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Donald Trump’s decision to tap Pete Hegseth for his Cabinet is one of his nominations that some are reading as pure provocation. Aside from being a veteran, Hegseth has little qualification to lead the Department of Defense. He’s a Fox News host who has written a screed against DEI in the military. He has faced an allegation of sexual assault, which he denies, but the Trump team is not balking. “We look forward to his confirmation,” Steven Cheung, a Trump spokesperson, said in reply to news reports about the allegation. At another time in our history, many lines in Hegseth’s latest book alone might have disqualified him on the grounds of being too juvenile. In the introduction of The War on Warriors, he criticizes the “so-called elites directing the military today”: “Sometime soon, a real conflict will break out, and red-blooded American men will have to save their elite candy-asses.”

Focusing on scandals and inflammatory rhetoric, however, may serve as a diversion from a bigger, more alarming strategy. The real danger of Hegseth’s appointment lies in the role he might play in Trump’s reimagined military. In this episode of Radio Atlantic, we talk with the staff writer Tom Nichols about Trump’s grander plan to centralize control. “He’s going for the trifecta of putting nakedly loyalist, unqualified people into these jobs as a way of saying to everyone in those departments, I’m in control. I run these. You’re going to do what I say. And forget the Constitution. Forget the law. Forget everything except loyalty to Donald Trump,” Nichols says.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Hanna Rosin: There is such an overwhelming amount of noise around Donald Trump’s proposed nominees—their histories, their scandals, their beliefs—that it’s easy to lose sight of one important pattern, which is Trump placing people in charge of critical Cabinet positions who are utterly loyal to him, so ultimately the real control of those agencies lies with the White House.

[Music]

Rosin: I’m Hanna Rosin. This is Radio Atlantic. Today we are going to talk about a key pillar of that strategy to centralize control: Trump’s plans for the military.

Rosin: Okay. Ready?

Tom Nichols: Ready.

Rosin: Our guest is staff writer Tom Nichols, who’s a professor emeritus at the Naval War College.

Tom, welcome to the show.

Nichols: Thanks, Hanna.

Rosin: So there is so much to talk about in terms of Trump’s proposed appointments, but today we’re going to talk about military- and security-related appointments because they are such high-stakes positions. From Trump’s choice during this transition period, what are you picking up about his attitude towards the military establishment?

Nichols: I think his appointments, particularly for secretary of defense—and some of the rumors that have been floated out of Mar-a-Lago about prosecuting military officers and wholesale firings—these are really direct shots at the senior officer corps of the United States, and I think of it as a direct attack on our traditions of civil-military affairs.

He is trying to send a message that from now on, America’s military officers are supposed to be loyal to him, first and foremost, and not the Constitution, because he still carries a pretty serious grudge against a lot of top military and civilian people during his first term as president who got in his way—or he thinks got in his way—about doing things like, you know, shooting protesters and using the military in the streets of the United States. So he’s sending a pretty clear message that this time around, he’s not going to brook any of that kind of interference.

Rosin: So you think the source of his resistance or hostility towards the military are specific actions that they prevented him from taking, or is it things that, say, generals have said about him—negative things that they’ve said about him?

Nichols: Oh, I don’t think we have to pick between those. He believes in a world where he has total control over everything, because that’s how he’s lived his life. So, of course, he’s angry about all of that stuff—reportedly, you know, going back to things like Bob Woodward’s accounts, where he calls the defense secretary and says, I want to kill Bashar [al-]Assad, the leader of Syria, and James Mattis says, Yeah, okay. We’ll get right on that, and then hangs up the phone and says, We’re not doing that.

Rosin: Right. So he doesn’t want anyone to say, We’re not doing that, anymore?

Nichols: No matter what it is and no matter how unconstitutional or illegal the order, he doesn’t want anybody to say, We’re not doing that. And remember, the first time he ran, he said things like, If I tell my generals—“my generals,” which is a phrase he loves—if I tell my generals to torture people, they’ll do it. And of course, immediately, a lot of very senior officers said, No. No, sir. We will not do that. That’s an illegal order. We can’t do that. He doesn’t want to hear any of that guff this time around.

Rosin: So one thing is: He doesn’t want any future resistance from military leaders who might, you know, counter things he wants done. Another is: He seems to be purging from the past. NBC reported this weekend that they were drawing up a list of military officers who were involved in the withdrawal from Afghanistan, seeing whether they could be court-martialed. How do those two things fit together? Why is that part of the picture?

Nichols: Well, the most important thing about that report from NBC is: It’s not about Afghanistan. If it really were about that and people were looking at it closely—you know, you have to remember that a big part of why that was such a mess, and Biden bears a lot of responsibility for that bungled pullout, but Trump’s the guy who negotiated the agreement and demanded that everybody stick to it.

So this is not about Afghanistan. This is about two things: It’s telling former officers who crossed him that I am going to get even with you. I think a lot of this is just him trying to cut a path to get to people like Mark Milley, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs. And it’s also a warning for the future that says, No matter what you do, no matter where you go, even if you retire, I can reach out and touch you. So if you’re a colonel or a captain or a general or an admiral, and you think about crossing me, just remember, I will get you for it.

And that’s what I mean about an attack on civil-military relations. Because the other problem, and the reason this whole Afghanistan thing is such nonsense, is these were officers who were following the legal and lawful orders of their commander in chief. If this report is confirmed, it’s a huge muscle flex to say, There is no senior military officer who’s beyond my retribution if he doesn’t, or she doesn’t, do what I want done—no matter how illegal, no matter how unconstitutional, no matter how immoral. All I want to hear out of you is, Yes, sir, and that’s it.

Rosin: Can he do this? In other words, can you reach deep down enough in the military hierarchy to actually accomplish what he’s trying to accomplish?

Nichols: Sure. It doesn’t take many people. There’s a bunch of kind of legalistic stuff that’s going to be difficult. The military—and I’ve actually counseled other people not to get wrapped up in the legality stuff, because that’s not what this is about. This is an effort at political intimidation. But you’d have to find people who are going to hold an Article 32 hearing. It’s kind of like—the military has its own version of, like, a grand jury, and you’d have to find people willing to do that, but you could reach down and find some ambitious and not very principled lieutenant colonel somewhere who says, Sure. I’ll be that prosecutor. I’ll do that.

You don’t need thousands and thousands of people. You just need a handful of men and women who are willing to do this kind of stuff. And yeah. Sure—he can get it done. Remember, this is the president who decided that the military didn’t have the authority to punish its own war criminals and intervened and started handing out dispensations.

Rosin: Yeah. All right. Well, let’s talk about someone who encouraged him not to punish those war criminals.

Nichols: Right.

Rosin: And that is Pete Hegseth, who he nominated for secretary of defense. Tom, in the circles of military people you know, how did people react to that nomination?

Nichols: Well, I’ve been careful not to ask anybody I know who’s still serving, because I don’t want to put them on the spot. But a lot of the people that I worked with and a lot of my colleagues from my days working with the military, I think the first reaction was something along the lines of: If this is a joke, it’s not funny. Are we being pranked? Are we being punked? I mean, the idea of Pete Hegseth running the Defense Department was so spectacularly bizarre—it’s right up there with Matt Gaetz running Justice.

And so now, as it’s sinking in, I think there’s a real horror here—and not just about what could happen in foreign policy. I mean, my biggest clench in my stomach is thinking about a nuclear crisis where the president really needs the secretary of defense—needs this sober and mature and decent man to give him advice—and he turns, and what he gets is Pete Hegseth. You know—

Rosin: Let’s say who Pete Hegseth is, now that you’ve painted the picture—

Nichols: Well, let me just add, though, that for a lot of my military friends and former military friends, there’s a whole other problem, which is: Unlike other departments, the secretary of defense holds the lives of millions of Americans in his hands.

Rosin: Wait. What do you mean? You mean because, because—why? What do you mean by that?

Nichols: Well, because those folks who serve in our military are completely dependent on the DOD for their housing, their medical care, where they’re going to live, what places they get assigned to, you know, all of that stuff. The SecDef doesn’t make those decisions individually every day, but if he turns out to be a terrible manager, the quality of life—and perhaps the actual lives of people in the military—can be really put under a lot of stress and danger by somebody who just doesn’t know what he’s doing.

It’s not like—Ben Carson’s a good example, right? Ben Carson was sent to HUD. He had no idea what he was doing. The department pretty much ran itself. And it’s not like the daily life of hundreds of thousands of people were going to be affected because Ben Carson didn’t know what the hell he was doing. That’s different than people who live under a chain of command to which they are sworn to obey, that goes all the way to the E-Ring of the Pentagon, to the chair Pete Hegseth would be sitting in. That’s a very different situation and very dangerous.

Rosin: Yeah, I see what you’re saying. I mean, at HUD, you go home at 5 o’clock.

Nichols: Exactly.

Rosin: It’s not like that—it’s not like that in the Department of Defense. So it’s totally obvious to you and the people you know why he’s unqualified. Can we just quickly make that case? So he was a weekend host, Fox & Friends. He did end up serving overseas, and I think he has a Bronze Star.

Nichols: He was a major. Yeah, he actually was a major. I think he has two Bronze Stars. Look, I’m, you know—

Rosin: So how does that compare to other people who’ve held this position?

Just so we know.

Nichols: Well, other people who have held these positions had long experience in the national-security and national-defense realm as senior executives who have come all the way up. Look—I think Don Rumsfeld was one of the worst secretaries of defense ever, but he had served in related capacities and had administered a gigantic company that he was the head of. Now, that doesn’t mean he had good judgment, but he—you know, the Defense Department ran every day, and things got done every day.

Ash Carter was a well-known—for, you know, 30 years—a well-known defense intellectual who had contributed substantively to everything about defense, from conventional forces to nuclear weapons. I think one thing people need to understand is how much of dealing with the defense department is just dealing with the intricacies of money.

Hegseth’s going to sit at the top of all that, with no experience in any of this—not in budgeting, not in strategy, not in dealing with allies. I keep having these just head-spinning moments where I think about the first day in the office, and Pete Hegseth has to make calls to his equivalents, to his opposite numbers, as they do in this job. That’s another thing that you don’t do if you’re the secretary of HUD—you don’t call all the housing secretaries on the planet to say hello. Hegseth is going to be on the phone with the Russian minister of defense. He’s going to be on the phone with the Chinese minister of defense. The people that have had these jobs have had exposure to folks like that. This is a guy who’s done none of that— nothing. There’s literally zero background.

Rosin: Yeah. I mean, what he lacks in qualifications and experience and everything else, he seems to make up for in this very forceful ideology that he has. I spent the weekend reading his latest book, [The] War on Warriors. Can we just talk about it for a minute?

I mean, here’s what I understand about it. He tells this kind of alternate history of the downfall of the American military. It basically adds up to DEI. It goes: While we were fighting in Afghanistan, we missed the real war, which was happening at home, which was, you know, women in combat roles and DEI all over the place—so basically, a war against what he calls “normal dudes,” who have always fought and won our wars.

Now, I’m going to torture you by reading one passage, and then I would love to get your opinion about how widespread this ideology is, this idea that the culture war has utterly shaped the military. Is he an outlier, or do a lot of people think this? So here’s the quote: “DEI amplifies differences, creates grievances, [and] excludes anyone who won’t bow down to the cultural Marxist revolution ripping through the Pentagon. Forget DEI—the acronym should be DIE or IED. It will kill our military worse than any IED ever could.”

Where do these ideas come from? Is this just sprouted from his own head, or is there—inside the military, as far as you know—like, a grand resistance against DEI initiatives?

Nichols: This comes from, like, morning editorial meetings at Fox.

Rosin: Uh-huh. (Laughs.)

Nichols: Because I worked with senior military officers, including a lot of my students who had just come back from deployments, and you just didn’t hear anybody talk this way about, you know, Marxism rampant in the Pentagon and DEI is destroying us—in part, because a lot of those folks were standing right next to people that Hegseth would say were DEI promotions. This is kind of the out-of-control bro culture that Hegseth came up in, and some of it’s just generational, I suppose, within the military. But what I found is actually that the military, for all of its flaws, is a pretty meritocratic institution.

Have there been cycles of this, where there’s a lot of sensitivity training and DEI issues? Yeah, of course, because we’re a more diverse country. I’m sorry, but welcome to the world of the 21st century. And what Hegseth and other guys are doing in that book—which is just kind of a big, primal, bro-culture yawp—is saying, I just don’t like this.

So I just think the idea that somehow Hegseth—he wasn’t chosen because of this. He was chosen because he’s a fawning sycophant to Donald Trump. He looks good on TV, which is really important to Trump. And he basically has made it clear, he’ll do anything Trump tells him to do, which is—I think you see this in all of Trump’s appointments.

Rosin: Yeah. Okay. So to summarize: He hates DEI. He pushed Trump to intervene in the case of those service members who were accused of war crimes.

What is this reimagined military? Like, how do you think Trump sees a reimagined military? What is the American military for? What is it doing under his vision? I mean, if it’s just window dressing—like, he wants a nice parade, and he wants a lot of military officers parading with him, and he wants it to look a certain way—that’s one thing. But if the intention is to use it for mass deportations or for turning against internal protesters, then that’s different. Then we’re living in a different country.

Nichols: And he just said that, right? He said, I’m going to do mass deportations, and I’m going to get the military involved. And one thing I can tell you that I know from more than 25 years of teaching military officers: They hate the idea of any internal role. The ethos of the American military officer is that they are there to defend the United States and not to be in the streets of the United States. And this is an old tradition that goes back a long way. And Trump just doesn’t care about that. He thinks it’s his private security force to be ordered around at his beck and call.

Rosin: I will say, about Hegseth: Most of the things in his book did not surprise me. The one thing that did surprise me is: It does seem to be a sustained argument for why the left is the actual enemy, like a foreign enemy. He talks about how they move, how they fight, how to root them out. I mean, the language is very resonant with Trump’s idea of “the enemy from within.”

Nichols: Right. I mean, part of the problem I had with it, you know, is that sometimes I—you just kind of stop and say, This is childish, right? That it comes across as this really sort of adolescent fantasy of, you know, the “internal enemy,” and how, you know, Christian warriors like me are going to save America, and all that stuff.

Rosin: And what men do and what women do and all that.

Nichols: Well, that’s the thing. I think, interestingly enough, if there’s stuff in the book that could really hurt him in terms of his nomination, ironically, it is the utter contempt with which he speaks of women not being in combat. And, of course, Hegseth knows better. I mean, in a foreign deployment, there’s a lot of places where a combat role and a noncombat role are separated by yards. Just ask Tammy Duckworth.

But, again, it’s this culture of, What would his future—because you asked what Trump’s future Army would look like. But, again, Hegseth—and I keep coming back to this word adolescent or juvenile—it’s lots of tough white guys with, you know, beautiful women cheering them on, going into battle from foreign shores to the streets of Baltimore or San Francisco, if that’s what it takes, all in the name of this kind of civilizational rescue.

[Music]

Rosin: After the break, we move from defense to intelligence. Who is Tulsi Gabbard, and what are her qualifications for the director of national intelligence?

[Break]

Rosin: Tulsi Gabbard. Let’s move on to her. She’s his pick for director of national intelligence. She also served in the military, the Hawaii National Guard. You’ve called her a national-security risk, but before we get into that, what does the director of national intelligence do? Why was that office founded?

Nichols: Right. After 9/11, after all the reports and postmortems, one concern was that every part of the American intelligence community, and there’s, like, a dozen and a half agencies that do this stuff—NSA, CIA, the FBI—that they weren’t talking to each other. I have to say, back at the time—I was against this, and I still am—they bolted on this big office called the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and that DNI is supposed to ride herd on all of these intelligence agencies.

Now you’re supposed to have this one person who represents the community, who kind of straightens out these internal squabbles and has access to everything, because the DNI sits on top of the CIA, the NSA, and all the other agencies. And that’s a really potentially powerful office.

Rosin: Okay, so good timing. It’s now a big and powerful office. That’s the job. What’s your reaction to the pick?

Nichols: Well, she literally has no experience in any of this—nothing, zero, like, not even tangentially. Her supporters say, Well, she’s a lieutenant colonel. Yes, and her deployments were as support missions to a medical unit, a police unit, and a civil-affairs unit.

She’s, even in the military, never had anything to do with intelligence, intelligence gathering, analysis—nothing. Her only other qualifications are that, you know, she was in Congress and attended committee hearings. But she wasn’t on the Intelligence Committee. So you have somebody who has no executive experience, has no intelligence experience, has no background in the field but is, just like Pete Hegseth, totally loyal, totally supportive, and looks good on TV.

Rosin: Right. And why is she a security risk?

Nichols: Because her views about people like Assad and Putin would really be disqualifying.

Rosin: Can you just—what are her views that she’s voiced? What has she said?

Nichols: Right. Putin is misunderstood. We basically caused the Ukraine war. There’s a kind of seriousness issue with Tulsi Gabbard, too. I find her sort of ethereal and kind of weird, to be honest with you. But she said, Zelensky and Putin and Biden—they all need to embrace the spirit of aloha.

Rosin: Oh, boy. Yeah.

Nichols: Yeah. So, you know, I’m sorry, but if you have a top-secret, code-word, compartmented-information clearance, I don’t really want to hear about how you think you should help Putin embrace the spirit of aloha.

With Assad, it’s even scarier. I mean, she has been an apologist and a denier of some of the terrible things he’s done. She met with him outside of government channels when she was a congressperson, and she took a lot of flak for that. And she said, Well, I just think you have to listen to everybody. You can’t solve these problems unless you go and listen.

Rosin: Yeah. So as far as you could tell, what’s the long game here? Is Trump just looking for someone who will stay out of his way so he can communicate with whatever foreign leaders he wants in whatever way he wants, and there won’t be anybody looking over his shoulder?

Nichols: There’s some of that. He resists adult supervision in everything, as he has in his whole life. But I think there’s something much more sinister going on here. If you really want to subvert a democracy, if you really want to undermine the thousands and thousands of people who work in the federal workforce and do things that are pretty scary—you know, investigate your enemies, send troops into the streets, and so on—the three departments you absolutely need are Justice, Defense, and the intelligence community.

Justice because you control the national cops, the FBI, and the national courts. The military because that is a huge source of coercive power, obviously. And the intelligence community because information is power, but also because the intelligence community is one of the other two branches that actually has people in it who have some control over coercive means, who have some ability to use violence.

So I think that he’s going for the trifecta of putting nakedly loyalist, unqualified people into these jobs as a way of saying to everyone in those departments, I’m in control. I run these. You’re going to do what I say. And forget the Constitution. Forget the law. Forget everything except loyalty to Donald Trump. And that means you at the CIA, you at the FBI, you at the Justice Department, the courts, the cops, the military. And I think that’s what’s going on here.

And I’ll add one other thing: If all of these nominees get turfed, that doesn’t mean the people coming in will be better.

Rosin: Yeah. Yeah. You know what this is reminding me of? Our colleague Peter Pomerantsev, who writes about autocracy and democracy—he always talks about how fear and humor are closely linked in an eroding democracy. Because there is a sort of, like, troll-joke factor to some of these nominations, but underneath it is just this chilling fear that you described. Like, a strategy of the triumvirate of power, you know?

Nichols: Absolutely. And they get you used to it by doing things that are so shockingly unthinkable that it becomes thinkable.

Rosin: Yeah.

Nichols: I mean, imagine if we were sitting here, you know, five years ago. Actually, let’s talk about Hegseth again for one moment: Hegseth’s extramarital affairs apparently helped cost him the leadership of the VA.

Rosin: Yeah, you know, Tom, I was remembering that when I was first a reporter, the kind of thing that would sink a nominee was you failed to pay your nanny’s taxes.

Nichols: Or John Tower—drinks too much, hard drinker.

Rosin: And now we have a nominee with a sexual-assault allegation. Now, he denies the allegation, but he did end up paying the woman who accused him as part of a nondisclosure agreement. And it’s like, Nah, he’s fine, you know.

Nichols: Yeah, I know: Whatever. I mean, again, writing the kind of book he wrote would almost—the preface to that book should have been, I want to never be confirmed for anything ever.

Rosin: Right.

Nichols: Right? And this was my argument about why we shouldn’t have elected Donald Trump back in 2016. He wears down our standards to the point where vulgarity and crudeness and criminality and incompetence all just become part of our daily life. When I look back ten years, just in a decade of my life, I think, The amount of change that has happened in the political environment in America is astonishing, and purely because we have signed on to this kind of, as you say, sort of comical and trashy but chilling change, you know, step by step by step, every day. We didn’t do this all in one year. We did this, like, you know, the frog-boiling exercise.

Rosin: Yeah, I feel that way about the last two weeks. You glided by this, but I just want to say: Unless Trump gets around the usual rules, all of these nominees do still need to be approved by the Senate.

Nichols: Right.

Rosin: So you would likely need four senators to oppose. What are the chances of that happening?

Nichols: My big fear—you know, I suppose I could start every sentence these days with, “My big fear,” you know. (Laughs.) One of my many fears is that Gaetz is the political equivalent of a flash-bang grenade that is just thrown into the room, and everybody’s blinded, and their ears are ringing, and they’re like, Oh my God, Matt Gaetz. What kind of crazy nonsense was this? And when everybody kind of gets off the floor and collects themselves, Trump says, Okay, fine, I’ll give you Gaetz. And then he gets everybody else.

Rosin: Yeah.

Nichols: I’m writing something right now, actually, where I argue that the Senate should take these four terrible nominations—Gaetz, Gabbard, Hegseth, and throw in Robert F. Kennedy [Jr.], who is not a threat to the existence of the United States but to the health and well-being of millions of its children—just take these four as a package, and say, Look—you’re gonna get a lot of other stuff. You’re not getting these four. That’s the end of it. Because if they go one by one by one, Trump will wear them down. And I think that’s what I’m worried about. Now, with that said, the Senate, you know, my old neighborhood—the one thing that the senators love is the Senate.

Rosin: Meaning what?

Nichols: Meaning, they love the institution.

Rosin: They love to have the power of the Senate, the decorum of the Senate.

Nichols: Yeah. They believe in the institution. I mean, you know, you can see it with somebody like Susan Collins. Susan Collins loves being a senator and loves the romance of the Senate itself more than, you know, than anything. And they don’t like a president walking in and saying, Listen—I want some guys, and the way you’re going to do this is with a recess appointment, where you’re going to go out and take a walk. They don’t like that. And I wonder if John Thune really wants to begin his time as Senate majority leader—one of the most important positions in the American government—being treated like a stooge.

Rosin: Well, that’s what we’ll be watching for. Thank you for joining me today, Tom.

Nichols: My pleasure, Hanna. Always nice to talk with you.

[Music]

Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Jinae West. It was edited by Claudine Ebeid, fact-checked by Sara Krolewski, and engineered by Rob Smierciak. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

I’m Hanna Rosin. Thank you for listening.

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.

As president-elect, Donald Trump has the right to name the people he wants in his Cabinet. Some of Trump’s nominations, such as Senator Marco Rubio to lead the State Department, are completely ordinary. A few are ideological red meat for Republicans. Others are gifts to Trump loyalists.

Four of these nominees, however, are dangerous to the security of the United States and to the well-being of its people: Pete Hegseth (Defense), Tulsi Gabbard (Office of the Director of National Intelligence), Matt Gaetz (Justice), and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (Health and Human Services). The Senate must turn back these nominations, and do so en bloc.

The Gaetz and Kennedy nominations are apparently already in trouble, and more than enough has been written about them. Gaetz is an accused sexual predator (he has long denied the allegations); ironically, he is the least dangerous of this pack. Yes, as attorney general he would green-light every raving demand from MAGA world for investigations into Trump’s enemies, but in a strange blessing, he is also likely to be completely incompetent. The Department of Justice, as Trump himself learned during his first term, is packed to the rafters with very sharp lawyers who would almost certainly jam up any of Gaetz’s unconstitutional orders. Gaetz’s tenure at Justice would be a national humiliation and destructive to the rule of law, but it would also likely be very short.

The RFK Jr. nomination is, in a word, pathetic. Most of his views are little more than pure anti-science kookery, and if he is confirmed, Americans—and especially their children—will be in peril from this anti-vaccine crusader. But he would be a danger to the health of individual Americans (especially those who watch too much TV and spend too much time on the internet) rather than to the continued existence of the United States.

Which brings me to Gabbard and Hegseth.

Tulsi Gabbard, as I wrote last week, is unqualified for the job of DNI, but she is also a security risk: I have held security clearances for most of my adult life, and had I worked in any federal office next to her, I would have had no compunction about raising her as an “insider threat” because of her political views and her shady international connections. (As a member of Congress in 2017, she held meetings with the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad outside of U.S. government channels—an obvious problem for anyone seeking a senior role in national security.)

Gaetz, Kennedy, and Gabbard are terrible choices. The Hegseth nomination, however, is easily the most dangerous and irresponsible of all of Trump’s picks. (Gabbard is a significant hazard, but she would not have a gigantic army at her disposal, and she would not be involved with the control of nuclear weapons.) Like the other three in this group, Hegseth is shockingly unqualified for the job he’s been asked to take, but in this case, the Senate is faced with a proposal to place a TV talking head at the top of the Pentagon and insert him into the nuclear chain of command.

Hegseth has made personal choices that make him unfit to lead the DOD, including his extramarital affairs (which apparently helped tank his chances to lead the Department of Veterans Affairs in Trump’s first administration) and a payoff to a woman who claimed that he’d sexually assaulted her. He denies the assault allegation, but in any case, adultery is a criminal violation of the Uniform Code of Military Justice and can be a career-ending mistake for a member of the armed forces.

I will leave aside whether Hegseth’s tattoos identify him as a white supremacist. Hegseth denies the claim. But some of Hegseth’s ink is popular with extremists; that’s why one of his own military comrades reported him as an insider threat in the first place—and not, as Hegseth and some whining conservatives claim, because he is being persecuted as a Christian. I knew many people in federal service with patriotic tattoos. (I have one myself, and no, it’s none of your business where it is.) I am also a Christian who wears a cross—one that I had blessed in a church—every day. That’s not what any of this is about.

Hegseth’s defenders seem unable to understand that neither Hegseth nor anyone else has a right to be the secretary of defense: If the nominee made choices earlier in life that would now undermine his effectiveness in the job, then that’s his problem, not the Pentagon’s. But even if Hegseth were not an example of a sexist, MAGA-bro culture—his statements about women in the military are particularly noxious—the Senate is still faced with the problem that he’s utterly unqualified.

A former Army major, he has no serious background in national-security or defense issues beyond his military service. (And how that service ended is apparently now a matter of some dispute.) He has not worked anywhere in the defense world: not in any of its agencies, not with any of its industries, not with any of its workforce in any capacity. He has never managed anything of any significant size.

Not only would he be incapable of administering America’s largest government department, but he’d also be in a position of terrifying responsibility for which he is unprepared. Imagine an international crisis, perhaps only a year or two from now. President Trump is facing a situation that could be rife with danger to the United States and our allies—perhaps even one that involves nuclear threats. At this dire moment, Trump turns to …

Pete Hegseth and Tulsi Gabbard?

The Senate must do everything in its constitutional power to stop this. Trump won the election, but no president has an absolute right to his Cabinet nominations: The Constitution requires the Senate to consent to those nominations. Trump has already warned that if the Senate balks, he will subvert this process by using “recess appointments,” in effect a demand that the Senate take a walk and let Trump do whatever he wants—to consent, in other words, to autocracy.

Incoming Majority Leader John Thune and others who still might care about their duty to the nation have time to go to Trump, right now, and tell him that these four nominations are DOA. They could tell Trump that it is in his own interest—the only interest he recognizes—not to risk multiple defeats. And if the Senate folds and decides to take these up one at a time, Trump will wear them down, likely accepting that Gaetz must be a Succession-style “blood sacrifice,” in return for which Trump gets everyone else. For Thune—who, one assumes, does not wish to begin his tenure as a statelier version of Senator Tommy Tuberville, the MAGA obstructionist who held up military promotions for months—accepting such a deal would be a huge strategic error.

Whomever Trump nominates as replacements will likely be dangerous in their own way. But these four nominees have to be stopped—and right now.

Related:

The thing that binds Gabbard, Gaetz, and Hegseth to Trump The perverse logic of Trump’s nomination circus

Here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

He was the world’s longest-held death-row inmate. He was also innocent. How Trump could make Congress go away for a while Thomas Chatterton Williams: Is wokeness one big power grab? Europe braces for Trump.

Today’s News

President Joe Biden authorized Ukraine yesterday to use U.S.-supplied long-range missiles for strikes inside Russia, according to U.S. officials. Russia said today that the decision would escalate international tensions and add “fuel to the fire” of the war. Trump confirmed on Truth Social that his administration is planning to declare a national emergency and enlist the military to carry out a mass-deportation program targeting undocumented immigrants. Trump picked Brendan Carr, a member of the Federal Communications Commission and a Project 2025 contributor, to lead the FCC.

Dispatches

The Wonder Reader: Learning where famous musicians sleep and what they eat can feel like finally glimpsing the unknowable, Isabel Fattal writes.

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Evening Read

Justin Chung for The Atlantic

How Jimmy O. Yang Became a Main Character

By Shirley Li

Jimmy O. Yang had been trying to make it as an actor for years—cobbling together bit parts in network sitcoms, auditioning for nameless roles such as “Chinese Teenager #1”—when he was cast in a new HBO series. The show, Silicon Valley, was a comedy about a group of programmers at a Bay Area start-up incubator; his character, Jian-Yang, was an app developer who spoke in broken English.

It was a small guest role, but he saw it as an opportunity.

Read the full article.

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Watch (or skip). Conclave (out now in theaters) treats Catholic theology as mere policy, like the membership rules at Augusta National. It’s even worse than The Da Vinci Code, Matthew Schmitz writes.

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Power-hungry presidents of both parties have been concocting ways to get around Congress for all of American history. But as Donald Trump prepares to take office again, legal experts are worried he could make the legislative branch go away altogether—at least for a while.

Several of Trump’s early Cabinet nominees—including Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and former Representative Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii—have drawn widespread condemnation for their outlandish political views and lack of conventional qualifications. Their critics include some Senate Republicans tasked with voting on their confirmation. Anticipating resistance, Trump has already begun pressuring Senate GOP leaders, who will control the chamber next year, to allow him to install his picks by recess appointment, a method that many presidents have used.

The incoming Senate majority leader, John Thune of South Dakota, has said that “all options are on the table, including recess appointments,” for overcoming Democratic opposition to Trump’s nominees. But Democrats aren’t Trump’s primary concern; they won’t have the votes to stop nominees on their own. What makes Trump’s interest in recess appointments unusual is that he is gearing up to use them in a fight against his own party.

[Read: The perverse logic of Trump’s nomination circus]

If Senate Republicans block his nominees, Trump could partner with the GOP-controlled House and invoke a never-before-used provision of the Constitution to force Congress to adjourn “until such time as he shall think proper.” The move would surely prompt a legal challenge, which the Supreme Court might have to decide, setting up a confrontation that would reveal how much power both Republican lawmakers and the Court’s conservative majority will allow Trump to seize.

“None of this has ever been tested or determined by the courts,” Matthew Glassman, a senior fellow at Georgetown University’s Government Affairs Institute, told me. If Trump tries to adjourn Congress, Glassman said, he would be “pushing the very boundaries of the separation of powers in the United States.” Although Trump has not spoken publicly about using the provision, Ed Whelan, a conservative lawyer well connected in Republican politics, has reported that Trumpworld appears to be seriously contemplating it.

Trump could not wave away Congress on his own. The Constitution says the president can adjourn Congress only “in case of disagreement” between the House and the Senate on when the chambers should recess, and for how long. One of the chambers would first have to pass a resolution to adjourn for at least 10 days. If the other agrees to the measure, Trump gets his recess appointments. But even if one refuses—most likely the Senate, in this case—Trump could essentially play the role of tiebreaker and declare Congress adjourned. In a Fox News interview yesterday, Speaker Mike Johnson would not rule out helping Trump go around the Senate. “There may be a function for that,” he said. “We’ll have to see how it plays out.”

Presidents have used recess appointments to circumvent the Senate-confirmation process throughout U.S. history, either to overcome opposition to their nominees or simply because the Senate moved too slowly to consider them. But no president is believed to have adjourned Congress in order to install his Cabinet before. “We never contemplated it,” Neil Eggleston, who served as White House counsel during President Barack Obama’s second term, told me. Obama frequently used recess appointments until 2014, when the Supreme Court ruled that he had exceeded his authority by making them when Congress had gone out of session only briefly (hence the current 10-day minimum).

[Watch: What’s behind Trump’s controversial Cabinet picks]

Any attempt by Trump to force Congress into a recess would face a few obstacles. First, Johnson would have to secure nearly unanimous support from his members to pass an adjournment resolution, given Democrats’ likely opposition. Depending on the results of several uncalled House races, he might have only a vote or two to spare at the beginning of the next Congress. And although many House Republicans have pledged to unify behind Trump’s agenda, his nominees are widely considered unqualified, to say the least. Gaetz in particular is a uniquely unpopular figure in the conference because of his leading role in deposing Johnson’s predecessor Kevin McCarthy.

If the House doesn’t block Trump, the Supreme Court might. Its 2014 ruling against Obama was unanimous, and three conservative justices who remain on the Court—John Roberts, Clarence Thomas, and Samuel Alito—signed a concurring opinion, written by Antonin Scalia, saying they would have placed far more restrictions on the president’s power. They wrote that the Founders allowed the president to make recess appointments because the Senate used to meet for only a few months of the year. Now, though, Congress takes much shorter breaks and can return to session at virtually a moment’s notice. “The need it was designed to fill no longer exists,” Scalia, who died in 2016, wrote of the recess-appointment power, “and its only remaining use is the ignoble one of enabling the president to circumvent the Senate’s role in the appointment process.”

The 2014 ruling did not address the Constitution’s provision allowing the president to adjourn Congress, but Paul Rosenzweig, a former senior official in the George W. Bush administration and an occasional Atlantic contributor, told me that the conservatives’ concurrence “is inconsistent with the extreme executive overreach” that Trump might attempt: “As I read them, this machination by Trump would not meet their definition of constitutionality.”

Thanks in part to those legal uncertainties, Trump’s easiest path is simply to secure Senate approval for his nominees, and he may succeed. Republicans will have a 53–47 majority in the Senate, so the president-elect’s picks could lose three GOP votes and still win confirmation with the tiebreaking vote of Vice President–Elect J. D. Vance. But the most controversial nominees, such as Gaetz, Kennedy, Gabbard, and Pete Hegseth (Trump’s choice for defense secretary), could struggle to find 50 Republican votes. And as Thune himself noted in a Fox News interview on Thursday night, Republicans who oppose their confirmation are unlikely to vote for the Senate to adjourn so that Trump can install them anyway.

Thune, who had been elected as leader by his colleagues only one day before that interview, seems fine with helping Trump get around Democrats. Letting Trump defy Thune’s own members and neuter the Senate is a much bigger ask. Then again, if Trump takes his power play to the limit, the new majority leader won’t have a say at all.

An isolationist in a key role for US-backed wars, Gabbard's positions on Iran, Russia, Syria and India will be watched.

Donald Trump spent much of the 2024 presidential campaign promising to wreak vengeance on his enemies and upend the federal government. Three Cabinet picks in the past two days are starting to show what that might look like.

Since last night, Trump has announced plans to nominate Pete Hegseth for secretary of defense, Tulsi Gabbard for director of national intelligence, and Matt Gaetz for attorney general. On the face of it, the trio seem to possess little in common except having scant qualification on paper for the jobs he wants them to fill. (Gabbard and Gaetz are also widely disliked by members of the respective parties in which they served in the U.S. House.)

Consider where all three were nine years ago. Hegseth was an Iraq and Afghanistan veteran serving in the Army Reserve, backing Marco Rubio for president from his relatively new perch as a Fox News commentator. Gabbard was a Democratic representative from Hawaii and the vice chair of the Democratic National Committee; she’d resign the next year to back Senator Bernie Sanders’s run for president. Gaetz was a little-known representative in the Florida state House, with plans to run for his dad’s state Senate seat in 2016. Even today, none of them share an ideology: Hegseth is a culture warrior, Gaetz a libertine with an unusual mix of political views, and Gabbard an ostensible dove with her own strange commitments.

[Read: Matt Gaetz is winning]

What brings them together is not just fidelity to Trump, but a shared sense of having been persecuted by the departments they’ve been nominated to lead. It’s what they share with Trump as well as one another, and it’s their main credential to serve under him.

After the January 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol, Hegseth defended the rioters on Fox News. “These are not conspiracy theorists motivated just by lies—that’s a bunch of nonsense that people want to tell us,” he said. “These are people that understand first principles; they love freedom, and they love free markets.” Two weeks later, the National Guard said it had removed 12 members from duty on the day of Joe Biden’s inauguration because of worries about extremist groups.

By his own account, Hegseth was one of the dozen. He said a tattoo of a Jerusalem cross had gotten him flagged. He soon left the military, then wrote a book attacking the military as a bastion of “wokeness” and decay. “The feeling was mutual—I didn’t want this Army anymore either,” he wrote. He’s remained a loud critic of Pentagon brass, including suggesting that General C. Q. Brown, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is in his role only because he is Black.

[Tom Nichols: The loyalists are collecting their rewards in Trump’s Cabinet]

Gabbard seems like an odd choice for DNI, a role created after 9/11 to try to solve problems of siloed information between intelligence agencies. Though a veteran and former representative, she has no clear interest in intelligence and did not serve on the House Intelligence Committee. She does, however, have a grudge against the intelligence community. She says that this summer, she was placed on a watch list for domestic terrorism, resulting in frequent extra screening at airports. Gabbard says she believes this is because of criticism of Vice President Kamala Harris. Confirming any of this is impossible, because the watch lists really are a civil-liberties nightmare: They are not public, the reasons anyone gets on them are opaque, and the process for challenging them is enigmatic.

Gaetz is somehow an even more improbable pick to be the nation’s chief law-enforcement officer than Gabbard is for DNI. He has extensive experience with law enforcement, but generally he’s been the suspect. In 2008, he was pulled over for speeding and suspected of driving drunk, but he refused a Breathalyzer test and charges were dropped. Court papers have alleged that Gaetz attended drug- and sex-fueled parties involving underage girls, which Gaetz denies. He’s currently being investigated by the House Ethics Committee for a variety of alleged offenses. (My colleague Elaine Godfrey reported that Gaetz has shown videos of naked women to colleagues; Gaetz was a leading opponent of a revenge-porn law in the Florida legislature.) 

More to the point, Gaetz was also the subject of a lengthy Justice Department probe into possible sex-trafficking. A top Trump aide told the House January 6 committee that Gaetz had sought a pardon from Trump at the close of his first presidency. After years of investigation, the DOJ informed Gaetz’s lawyers in 2023 that he would not be charged. The experience left Gaetz furious at the Justice Department.

[David A. Graham: The terminally online are in charge now]

What each of these appointments would offer, if the nominees are confirmed, is a chance to get their revenge on the people they feel have done them wrong. Whether they can get confirmed will be a good test of just how acquiescent the GOP Senate, under incoming Majority Leader John Thune, will be to Trump’s agenda.

Hegseth would be the least traditionally qualified nominee to lead the Defense Department in memory; it’s a sprawling bureaucracy, and he has no experience with it except as a low-ranking officer. But Hegseth is personally well liked and already collecting support from powerful Republicans. Gabbard’s past record of criticizing Republicans may raise some eyebrows, though she has become a loyal member of Trump’s inner circle. Gaetz will be the biggest test, in part because many Republicans personally despise him, and because the probes into him make him radioactive. (Perhaps these nominees are why Trump has so avidly demanded recess-appointment power.)

If Trump can get Hegseth, Gabbard, and Gaetz confirmed, he’ll be on the way to the retribution he promised. And if any of them falls, he’s still made his intentions crystal clear.