The Ministry of Justice said it is "aware of a breach of data to the prison estate" and has taken "immediate action".

Out goes a Florida man, in comes a Florida woman. Hours after Matt Gaetz, Donald Trump’s pick for attorney general, withdrew from consideration, the president-elect last night announced that he will nominate Pam Bondi to lead the Justice Department.

Bondi, a former attorney general of Florida, is widely viewed as a more serious and confirmable pick, and although that is partly a statement of what a ridiculous choice Gaetz was, it also shows how far expectations—and standards—have been lowered since the start of the first Trump administration. In 2017, Bondi was passed over for an administration role for fear that she was too scandal-tainted. This time around, she’s the safe, acceptable fallback choice.

If Bondi’s name means anything to you, you’re probably either a Floridian or a real Trump-news obsessive. After a stint as a local prosecutor, Bondi was elected as Florida attorney general in 2010 and served two terms. She left that office in 2019 and worked on Trump’s defense teams for both of his impeachment trials. Bondi also worked as a lobbyist in that period, with clients including the Qatari government, Amazon, and Uber. (You really don’t hear much about “draining the swamp” these days.) She also joined the America First Policy Institute, a Trump-aligned nonprofit.

[David A. Graham: Trump’s first defeat]

Bondi’s highest-profile connection to Trump began in 2013, during her first term as Florida attorney general. Several state attorneys general had probed Trump University, a souped-up real-estate seminar suspected of advertising itself with fraudulent claims. In September 2013, Bondi announced that she was considering joining a lawsuit in New York. Within days, Trump’s personal putative charity, the Trump Foundation, had written a $25,000 check to And Justice for All, a group supporting her reelection—a donation that Bondi had personally solicited several weeks earlier. Bondi then declined to join the suit. (Bondi denies that the payment affected her decision.)

In the kaleidoscopic way of Trumplandia, the foundation itself was a kind of scam; it was later forced to shut down, and Trump admitted to 19 violations, including self-dealing. The Trump Foundation was not legally permitted to make political donations, and instead of reporting the pro-Bondi donation as such, it reported it as a gift to Justice for All, a similarly named nonprofit in Kansas. After The Washington Post uncovered the details, a Trump aide insisted that the mistake was innocent, but the IRS fined Trump $2,500.

When Trump won the presidency in 2016, Bondi was widely expected to land a job in his administration. In January 2017, Bloomberg even reported that an appointment was imminent, but nothing ever materialized—apparently because Trump staffers were concerned that questions about the donation would make confirmation hearings difficult and damaging. How quaint—now she’s the person Trump is relying on to sail through confirmation. And given the scale of Gaetz’s problems, the weaknesses of other Cabinet nominees, and the fatigue among the press and populace, that seems likely to work.

She is similar in this way to John Ratcliffe, whom Trump last week nominated to lead the CIA. During Trump’s first term, in 2019, he nominated Ratcliffe to be director of national intelligence, a job that helps coordinate all U.S. intelligence agencies. Ratcliffe was forced to withdraw once it was clear that the Senate wouldn’t confirm him, because he had no real qualifications for the job, and had exaggerated what little he did have. (I wrote at the time that Ratcliffe “would have been the least qualified DNI in the position’s short history,” but the current nominee for that post, Tulsi Gabbard, gives him a run for his money.) A year later, Trump nominated him again, and this time the Senate sighed heavily and confirmed him, despite concerns that he would improperly politicize the job. This is precisely what he did: In the last weeks of the 2020 campaign, Ratcliffe disclosed unverified information about the 2016 election, which career officials worried was disinformation, in a blatant attempt to boost Trump’s reelection.

[Read: The art of the swindle]

And yet when Trump announced Ratcliffe’s nomination this time around, it was met with something between a shrug and relief. After all, compared with Gaetz and Gabbard, here was a guy with actual experience in his appointed subject and in the executive branch! Trump has managed to move the goalposts so far, they’re in the budget parking lot.

Pete Hegseth, his nominee to lead the Defense Department, fits the same pattern. He was considered to lead the Department of Veterans Affairs in the first Trump administration, but not chosen. Now he’s been picked to lead an even more important and sprawling bureaucracy, though the only new qualifications he’s picked up in the ensuing years are three vitriolic books, many hours on Fox, and dismissal from guarding Joe Biden’s inauguration. (Hegseth’s nomination seems rickety after revelations of a sexual-assault accusation, but he may yet make it through.)

If confirmed, Bondi will likely be a more effective and reasonable attorney general than Gaetz. She is not driven by personal grievance in the way he seems to be, and she has experience as both a prosecutor and a state attorney general. Like Gaetz, however, she is unlikely to defend the independence of the Justice Department from presidential interference. In addition to her past loyalty, she backed Trump’s bogus claims of election fraud in 2020. Trump has also already named three of his personal criminal-defense attorneys to top DOJ positions. At this stage, perhaps less bad news is the best anyone can desire, but none of this is good.

This past summer, a U.S. district court declared Google a monopolist. On Wednesday, the Department of Justice filed its proposed remedy. This plan—the government’s “proposed final judgment,” or PFJ—must be approved by the judge who is overseeing the case. But it outlines changes the government believes would be sufficient to loosen Google’s grip on the search market.

Notably, the DOJ has proposed that Google sell off its Chrome web browser—which currently accounts for about two-thirds of the browser market—and stay out of that business for five years. That proposal may seem righteous and effective, and stripping Google of its browser does make the government look bold. The proposal also seems to right a cosmic wrong from more than two decades ago, when the DOJ tried (and failed) to get Microsoft to unbundle its own Internet Explorer browser during a prior antitrust enforcement. This time around, the government’s lawyers insist that wresting Chrome from Google’s mitts is necessary to prevent Google from setting a default search engine for the majority of internet surfers, and pushing those same people to other Google products too. (By the same logic, the PFJ prevents Google from paying rivals such as Apple for default-search placement.)

This is a mistake. Google’s control of Chrome has surely benefited its market position and its bottom line. But Chrome might remain a boon for Google even if it’s under outside ownership. Instead, why not force Google to strip Chrome of its Google-promoting features, and let the browser be a burden rather than a tool for market domination?

In August, I argued that declaring Google a monopoly might not matter, because the company had already won the search wars. Searching the web effectively via text typed into input boxes was Google’s first and perhaps only innovation; the competitors that arose—DuckDuckGo, Bing, and so on—offered their own takes on Googling, which became the generic term for searching the web. People returned to Google because they wanted to, not just because the company had strong-armed them.

[Read: Google already won]

Google did incentivize competitors to maintain that status quo. Mozilla’s Firefox browser offers a case study. The foundation’s most recent annual report lists $510 million in royalty revenue for 2022, some of which surely comes from Google in the form of referral fees for Google searches. The PFJ appears to prohibit these kinds of payments, and whatever revenue they generate for Mozilla. If those are off the table, browser companies may end up letting users choose their own default search service. But the results could ultimately look very much the same: People who like and are familiar with Google might just choose it again.

Google built the Chrome browser in part to steer web users to its services—Search (and the ads it serves), Gmail, Google Docs, and so forth. Search was, of course, the most important of these. (Chrome was the first major browser to integrate web-search functionality directly into the address bar, a design known as the omnibox.) But over time, other Google features have become more and more entwined with Chrome’s operation. When I opened my Chrome browser in order to write this article, it presented me with a user-profile screen, strongly encouraging me to log in to my Google account, which gives Google insights into what I do online. That facility also offers me seamless access to Google Docs and Gmail, because I am already logged in.

Given that Chrome accounts for so much of the web-browser market, a more effective way to quash Google’s bad tendencies might involve sabotaging its browser rather than selling it off. Instead of making Google divest Chrome, the DOJ could have it keep the browser running (and secure) while stripping it of all the features that make Google services ready to hand. Killing the omnibox would be the boldest of these acts, because search, which basically means Googling, would no longer be presented as the default act on the web. Likewise, removing the tight Google-account integration and associated benefits for Google’s services and data collection would frustrate the company’s monopoly more effectively than a spun-off browser ever could.

The Department of Justice (DOJ) said Wednesday that it wants Google (GOOGL) to sell its Chrome web browser as the government looks to break up the tech giant’s dominance in the search engine market.

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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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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Controversial Hungarian law criticised as anti-LGBT to appear before EU Court of Justice

The images and videos were hard to miss in the days leading up to November 5. There was Donald Trump with the chiseled musculature of Superman, hovering over a row of skyscrapers. Trump and Kamala Harris squaring off in bright-red uniforms (McDonald’s logo for Trump, hammer-and-sickle insignia for Harris). People had clearly used AI to create these—an effort to show support for their candidate or to troll their opponents. But the images didn’t stop after Trump won. The day after polls closed, the Statue of Liberty wept into her hands as a drizzle fell around her. Trump and Elon Musk, in space suits, stood on the surface of Mars; hours later, Trump appeared at the door of the White House, waving goodbye to Harris as she walked away, clutching a cardboard box filled with flags.

[Read: We haven’t seen the worst of fake news]

Every federal election since at least 2018 has been plagued with fears about potential disruptions from AI. Perhaps a computer-generated recording of Joe Biden would swing a key county, or doctored footage of a poll worker burning ballots would ignite riots. Those predictions never materialized, but many of them were also made before the arrival of ChatGPT, DALL-E, and the broader category of advanced, cheap, and easy-to-use generative-AI models—all of which seemed much more threatening than anything that had come before. Not even a year after ChatGPT was released in late 2022, generative-AI programs were used to target Trump, Emmanuel Macron, Biden, and other political leaders. In May 2023, an AI-generated image of smoke billowing out of the Pentagon caused a brief dip in the U.S. stock market. Weeks later, Ron DeSantis’s presidential primary campaign appeared to have used the technology to make an advertisement.

And so a trio of political scientists at Purdue University decided to get a head start on tracking how generative AI might influence the 2024 election cycle. In June 2023, Christina Walker, Daniel Schiff, and Kaylyn Jackson Schiff started to track political AI-generated images and videos in the United States. Their work is focused on two particular categories: deepfakes, referring to media made with AI, and “cheapfakes,” which are produced with more traditional editing software, such as Photoshop. Now, more than a week after polls closed, their database, along with the work of other researchers, paints a surprising picture of how AI appears to have actually influenced the election—one that is far more complicated than previous fears suggested.

The most visible generated media this election have not exactly planted convincing false narratives or otherwise deceived American citizens. Instead, AI-generated media have been used for transparent propaganda, satire, and emotional outpourings: Trump, wading in a lake, clutches a duck and a cat (“Protect our ducks and kittens in Ohio!”); Harris, enrobed in a coppery blue, struts before the Statue of Liberty and raises a matching torch. In August, Trump posted an AI-generated video of himself and Musk doing a synchronized TikTok dance; a follower responded with an AI image of the duo riding a dragon. The pictures were fake, sure, but they weren’t feigning otherwise. In their analysis of election-week AI imagery, the Purdue team found that such posts were far more frequently intended for satire or entertainment than false information per se. Trump and Musk have shared political AI illustrations that got hundreds of millions of views. Brendan Nyhan, a political scientist at Dartmouth who studies the effects of misinformation, told me that the AI images he saw “were obviously AI-generated, and they were not being treated as literal truth or evidence of something. They were treated as visual illustrations of some larger point.” And this usage isn’t new: In the Purdue team’s entire database of fabricated political imagery, which includes hundreds of entries, satire and entertainment were the two most common goals.

That doesn’t mean these images and videos are merely playful or innocuous. Outrageous and false propaganda, after all, has long been an effective way to spread political messaging and rile up supporters. Some of history’s most effective propaganda campaigns have been built on images that simply project the strength of one leader or nation. Generative AI offers a low-cost and easy tool to produce huge amounts of tailored images that accomplish just this, heightening existing emotions and channeling them to specific ends.

These sorts of AI-generated cartoons and agitprop could well have swayed undecided minds, driven turnout, galvanized “Stop the Steal” plotting, or driven harassment of election officials or racial minorities. An illustration of Trump in an orange jumpsuit emphasizes Trump’s criminal convictions and perceived unfitness for the office, while an image of Harris speaking to a sea of red flags, a giant hammer-and-sickle above the crowd, smears her as “woke” and a “Communist.” An edited image showing Harris dressed as Princess Leia kneeling before a voting machine and captioned “Help me, Dominion. You’re my only hope” (an altered version of a famous Star Wars line) stirs up conspiracy theories about election fraud. “Even though we’re noticing many deepfakes that seem silly, or just seem like simple political cartoons or memes, they might still have a big impact on what we think about politics,” Kaylyn Jackson Schiff told me. It’s easy to imagine someone’s thought process: That image of “Comrade Kamala” is AI-generated, sure, but she’s still a Communist. That video of people shredding ballots is animated, but they’re still shredding ballots. That’s a cartoon of Trump clutching a cat, but immigrants really are eating pets. Viewers, especially those already predisposed to find and believe extreme or inflammatory content, may be further radicalized and siloed. The especially photorealistic propaganda might even fool someone if reshared enough times, Walker told me.

[Read: I’m running out of ways to explain how bad this is]

There were, of course, also a number of fake images and videos that were intended to directly change people’s attitudes and behaviors. The FBI has identified several fake videos intended to cast doubt on election procedures, such as false footage of someone ripping up ballots in Pennsylvania. “Our foreign adversaries were clearly using AI” to push false stories, Lawrence Norden, the vice president of the Elections & Government Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, told me. He did not see any “super innovative use of AI,” but said the technology has augmented existing strategies, such as creating fake-news websites, stories, and social-media accounts, as well as helping plan and execute cyberattacks. But it will take months or years to fully parse the technology’s direct influence on 2024’s elections. Misinformation in local races is much harder to track, for example, because there is less of a spotlight on them. Deepfakes in encrypted group chats are also difficult to track, Norden said. Experts had also wondered whether the use of AI to create highly realistic, yet fake, videos showing voter fraud might have been deployed to discredit a Trump loss. This scenario has not yet been tested.

Although it appears that AI did not directly sway the results last week, the technology has eroded Americans’ overall ability to know or trust information and one another—not deceiving people into believing a particular thing so much as advancing a nationwide descent into believing nothing at all. A new analysis by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue of AI-generated media during the U.S. election cycle found that users on X, YouTube, and Reddit inaccurately assessed whether content was real roughly half the time, and more frequently thought authentic content was AI-generated than the other way around. With so much uncertainty, using AI to convince people of alternative facts seems like a waste of time—far more useful to exploit the technology to directly and forcefully send a motivated message, instead. Perhaps that’s why, of the election-week, AI-generated media the Purdue team analyzed, pro-Trump and anti-Kamala content was most common.

More than a week after Trump’s victory, the use of AI for satire, entertainment, and activism has not ceased. Musk, who will soon co-lead a new extragovernmental organization, routinely shares such content. The morning of November 6, Donald Trump Jr. put out a call for memes that was met with all manner of AI-generated images. Generative AI is changing the nature of evidence, yes, but also that of communication—providing a new, powerful medium through which to illustrate charged emotions and beliefs, broadcast them, and rally even more like-minded people. Instead of an all-caps thread, you can share a detailed and personalized visual effigy. These AI-generated images and videos are instantly legible and, by explicitly targeting emotions instead of information, obviate the need for falsification or critical thinking at all. No need to refute, or even consider, a differing view—just make an angry meme about it. No need to convince anyone of your adoration of J. D. Vance—just use AI to make him, literally, more attractive. Veracity is beside the point, which makes the technology perhaps the nation’s most salient mode of political expression. In a country where facts have gone from irrelevant to detestable, of course deepfakes—fake news made by deep-learning algorithms—don’t matter; to growing numbers of people, everything is fake but what they already know, or rather, feel.