The Senate Should Reject These Two Dangerous Nominations

By Peter Juul

President-elect Donald Trump has nominated a pair of unqualified and unacceptable individuals to fill two critical national security posts in his upcoming administration: Fox News personality Pete Hegseth as secretary of defense and former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence. Neither nominee possesses any experience managing organizations the size, scope, and scale of the Defense Department or America’s intelligence community. Both hold extreme views that ought to disqualify them from holding any senior national security position, much less ones with the duties and responsibilities they have been nominated for.

The Senate must exercise its Constitutional responsibility of advice and consent to reject these two presidential nominees. If confirmed, both Hegseth and Gabbard would do grave harm to American national security — primarily via the damage they would inflict on the institutions they have been nominated to lead.

A conservative activist, veteran, and Fox News television personality, Pete Hegseth has no experience managing organizations of any size whatsoever — much less one as large and complex as the Department of Defense. He stands accused of sexual assault, possibly drugging his victim during an alleged 2017 incident in California, and was flagged as a possible “insider threat” by a fellow National Guard member ahead of its post-January 6 deployment for President Joe Biden’s inauguration.

More troubling, however, are Hegseth’s views. As a private citizen and political commentator, Hegseth remains entitled to hold whatever positions he likes and share them however he pleases. As nominee for secretary of defense, however, these positions and views take on greater importance and relevance. They show us the attitudes Hegseth will bring to the job and give a sense of the priorities he will likely pursue if confirmed by the Senate.

As The Atlantic’s Jonathan Chait makes clear, the picture painted by Hegseth’s written work is an alarming one: “The man who emerges from the page appears to have sunk deeply into conspiracy theories that are bizarre even by contemporary Republican standards but that have attracted strangely little attention. He considers himself to be at war with basically everybody to Trump’s left, and it is by no means clear that he means war metaphorically.” A Secretary of Defense Hegseth, in other words, would have no problem with President Trump ordering the U.S. military into action against its own citizens — something Trump previously mused about during his first term.

Hegseth would also likely go along with or actively facilitate Trump’s reported plans to purge generals and other high-ranking military officers, possibly subjecting some of them to courts-martial. The end result would be a compliant military leadership, willing to execute whatever orders Trump might issue regardless of their legality or morality. (Indeed, Hegseth successfully lobbied Trump to pardon service members convicted of war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan — yet another reason to oppose his nomination.) A politicized military is also an ineffectual military, less able to fulfill its core task of defending the United States and its interests overseas.

More practically, Hegseth could undermine American military readiness via attempts to bar women from combat roles — he has stated he does not believe women should serve on the frontlines — and remove transgender servicemembers from the ranks. It ought to go without saying that a military fighting a domestic culture war against itself will not be a terribly effective military when it comes to fighting actual wars.

Tulsi Gabbard, former Democratic representative from Hawaii, likewise has no experience managing large organizations — or supervising multiple large organizations, as she would were she confirmed as director of national intelligence. Beyond this lack of any relevant experience, Gabbard’s clear and consistent sympathies for America’s adversaries — most notably Vladimir Putin’s Russia and Bashar al-Assad’s barbaric regime in Syria — render her unfit to run the nation’s sprawling intelligence community.

Gabbard routinely parrots false, conspiratorial claims that conveniently line up with the foreign policy narratives put forward by the Kremlin and the Assad regime, among other autocratic governments around the world. As a congresswoman, Gabbard met with Assad twice during a January 2017 trip to Syria, “blindsiding” Democratic House leaders, and then denied his regime’s responsibility for chemical weapons attacks against Syrian civilians. She likewise regularly regurgitates Russian propaganda about the war in Ukraine, blaming NATO and the United States for the conflict while echoing Kremlin-sponsored conspiracy theories about secret American “biolabs” in Ukraine. No wonder that outgoing Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) went so far as to accuse Gabbard of spouting “treasonous lies” about Ukraine in 2022.

As both a private citizen and a member of Congress, Gabbard is entitled to hold and espouse views both at odds with reality and in sync with America’s adversaries overseas. But her conspiratorial views and outright embrace of Russian and other autocratic propaganda ought to disqualify her from a post like the director of national intelligence, where she would supervise the operations of America’s 18 main intelligence agencies and ensure that they provide timely, accurate information to the president, Congress, and relevant government agencies.

If confirmed, Gabbard’s known views would cast doubt on the trustworthiness of the intelligence process as a whole — even if America’s intelligence agencies otherwise continue to produce high-quality analyses based on the most accurate information available to them. As with the military, a politicized intelligence community is a less effective intelligence community, less able to fulfill its core national security functions and play its part in keeping America safe.

With the Hegseth and Gabbard nominations, President-elect Trump has acted in a grossly irresponsible fashion that potentially endangers American national security. The Constitution requires the Senate to give its advice and consent to presidential nominations for precisely this scenario.

The Senate should take this duty seriously and reject both nominations.