.
There are other strong nominations, such as that of Tom Homan to be the new border czar. He can be expected to sweep away quickly the culpably ineffectual and duplicitous policies of the Biden-Harris administration and return to a focus on securing the southern border and asserting national sovereignty again. The pick of Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) to be U.S. ambassador to the United Nations will, similarly, elevate an energetic and pugnacious champion of U.S. interests in a forum that habitually militates against them while its insouciant members enjoy large subventions from the pockets of long-suffering American taxpayers.
Sticking with nominations easy to assess but moving from the high end of the scale to the dregs, it is simple to say that former Rep. Matt Gaetz should be rejected out of hand as the next attorney general. He is not a serious politician except in being a serious embarrassment to the great majority of elected officials and the public who believe the federal government is there to be a conscientious servant of the people. He is at once shallow and sinister, utterly unqualified to be the nation’s principal law enforcer.
Another nomination that should be swiftly rejected is that of former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard for director of national intelligence. Although she is considerably more appealing as a personality than Gaetz and worthy of respect for her military service and political seriousness, she is an ideological sympathizer with tyrants such as Presidents Vladimir Putin of Russia, Xi Jinping of China, and Bashar Assad of Syria, and she should not be let anywhere near the production and coordination of our most sensitive national security intelligence and top secrets.
Now to the more difficult. Pete Hegseth’s nomination to be secretary of defense stunned Washington on Tuesday evening, and the sharp intake of breath it caused has faded into the background only because of the subsequent and greater shocks of Gabbard and Gaetz. But there are serious reasons for concern about Hegseth.
None of them has to do with his intellect, motivations, or dynamism. He is whip-smart and comes with an education from Princeton and Harvard. He is a combat veteran of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, and he has continued to be a champion of veterans’ affairs since leaving the military. Many of his critics simply don’t like the fact that he has been a TV personality for the past 15 years.
He would doubtless do much to reverse the tide of social engineering and “woke” nonsense engulfing the U.S. military and would work tirelessly to restore its warrior ethos and focus on a mission to deter wars through strength and win them when they are unavoidable. All that is good.
But he has never commanded more than a few scores of subordinates and has done nothing close to directing an organization with more than 2 million employees and a budget of $841 billion. His experience in such an endeavor is not so much insufficient as nonexistent. One needs not just the will but also a high measure of savvy about the ways of big institutions if one is to reform them appropriately. Although the military has, in recent years, proceeded from one debacle to another when run by men with much more experience and many more credentials, that does not make it preferable to give this huge job to someone with such yawning gaps in his experience.
Hegseth’s qualifications are highly questionable and perhaps inadequate. It thus falls upon the Senate to take its oversight responsibility with the utmost seriousness in his case before making a decision about putting him in charge of perhaps the most important agency in the government.
Which brings us to the Senate’s role. It must not cede authority to Trump. It is wholly appropriate that incoming Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD), plus his leadership team and caucus of senators, should want to support Trump and his agenda. But that support requires ensuring that the new administration is staffed with strong personnel at the top, not populated with mistakes.
This may mean allowing some recess appointments if Democrats try to obstruct Trump from staffing key positions, as they did in 2017. It would be quite another thing, and a wholly unacceptable one, however, for the GOP majority to give the president carte blanche. It should certainly reject Gaetz and Gabbard, and it should approach Hegseth with considerable due skepticism. They should be given up or down votes to make the considered will of the Senate plain. Thune should not put the upper chamber into a long recess to facilitate Trump bypassing the constitutional proprieties with unvetted appointments.
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It would, of course, be a constitutional outrage, anti-constitutional rather than unconstitutional, if Trump were to appoint any of his nominees after the Senate had rejected them.
What is most frustrating about the more extraordinary nominees the president-elect has picked for top posts is that the election this month gave Trump a perfect springboard from which to launch an administration that helped bring the country together. Some of the best nominations, listed above, can help do that. But others militate against unity with shock and outrage. The worst two look like deliberate assaults on the nation’s trust, as well as handing a loaded gun to the Democrats and the wider Left whom voters have just repudiated.
This article was originally published at www.washingtonexaminer.com
