Wait, do I have to laugh if it's not funny? Like, don't have to laugh. No, okay. This is not some like Stalinist dictatorship. This is not Mar-a-Lago. Express your true opinions. I'm joined this week by my colleague and fellow columnist David French. Hey David. Ross, it's great to be with you. I'm so glad you could be with me because this is kind of a funny situation. We actually, yes, you can laugh. Yeah, no, I'm already laughing Ross, I'm already laughing.
God laughs at all podcasting plans and so apparently just Donald Trump because we actually taped an entire Matter of Opinion episode earlier this week, talking about what a second Trump administration might look like with a lot of discussion of what was then a rush of White House cabinet appointments and nominations. But then no sooner had we finished taping the episode, then President-elect Trump announced two more really big ones.
Florida Congressman Matt Gates for Attorney General and former Congressman Montelsey Gabbard for Director of National Intelligence. And we thought we had to talk about this and unfortunately Carlos and Michelle are, you know, have escaped to a beach.
Somewhere I assume so I was left alone, but I knew I could count on you David with your law and foreign policy background and your deep devotion to Matt Gates to talk about these picks in particular and what they say about how Trump intends to govern. So that's what we're going to talk about. I'm always warming up in the bullpen Ross. You just have to give the sign. The Dan Quisenberry of Trump Europe podcasting. Okay, that was a deep cut for our Kansas City audience. High Kansas City.
I appreciate it. Yep. So and one final note, we are taping Thursday afternoon this episode, God willing, through the administrations of our Herried Producers will be out Friday morning. But God knows what will happen in the next five hours. So we apologize for any news we've missed. So let's start with the Gates appointment. David, he's notable unsurprisingly for Attorney General Pick for being one of Donald Trump's allies and fierce defenders.
Is there anything else you would say that he's known for? Well, yeah, you would say that he is known for being investigated for allegedly having sexual relations with an underage girl. He is known for allegedly speaking quite openly and proudly about his sexual exploits, including allegedly showing pictures of women that he slept with.
Newed pictures to colleagues. He is definitely also known for disrupting the House rather dramatically when he initiated the coup that toppled the House Speaker after the 2022 midterms when ultimately leading the Mike Johnson being the current Speaker of the House. And I guess the best way to describe him, Ross, is that he is a purely pugilistic political figure and a extraordinarily libertine personal figure who, by the way, has barely any legal experience at all.
Let's just throw that in there. He has a law degree, which is more than I have. Right. Yes, came out of law school. Practice for around two years before he then entered the Florida legislature. So he may be one of the least qualified attorney general nominees ever just on the basis of his experience or lack thereof in addition to these other things that I talked about.
Yes, yes, the other things are notable, bad, gross. Yes, no, no, he's I think it's fair to say that he's known for being a gross figure. There is a House ethics investigation involving him, which the House ethics committee was set to vote on Friday, on whether to release their report.
But now that release is suspended because Gates has resigned from the House, which has led to various complicated theories about how he isn't really trying to be attorney general that this was some sort of favor from Trump to him that let him leave the House to set himself up for his next political act.
But that sort of six dimensional chess theory runs a ground on, you know, a certain amount of reporting just in the last 24 hours from people saying, no, look, you know, obviously it's open question whether he can be confirmed, but Trump definitely wants him to be confirmed.
And that reporting includes a, I think a particularly striking quote from Mark Caputo, a Floridian reporter who now reports for the bull work, he had a quote basically from a Trump advisor, an anonymous quote saying none of the other candidates, none of the attorneys had what Trump wants and they didn't talk like Gates, the advisor said everyone else looked at AG as if they were applying for a judicial appointment.
They talked about their vaunted legal theories and constitutional bullshit pardon my language Gates was the only one who said, yeah, I'll go over there and start cutting F word deleted heads. So clearly that's what Donald Trump wants from this appointment. What do you think is going to happen next?
That's a great question Ross because it's very clear from some of the early reporting that a number of senators are shall we say skeptical of this appointment, but there is also another factor looming in the background, which is, okay, wait a minute.
If it's not that Gates, who is it, is it can Paxton, the Texas attorney general who's under investigation himself, so there is a lot of concern that what this pick is is a signal of this is the kind of person Trump wants as an attorney general pick and he's just going to keep valuing up to us.
The same kind of person, however, if the Senate is going to exercise a true advice and consent, not just consent, but advise and consent role here, it should be able to stand up and say this person is grotesquely unqualified. We need to see the American people need to see this House ethics report before there's a single vote in the Senate.
But you know, Ross, this is going to be a big test for Senate Republicans. The question is how much are they going to view themselves as team Trump versus how much are they going to adopt the role in vision for them in the process by the founders as an independent check on Trump. And that's the question and right now I'm not that optimistic that they're going to act as a check as opposed to act as team members. And so the other thing that I want to mention about him just real briefly.
There's no indication from Matt Gaetz's career that he is just even competent enough to run an organization like this. One of the reasons the American people are so negative about American institutions is because of a sheer lack of competence that is consistently displayed in American institutions. And the last name that I would think of to say write the ship on a massive complex organization to just make it competent and good at his job. That last name that comes to my mind is Matt Gaetz.
Yeah, so let me put a couple points to you on those questions. So I agree that Gaetz has no as far as I can tell relevant managerial experience. There would be relevant to running the Department of Justice. I do think that Gaetz is smart. I think that he is a sort of savvy tactical politician who is sort of different categorically in certain ways from some of his sort of mega-esque allies in the house.
I think he has more savvy and more sense of what he's actually doing for better or worse. I do think he has somewhat of a kind of principled issue profile interestingly that is kind of, you know, he is a libertine obviously and it's sort of a libertarian issue profile.
He's a libertarian in his voting record on, you know, everything from drug policy to surveillance, these kind of things. It's sort of an interesting mix. So I just wanted to mention those two things because they are, I think, part of the Gaetz package and relevant to sort of thinking about what he might be thinking here.
But then I think from the start, from the point of view of people worried about abuses of power in a second Trump term, the Attorney General Office has obviously been kind of a reasonable locus of anxiety. Trump campaigned on the premise that the Department of Justice was politicized and weaponized against him and that he was going to sort of act against it, you know, that there would be purges and heads would roll and so on.
With this sort of further implication, I think that a lot of people drew that the DOJ would be used against his political enemies as he felt it was used against him. Now, if that is your major concern about what might happen with the DOJ, obviously there is a sort of high-minded institutionalist case that Matt Gates should not be in Attorney General.
I do wonder though, maybe I'm being perverse here, but I do wonder if that is your worry. In a way, are you maybe not better off with a sort of lightning rod, performative shaman bound really tightly to Trump without significant institutional experience in that role as opposed to a more conventional figure who we can assume could only get the job if he'd promise certain things.
To Trump, but might actually be a little bit more effective at using the DOJ inappropriately for Trump's ends like can you see sort of from a point of view of not wanting a successfully politicized DOJ. I can almost see a case for just like, yeah, this is the kind of person Trump is sending up. He campaigned on this. Let's see how it goes. So in other words, the incompetence is a feature, not a bug.
In competence, but also like there is no sort of tissue of neutrality around gates. There's always a certain illusion around the neutrality of the DOJ. Attorney generals are always to some extent creatures of the presidency. Janet Reno was not actually independent of Bill Clinton and so on. So Trump wants to go further even maybe then, you know, the president's brother as attorney general era that the Kennedys gave us.
He wants a true creature. Okay, don't you want that to be sort of naked and overt so that the public can judge it fully rather than again someone who's draping it in some kind of constitutional theorizing. Ross, you're getting to I think which is going to be one of the key questions of the Trump administration, which is how much should people try to throw their bodies in front of obviously terrible decisions.
So you had 2017, 2018, 2019, you had a culture in the White House and in the larger government where people were throwing their bodies in front of what they viewed to be impulsive or catastrophic or terrible Trump decisions. And then by 2020, a lot of those people had been kind of cleared out and then you're beginning to get a lot of the same kind of conversation now. Okay, should the Senate just go ahead and confirm him so that the American people can see what the Trump vision is for the DOJ.
Isn't that what they should do? Should they stop throwing their bodies in front of bad decisions? And my bias is you throw your body in front of the bad decision because the bad decision can have terrible consequences. The counter argument to that is well, it's the consequences of the bad decision that move us through this moment.
I don't know that there's a perfect answer to that, but I do think wherever the line is of when the Senate should say Trump gets his way versus we're going to assert our independent judgment wherever that line is. It's far removed from this guy from Matt Gaetz. This is the kind of pick that I don't even know why the Senate has an advising role if it's just going to roll over for this person.
Right. And one of the things, I mean, you've had a lot of commentary on this from people saying Trump is, you know, he's owning the lives. It started the liboning has begun. And in the case of Gaetz, as far as I can tell, the people being owned are all of the Republicans who hate him. Liberals obviously don't like Matt Gaetz, but I think he's more of a kind of hate figure inside the Republican caucus.
Yes. And then he is like on MSNBC. I think right now you have Trump is giving Senate Republicans in an odd way, an out. Like John Cornyn, I think just before we recorded this said something to the effective, well, we need to see at least see what's in the ethics report. Right. So they may not, it's a totally possible gate sketch confirmed, but they can just reject him and say, we're protecting President Trump from Gates his own bad character.
Right. So that maybe where this goes, which, but which again leaves open the underlying question of how beholden an AG should be to the president. All right, speaking of areas where Trump appointees have tended to, if not throw their bodies in front of the president, at least steer the president in the past.
When we come back, we're going to talk first about the Tulsi Gabbard appointment, but more generally about the array of foreign policy picks Trump has made and what they tell us. So stay with us. We'll be right back. And we're back. So we're going to turn from President elect Trump's attorney general pick to his foreign policy pick. Along with Matt Gates for attorney general, the big pick at the same time was former Democratic Congresswoman, Tulsi Gabbard for director of national intelligence.
I think clearly a kind of gesture to what you might call the anti CIA wing of the Republican party also sort of anti interventionist paleo conservative isolationist, you can choose your term.
Gabbard is only one of a number of foreign policy picks that Trump has made and these include Marco Rubio for secretary of state Florida representative Mike Waltz for national security advisor congresswoman, congresswoman, at least to phonic for you and ambassador and maybe most notably in terms of it being a Trumpian surprise, the Fox News host and combat veteran Pete Higgseth for secretary of defense.
So David before the Higgseth pick certainly and before the Gabbard pick as well, the foreign policy picks struck me as essentially a reprise of Trump's first term where what he did in foreign policy was not pick figures associated with Trumpian populism directly. Obviously all of the figures involved have adapted themselves to Trumpism, but they they on foreign policy Rubio Waltz and Stefano are all what I would refer to and maybe disagree as kind of mainstream Republican foreign policy.
And in his first term, Trump basically worked his own kind of amoral realist calculations through a foreign policy team that was more conventional in its views and it seems like that could be happening again now, and I think that's a different case and Gabbard is a different case, but I wanted to give that reaction see what you thought about it.
And so I talked to Trump supporters just all the time and course of my daily life and what's really interesting is sort of seeing the dichotomy between maga and what you might call normy Republican and normy Republican basically takes the view that the real Donald Trump is the Donald Trump of 2017 2018 2019 that's with Rex Tillerson as secretary of state at the start, Mattis McMaster Kelly and they look back at that time and they they're nostalgic for it.
So they looked at the 2024 election with Trump was saying pretty radical things about foreign policy pretty radical things on a lot of fronts and saying he doesn't mean that that's just Trump being Trump that Trump's bluster. And those folks who believe that looked at the pick of Rubio in particular Stefano as well and said look these are mainstream Republicans. This is not an unusual crazy out there administration.
But they're mainstream Republicans and then you saw some consternation from maga which had heard all the campaign rhetoric and said, oh, we want him to do all that that's exactly what we want. So part of his coalition is voting for him saying, nah, he's not going to do what he says another whole part of this coalition is voting for him and saying, yeah, we want him to do exactly what he says.
So I felt like the Rubio's Stefano picks were much more in line with that kind of normy Republican view of Trump, which is lots of bluster, but at the end of the day, he's still broadly a Republican as we understand Republicans. And so I think the Rubio pick in particular amongst all of them sent that signal. And so it was a very interesting first of the big picks to come out.
And then you saw it, Ross, I'm sure you saw it that backlash on maga what from maga what are you doing with Rubio? And then here comes Gabbard, here comes Hegseth, which is these are two very different picks from Rubio and Stefano.
Well, let's talk about what makes them different because I feel like to me, Gabbard is ideologically different like to the extent that she sort of belongs to the Republican party now, she belongs to the to the Ron Paul wing of the Republican party, which is intensely anti interventionist, intensely skeptical of the national security state.
And you know, just fundamentally ideologically different from a Rubio Hegseth, I think, is a more complicated case where he is a guy who sort of began his career as part of a group of veterans advocating in defense of the surge in Iraq and the George W. Bush era.
He ended up as a Fox News host and in affect has become sort of very aggressively populist aggressively Trumpian, you know, if you look at things he said in the Trump era, he was more hawkish than Trump at some points on Iran and other things.
I don't think he fits neatly into the kind of ideological category as Gabbard, I think it's more than he's doesn't have normal foreign policy experience is much more of sort of a tattooed TV figure with, you know, substantial military experience who, who if I'm reading it is there to sort of fight a culture war in the Pentagon, you know, against wokeness DEI initiatives.
And I think that there are people in Trump's orbit who imagine that the US can address honestly address its recruiting shortfalls if we have a sort of martial figure with combat experience, a sort of tough guy figure as as secretary of defense, which again is maybe a bad idea is quite different from Gabbard, but what do you think?
Yeah, well, let me start with Gabbard. I mean, when it comes to Gabbard, I see her in many ways is the worst pick than hexeth. Gabbard isn't just a Ron Paul light figure. She's a Ron Paul light figure if Ron Paul seem to really have an affection for Assad and Syria and seem to have some much more sympathies to sort of the Vladimir Putin view of international relations and international affairs.
Very hostile to Ukraine in a way that Marco Rubio, for example, never would be, but the way that Pete hexeth has never shown. So I think when you're talking about Tulsi Gabbard, you're talking about somebody with a world view about America's role in the world, a world view about the defense establishment, a world view that it's about as far from conventional Republican as you can imagine. It is extraordinarily different from conventional Republican.
Hexeth is a different case. So, you know, I've seen a lot of opposition to him. None of that opposition sent around his military record. His military record is sterling. I mean, he served his country honorably. He served his country courageously.
The critiques that I have around him is similar to one of the critiques that I had around Matt Gaetz. Why are we giving the keys to these vast institutions to people who have no experience running virtually any kind of institution at all for one thing? So again, we're going to that competence point. You cannot equate ideology and competence. They're not the same thing. You can like someone's ideology. But if they don't have the right to do that, they're not going to be the same.
But if they don't have this record of accomplishment that indicates they're ready for this role, I mean, think about it this way. If you are running a multinational corporation, you're running Boeing. Do you hire a CNBC host to run Boeing if they've never run a company? That would be a dangerous move. That would be a dangerous hire. So I think here with Hexeth, what you're looking at is, yeah, he has an ideological view.
I would put it is he's more like an avatar of Christian Maga. He has Crusader tattoos, the Deus Volt tattoo So he's a TV host. He's served bravely and honorably But Russ I could tell you five six guys I served with an Iraq who are far more qualified to be sick death than he is
Right. No, I mean he's he has done some policy work Worked for veterans organizations was sort of touted briefly in the first term as a potential secretary for veterans affairs So he's not without some let's say sort of interest in military policy, but yes, he has no relevant
executive experience and I mean at a moment when the Pentagon obviously Everyone on the rightward side of the political spectrum thinks you know the Pentagon needs to be shifted in various ways to meet the Chinese threat to meet the
Bultipolar world you would have to imagine that he could only succeed if his undersecretaries were all amazing bureaucrats basically Exactly, which you know is not impossible, but does not seem especially likely to be the case All right, I want to pull up from both of these questions and talk about
What generally we're learning about the Trump governing style so far, but we'll talk about that and finish up when we come back stay with us And We're back so we've talked about the attorney general pick we've talked about the foreign policy picks I want to just pull up were you know what a week a week and two days into the preamble to the second Trump administration What can we say generally David about what we're seeing is this time
Different are we just doing four years of the same Trumpian style? What do you think?
Oh, it's it's beginning differently than it did last time I mean I vividly remember in November 2016 moving into December 2016 One of the first things that you saw was Trump bringing in a parade of some of the most respected people in Republican politics or some of the most respected people in the military who was bringing in a parade of people who Had a calming effect on the American people not entirely of course we know it was a very chaotic time then too
I was I don't remember being that calm, but for sure. Yeah, okay But I didn't know who Trump would nominate and if you're gonna nominate General Mattis if you're gonna nominate I didn't love the Rex Tillerson pick, but he's a very serious person So if you're gonna nominate Mattis Tillerson McMaster Kelly These are all very very serious people and so from the get go a lot of the alarmism around Trump to a lot of Republicans was already seen as Overblown because look
Does General Mattis work for a dangerous man does a charming master? I mean you could go down the list and then Here what you're seeing is he's going ahead and just running straight to the 2020 chaotic Trump he's just stampeding straight there and so that
2020 chaotic Trump was surrounding himself with cranks and fringe figures and that's exactly what he's doing with some Not all of these cabinet appointments So what we're seeing is as I said earlier is just the continuation of the 2020 2021 Lurch into what would you might call more pure Trumpism?
So I just want to though focus on what to me is sort of the difference right you said some but not all of the picks to me It seems like by picking Matt Gates Trump is telling us that he means to be sort of personally Intensely invested in the trumpification whatever that may mean of the Department of Justice and you know related things by picking Marco Rubio Mike Waltz Along with
Tulsi Gabbard and Gabbard in an important but a role that is not as historically important in setting foreign policy a secretary of state That says to me that on foreign policy there's less of a full Trumpian agenda that he's just going to push through and
It's more that he is in effect doing something similar to the first term But he has a different coalition now and he's ensuring basically that he's got you know a group of conventional Republicans plus a representative of We'll call it the like anti-war right for one of a better term in Gabbard
Plus whatever Hegseth is but that seems to me quite different and if you're looking for reassurance I would rather get the full trumpification in domestic policy than in foreign policy right now and and I don't think you know I think we would disagree slightly maybe more than slightly I don't think it's a bad thing to have a foreign policy team with someone with you know what you would consider somewhat fringe views
In the room for for debates. I would not want Gabbard a secretary of state But Gabbard in the room does not alarm me that much I I will say that of the picks. I don't like the Gabbard pick at all Utterly opposed to the very very anti-David French pick. Yes Yeah, there's nothing about the Gabbard pick Not you know there's nothing about her cozying up to Assad. There's nothing about her Comments about Russia and Ukraine nothing about that. I think that that I am entirely in disagreement with that
But I will agree with you. She is less dangerous at where she is than if she was secretary of state for example or secretary of defense and And I'm also going to agree with you that the full trumpification of domestic policy is also less
Minicing than the full trumpification of foreign policy because there are multiple checks that you can impose on a President domestically he has a much more free hand much more free hand in foreign policy and so That trumpification domestically is much easier to oppose and concrete and specific ways
Compared to if he wants to just cut off Ukraine. He can cut off Ukraine. He can just do that and so I think that you know, I'm gonna agree with you on that Yeah, I mean to me this looks like a foreign policy team that like the last foreign policy team He's gonna, you know make requests and they're gonna end up Presenting him with a bunch of different options that steer him in one direction or another and my concern as someone who is
I think you know someone less hawkish than you or more concerned about American overstretch is actually that this team while it has Engabored again a sort of anti-war figure it lacks a kind of Realist center like someone who has a strategic vision of how America is gonna rebalance itself in the world right now
I don't I don't see that appointment. I see sort of more I mean maybe Rubio has ideas along those lines But I see more sort of Conventional, you know, we face our enemies wherever they are Republican thinking plus I mean who knows who knows what P tech Seth will represent So can I I know I'm a move guest and not a move host can I ask a move host a question? Yes
Does JD Vance play a role in foreign policy? Do you see him is providing some sort of ballast on foreign policy in a Trump administration? What kind of portfolio do you see him having because He's obviously much less hawkish on Ukraine than I am for example, yes But right how much of a role does he play in the Trump administration do you foresee?
I honestly I wish I could tell you that I can see through the veil and call up the future vice president That's have him tell me but I have no special Insight my sense from these picks would be that he is not exerting strong
Influence over foreign policy. I mean he defined himself to me and the interview I did with him as a realist I don't think he defines himself where Gabard is right and And I think he's on has a good relationship with Rubio in the Senate But obviously they have differences on foreign policy
So I think the Vance role remains to be seen But the one other thing about Vance is that we haven't seen a lot of economic policy appointments from Trump as yet and you would expect Vance is sort of Populist side to have potentially some influence on those Certainly, I think the people who for good or ill were like, you know, Vance is gonna end up being the brains of this White House I mean we haven't even talked about Elon Musk and his role
But I would say that the real might might take away at the moment especially from the Gates pick and the Hegseth pick And the way that these picks are being made sort of this the way they seem like a surprise even to people on Trump's team is
The real continuity with the first term is there's no JD Vance as the secret brain Elon Musk, you know, this is Donald Trump's administration Yes, there may be a JD Vance administration someday, but this is for now just the Trump administration Redux with all that that may entail and on that note I'm being handed a note no, I'm not being handed a note because I don't have anyone here to hand me one But I would be remiss if I did not mention that as we conclude this recording
There's breaking news and a political report that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Will indeed be put forward as secretary of health and Human services another lightning rod controversial Trump being Trump kind of pick that I wish we could talk about now David, but I'm Ross
I thought they couldn't get worse than Matt Gates All right, well that's that's a strong statement and I Imagine that this show will have many more opportunities to talk about all of these characters and all of these issues And I'm sure that we will have you back at some point soon to do so
So thank you again David for joining me in a pinch and we'll talk again soon. Thanks so much Ross Thanks so much for joining our conversation Give matter of opinion a follow on your favorite podcast app and leave us a nice review while you're there to let other people know why they should listen
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