His election as defense minister was already shocking. Then came these picks.

In his first picks for Cabinet secretaries, President-elect Donald Trump has made it clear – even more so than many predicted – that his primary selection criteria is blind loyalty. Characteristics such as competence or experience play no role.

One of the nominees, a combat veteran and Fox News host named Pete Hegseth, is so obviously unqualified — a caricature of MAGA loyalty — that some insiders say even the 53-Republican Senate sworn in in January could vote to reject him confirm as head of the Ministry of Defense.

The same could (one can always hope) be true of Trump’s pick for director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, the far-right Democrat turned MAGA Republican who has no relevant experience except, perhaps, for having eagerly parroted Russian propaganda lines to explain diverse international developments.

Only slightly less stunning is Trump’s choice of former Texas Rep. John Ratcliffe as CIA director. An even slightly less biased Senate would probably reject Ratcliffe for fear that he would politicize the intelligence community – as he actually did during the short term, at the end of Trump’s first term, when he was director of national intelligence, the office that The surveillance and surveillance of intelligence agencies coordinates the 18 US intelligence agencies. But most importantly, if enough Republicans feel they can’t stand Hegseth or Gabbard in high office, they’ll probably let Ratcliffe through.

Other beneficiaries of the political retaliation include South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem, who has been named secretary of Homeland Security, and New York Rep. Elise Stefanik, who is slated to be ambassador to the United Nations. Nor do they have any experience remotely related to the task they will undertake. However, both were ardent supporters and defenders of Trump; Stefanik has the distinct distinction of becoming chairman of the House Republican Conference after Rep. Liz Cheney was ousted for criticizing Trump over the Jan. 6 riots.

The oddball of them all, the candidate who has appeared out of nowhere, is Hegseth, a complete stranger to anyone not watching Fox & Friends weekendwhich he has co-hosted for a decade. Of course, Trump is a regular viewer of this show, and to the surprise of his advisers, he chose Hegseth to head the Defense Department – the country’s largest bureaucracy, with 2.8 million employees and a budget of $841 billion this year – because him really liked what the rough looking co-host said.

Hegseth fought in Afghanistan and Iraq, but his rank — a major in the Army National Guard — wasn’t exactly a leadership position. In particular, he has written several bestsellers The War Against the Warriors: Behind the Betrayal of the Men Who Keep Us Free. In it and on several Fox shows, he condemned the introduction of diversity requirements in the military, saying they led to the rise of “woke generals” who in turn weakened the army’s fighting spirit. He also said that lowering entry requirements to allow women to join combat units would have the same damaging effect. (Many Army officers say critics like Hegseth exaggerate the amount of time spent on diversity training and that women serving in combat — in some cases in elite units like the Rangers and Green Berets — had to pass the same grueling tests as men.)

The anti-woke stance may have appealed most to Trump, who wants to fire generals who do not show sufficient loyalty to him. Hegseth has said he will appoint a board of retired officers, no doubt like-minded, to draw up lists of active officers who should be fired.

On his Fox show, Hegseth also vigorously protested against the prosecution of soldiers for war crimes, even going so far as to persuade Trump during his presidency to pardon two perpetrators of particularly heinous murders of civilians.

But when it comes to the core responsibilities of a defense secretary — creating budgets, evaluating weapons systems, managing interagency rivalries, engaging in interagency policymaking, conducting diplomacy with foreign counterparts, etc. — Hegseth has no discernible qualifications.

Even some MAGA Republicans see the benefits of having someone with at least one a little With political acumen and organizational skills, they lead an enterprise as large, complex and vital as the Department of Defense. It would take four Republican senators to reject his nomination. Some on Capitol Hill believe four could band together to vote their consciences. If not, and if Hegseth is sworn in, others doubt he would stay in office longer than six months. The Pentagon bureaucracy is deeply entrenched; it can tire far more agile players than Hegseth.

Before Trump launches a political campaign against military officers, he may also want to read the biography of his own early business lawyer and mentor Roy Cohn, who began his career as Senator Joseph McCarthy’s lawyer. Cohn, who died in 1986, could have told Trump that McCarthy – who became famous for rooting out and prosecuting suspected communists in the government – had made his big misstep by targeting Army officers. During the nationally televised Army-McCarthy hearings in 1954, Joseph Welch, the attorney for an accused officer, retorted to the senator, “Have you no sense of decency, sir?” And that was not only the end of McCarthy’s witch hunts, but also the end of his career – and three years later his life due to excessive alcohol consumption.

Hegseth probably read some history as an undergraduate at Princeton and as a master’s student at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, so he might want to reflect on the lessons from that history: Is anti-woke the new anti-communism? Will Hegseth be Cohn or McCarthy?

Not much needs to be said about Gabbard, who was chosen to oversee and coordinate the 18 U.S. intelligence agencies, except: “Holy shit!“If confirmed, she will replace Avril Haines, who — in contrast to Gabbard’s flimsy resume — was deputy director of the CIA and deputy national security adviser before President Joe Biden nominated her to the post. Haines also has degrees in law and theoretical physics.

If the Senate does not dismiss Gabbard’s nomination as an insult to the enterprise of intelligence gathering and analysis, then we as a nation are in serious trouble. At the very least, hundreds of intelligence officials are expected to resign – which may be Trump’s intention. He wants to destroy “the administrative state,” as his former strategist Steve Bannon once put it. One way to achieve this is to put Gabbard in charge of the intelligence apparatus.

Ratcliffe’s appointment as CIA director is only slightly less egregious. In many ways, his and Gabbard’s decisions are more appalling than even Hegseth’s. Although defense secretaries are expected to implement the president’s policies, the chief intelligence agency chief is expected to be fiercely independent – and Ratcliffe is anything but.

He attracted Trump’s first major attention as a congressman who spoke out most harshly against the officials investigating the then-president’s various alleged improprieties, particularly the Mueller Commission, which looked into stories about Trump’s collusion with Russia. Trump wanted to appoint Ratcliffe as director of national intelligence until even Republican senators warned him that the Texas congressman was too partisan and inexperienced for the job. Trump nominated a more moderate congressman, Dan Coats, who filed too many honest reports that contradicted Trump’s own talking points about Iran, North Korea and Russia. In his final year as president, Trump fired Coats and nominated Ratcliffe, this time sticking by his defense attorney. Republicans, who had Trump in tow as the 2020 election approached, caved. Ratcliffe was confirmed by a narrow margin of 49–44.

In his 18 months in office, Ratcliffe confirmed fears about him and used his office to confirm several conspiracy theories, many about Trump’s political opponents. These included claims that the Russians supported Hillary Clinton more than Trump in the 2016 election, and that the Iranians hacked into the pro-Trump Proud Boys militia group’s servers and accessed emails in the 2020 election They sent voters in three battleground states warning them: “You will vote for Trump on Election Day or we will come after you.” In fact, other intelligence agencies concluded that the Russians had supported Trump, not Clinton, in 2016. And even Ratcliffe had to admit in the report on the embattled states’ emails that the evidence of Iranian involvement was inconclusive.

A little more than a week after Trump moved to the White House, the former and future president is making good on his most outrageous threats. Those who dismissed his agenda as histrionics and told us not to worry, that he wasn’t serious about it, or that institutional guardrails would prevent it from being implemented – well, we’ll see. It’s up to four of 53 Republican senators to play hero, and as Liz Cheney learned, playing hero against Donald Trump can mean the end of your career. Be very nervous.

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