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Trump NatSec Nominees Are ‘Worse Than Worst Case,’ ‘Functional Foreign Agents’: Experts

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National security and political experts are sounding the alarm over several of Donald Trump’s nominations to top Cabinet-level positions, saying they are not only “totally absurd and appalling,” but a threat to the nation’s—and the world’s—security.

Here’s the current list of all of Trump’s Cabinet-level nominations (Politico is keeping track):

• White House Chief of Staff – Susie Wiles

•Secretary of State – Marco Rubio

•Secretary of Defense – Pete Hegseth

•Attorney General – Matt Gaetz

•Secretary of Homeland Security – Kristi Noem

•Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency – Lee Zeldin

•Director of National Intelligence – Tulsi Gabbard

•Ambassador to the United Nations – Elise Stefanik

•Director of the CIA – John Ratcliffe

READ MORE: Musk and Ramaswamy Heading New ‘DOGE’ Prompts Legal and Ethical Concerns: Experts

“Good lord,” remarked Phillips O’Brien, a historian, professor of strategic studies, and author of books on World War II, “an outright Putin apologist is named to be head of US national intelligence.”

O’Brien was referring to Trump’s nomination of former Democratic Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard to be the Director of National Intelligence (DNI).

Economist Anders Åslund, a former economic advisor to Kyrgyzstan, Russia, and Ukraine, said: “Tulsi Gabbard appears a pure Russian asset. How can she become Director of US National Intelligence? How could she possibly pass a normal security clearance?”

“If Tulsi Gabbard becomes Director of National Intelligence,” Åslund added, “it would be better for US national security to close down all intelligence.”

The Washington Spectator’s Dave Troy, an investigative journalist with expertise on Russia and Russian President Vladimir Putin, explained: “This is the reality. This can’t happen. The other Five Eyes countries will cut us off. This is a decapitation strike.”

“Five Eyes” is the joint intelligence-sharing alliance of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

Dr Ruth Deyermond, a Senior Lecturer in Post-Soviet Security at King’s College London’s Dept. of War Studies writes: “Even by Trump standards, this an extraordinary demonstration of the extent to which Russia-aligned interests have captured the incoming US executive. What NATO partner (Hungary aside) will trust the US with any intelligence now?”

Journalist Craig Unger is a New York Times best-selling author of books about 9/11, the Bush family, and Trump, including: “House of Trump, House of Putin: The Untold Story of Donald Trump and the Russian Mafia.”

He writes: “As of now, NATO is effectively over. Why would any of our allies share intelligence with us when the head of National Intelligence is effectively in bed with Putin.”

Former FBI special agent Asha Rangappa, an attorney and legal contributor to ABC News, issued this warning: “I very much hope that the USIC [U.S. Intelligence Community] takes measures to protect sources (or hand them off to allied intelligence services) pronto because Pooty [Vladimir Putin] is about to learn EVERYTHING we know about them and Ukraine.”

The Guardian’s Carole Cadwalladr, who exposed the Facebook–Cambridge Analytica data scandal, posted the video below by Tulsi Gabbard and wrote: “Trump has just appointed this woman Director of National Intelligence. A pro-Russian, pro-Putin mouthpiece. To remind you the UK shares intelligence with the US. Worse than worst case scenario.”

Christopher Miller is the Financial Times’ award-winning chief Ukraine correspondent whose “reporting has focused on Ukrainian politics and various aspects of Russia’s war against Ukraine, exposing war crimes and revealing the plight of people forced to live under brutal occupation,” according to his bio.

He weighed in on the appointment of Tulsi Gabbard to ODNI:

The Atlantic’s David Frum, a former Bush speechwriter who recently renounced his membership to the Republican Party, declared Congressman Gaetz’s nomination is the “most absurd,” and former Democratic Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard’s is “the most sinister.”

READ MORE: MAGA Congressman Vows Loyalty: ‘If Trump Says Jump 3 Feet High We Jump 3 Feet High’

The Lincoln Project’s Stuart Stevens, author of “The Conspiracy to End America: Five Ways My Old Party Is Driving Our Democracy to Autocracy,” warned:

“A prediction: assuming we get through this period as a functioning democracy, there will be the first treason trials in America since 1949. Trump is giving functional foreign agents access to America’s security.”

Trump’s latest announcement, that he is nominating U.S. Rep. Matt Gaetz to lead the U.S. Dept. of Justice as Attorney General, drew consternation, with critics noting that the Florida Republican lawmaker is currently under investigation by the House Ethics Committee, and had been under federal investigation for a litany of possible offenses, including illicit drug use, sex trafficking, and having sexual relations with a minor. He also reportedly had asked outgoing President Donald Trump for a “blanket pardon,” to cover any number of possible crimes, including his alleged efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

“Evidence suggested that he had spent time with a number of young women who advertised on a Web site that seemed to be a thinly veiled venue for prostitution,” The New Yorker reported in February. “Gaetz, then a three-term congressman with a reputation for a freewheeling private life, appeared to have the impulse control of a teen-age boy.”

O’Brien also weighed in on Gaetz: “Good lord 2, Matt Gaetz as Attorney General. The GOP seems hellbent on turning the US Government over to Russia.” And he warned that “all of us who have been saying that Europe needs to take care of its own security without the USA…need to scream it louder.”

Gaetz has suggested Russia be admitted to NATO, instead of Ukraine.

Alyssa Farah Griffin, the former Trump White House director of strategic communications and a co-host on “The View,” suggested there may be a “strategy” in play.

“Perhaps there’s some strategy to the more *bonkers* Cabinet picks? Trump may be signaling to the Senate to be thoughtful in what nominees it considers blocking -Kristi Noem, for example, suddenly looks immensely qualified for DHS compared to say Gaetz as AG or Tulsi as ODNI.”

Media Matters’ Matthew Gertz observes, “Matt Gaetz pick is so crazy people have forgotten the Tulsi Gabbard pick which was so crazy people had forgotten about the Pete Hegseth pick. Who knows what tomorrow will bring.”

Watch the videos above or at this link.

READ MORE: ‘Tenfold Increase in Number of Deportations’: Trump Hands Stephen Miller Top Policy Post

 

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News

Breaking From Trump Republican Says Families Are ‘Struggling’ — But Points Finger at Biden

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April 21, 2026

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A prominent House Republican is breaking with President Donald Trump on the state of the U.S. economy — which the president in recent months has called the “hottest” in the world and suggested that the inflation and affordability crises have been resolved. But she’s also placing the blame on former President Joe Biden, well over a year after he left office.

House Republican Conference Chair Lisa McClain “offered a rare acknowledgment from a GOP leader Tuesday that the U.S. economy might not be in tip-top condition,” Politico reported.

“Now, I know that even with bigger refunds, many families are struggling right now. And I get it,” McClain told reporters.

“But we also owe it to the American people to be honest about how we got here, to make sure we don’t ever go back again. So let me be candid, and let me refresh everybody’s memories,” she said, declaring that the Biden administration “killed” the Keystone Pipeline on “day one.”

The pipeline was never completed — Biden revoked a permit for it.

READ MORE: ‘Dropping Like Flies’: Which of Trump’s Cabinet Secretaries Will Be Next?

“Then,” she continued, “the Biden administration made it harder to ‘drill baby drill.'”

By the time President Biden left office, the U.S. was the world’s largest producer of oil and a net exporter of petroleum products and natural gas.

After praising the Trump administration for opening up more drilling permits, McClain scolded the press: “We need to tell the truth on truly what’s going on.”

“I’m not passing the buck, I’m giving you the facts,” she said.

“It’s crazy that Democrats closed the Keystone pipeline,” she reiterated. “It’s crazy to rely on our enemies for our oil and our natural gas. And it is crazy to sacrifice our national economic security for woke Green New Deal talking points.”

“So, no. Energy prices aren’t where any of us want them to be,” she acknowledged before praising Trump’s energy policies.

READ MORE: ‘What Evil Looks Like’: Columnist Says Trump Presides Over a ‘Circus of Death and Chaos’

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‘Dropping Like Flies’: Which of Trump’s Cabinet Secretaries Will Be Next?

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3 hours ago

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April 21, 2026

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After more than a year with no Cabinet Secretary exits, President Donald Trump has now seen three leave under various circumstances — Kristi Noem, Pam Bondi, and Lori Chavez-DeRemer — in less than two months. The question now is: who might be next?

The Wall Street Journal says Trump’s cabinet secretaries are “dropping like flies,” and Politico reports that high-profile Trump officials are “sweating on their futures.” Politico also notes that the “Cabinet-level calm of the first 13 months of this presidency is over. Trump is in the mood for shaking things up.”

A president with approval ratings currently in the mid-to-upper 30s, Trump is “culling” those who have disappointed or are “distrusted” by his base, Politico writes, with an eye on the midterm elections.

“The campaign is not exactly going swimmingly, and the theory is that problematic members of the administration need clearing out now — still six months from the start of voting — to put sufficient distance between their departures and Election Day.”

The obvious common threads between those out the door — fired, forced, or otherwise leaving — are that all three are women, and were “embroiled in scandal” or distrusted by the base.

Politico suggests two officials who might be next to exit.

FBI Director Kash Patel has been embroiled in scandal and is distrusted by Trump’s base, according to Politico, making him a possible next contender.

“His reputation in MAGA world hasn’t recovered from his role in the initial handling of the Epstein files, while the list of colorful stories (and videos!) about his approach to the job of FBI chief gets longer every month,” Politico notes.

There is also Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, who has “faced fierce internal criticism from Day One,” and “now has an Epstein-shaped problem of his own.”

“The contrast between how Trump treats the men and the women in his cabinet is notable,” The Bulwark‘s Bill Kristol writes, noting that “Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has surely done as much damage to his department and to the nation as Kristi Noem did. But Pete’s still on the job, strutting around and displaying his machismo at the Pentagon.”

Kristol also mentions Secretary Lutnick, who “has profited on a larger scale from the Trump administration than Chavez-DeRemer did. But Lutnick is still there, grifting as men in the Trump orbit do.”

He also points to Director Patel, whom Kristol says is presiding “in all his male adolescent glory as director of the FBI.”

 

Image via Reuters 

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‘What Evil Looks Like’: Columnist Says Trump Presides Over a ‘Circus of Death and Chaos’

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20 hours ago

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April 20, 2026

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Do President Donald Trump’s “clownishness” and “lack of ideology” make him less dangerous? A columnist at The Guardian says no.

“Trump’s seeming lack of vision or ideology are misread as attributes that make him somehow less dangerous than the authoritarians of the past who have become the template for what evil looks like,” writes Nesrine Malik. But, “Trump’s presidency is what evil looks like.”

She points to images she remembers from “movies not seen since childhood,” or art and literature, tied together by “kitschy evil.”

She writes that those images seem to be standing in for horrific current events: “the bodies pulled from the rubble in Gaza, a school full of young pupils blown apart in Iran. The more than 1 million people in southern Lebanon expelled en masse from their homes.”

Malik calls it “bewildering” how the “casualness” of the cruelty “has been allowed to pass,” as Donald Trump, who “defies attempts to make his actions cohere with any particular strategy … hovers above the circus of death and chaos.”

Trump and his threats, like those where he threatened “entire civilizations,” are “reshaping the world, but without him even having orchestrated some master plan.”

READ MORE: ‘I’m in Charge!’: Trump Declares ‘I’m Winning a War’ in Series of Wild Rants

Trump “does not adhere to the style or affect of the fascist model,” she argues, “he doesn’t hold rallies, wear uniforms or make fiery speeches from balconies to flag-waving throngs. He hasn’t (entirely yet) overturned the constitution and dismantled democracy.”

“He is an addled comic figure, a man whose very soul is bared in his angry outbursts on social media or in rambling speeches without self-awareness or self-consciousness. He talks about the war on Iran flanked by a gigantic Easter bunny, posts an image of himself as Jesus. He ‘always chickens out‘.”

And yet, Malik asks, “isn’t this what evil is? A projection on to the world not of overbearing and large intent, but smallness and fear?”

Evil creeps up on you, she writes, “because it’s hard for the human brain to encounter evil in ludicrous form, and still recognize it as such.”

“That’s why you ask how such crimes were allowed to happen in the past,” she says.

Composed of “frivolity and nonchalance and fragility, as well as relentlessness and insatiability and brutality,”  evil “rarely arrives with the intent and identifying hallmarks of a villain. It arrives in the form of broken people, whose power lies in their unquenchable desire to make themselves whole no matter the consequences.”

READ MORE: Why a Democratic Senate Takeover Has Become a ‘Real Possibility’: NYT

 

Image via Reuters 

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