Trump Picks Shock National Security World

Matt Gaetz as A.G., John Ratcliffe as DCIA, Tulsi Gabbard as DNI, Kristi Noem for DHS draw gasps of disbelief outside MAGA World, cheers inside it.

Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s pick for Director of National Intelligence (Wiknedia Commons)

There was a time when Donald Trump actually had to withdraw some of his nominations for cabinet posts over objections by members of his own party, not to mention Democrats. No longer – as the nominations of Matt Gaetz, John Ratcliffe, and Tulsi Gabbard to run three of the government's top national security agencies in a second Trump administration show.

We'll have a lot more to say about these nominations in the coming days, but suffice it for now to note some of the hurdles all of them face.

Gaetz, for example, Trump’s pick to be attorney general, was not so long ago at the center of a sex trafficking investigation by the Justice  Department.

“How did Representative Matt Gaetz get into so much trouble?” Amy Davidson Sorkin wrote in The New Yorker back in April 2021. “There are so many allegations surrounding the Florida Republican and the carnival-like crowd of characters around him that it’s hard to know where to begin.”