Glance through any post-election voter interview and you will inevitably find someone who mentions “America first” when explaining his or her vote. They understand the term in varying ways, but the throughline is the belief that Donald Trump is a strong leader who will steadfastly pursue America’s national interests.
Sorry, but that is deluded. Even by the strongman standard, Trump is not securing America. His nominees are not just unqualified; they are anti-qualified. If he were attempting to sabotage America’s interests, it’s hard to see how he would do things differently.
Someone who cared about America’s security would never dream of nominating a weekend TV host with no relevant experience in running large organizations to serve as secretary of defense, far less someone who has an alcohol problem, white nationalist sympathies and a history of sexual misconduct. Many Republican senators are minimizing the credible accusations against Peter Hegseth, so perhaps a primer is in order about why character matters.
It matters for all officials if you care about honest, responsible government (an antique taste perhaps). For those in sensitive national security posts though, good character is more than desirable; it’s essential. If a defense secretary is drunk during a crisis, lives can be lost. And if he has a history of sexual assault, it’s possible, even likely, that there may be more unreported episodes out there that could be exploited by an enemy to blackmail him.
The choice of Tulsi Gabbard for director of national intelligence is even less explicable. Her appalling judgment comes into sharp focus this week with the fall of Bashar al-Assad.
Gabbard’s outstanding trait has been warmth toward dictators. In 2017, she traveled to Syria and met with Assad not once but twice. Like so many political pilgrims, Gabbard saw what she wanted to see, not the reality staring her in the face. In 2017, she had every reason to know that Assad had not only used chemical weapons against the Syrian people but had welcomed Russian assistance in his civil war, and that Iranian-allied troops and Russian fighters had conducted operations against American interests in the region.
Gabbard embraces conspiracy theories
No one knows what Assad and Gabbard discussed in their two hours together, but soon after she emerged, Gabbard was expressing skepticism that Assad had really used poison gas, and by the time of her 2020 presidential run, she was citing full-on conspiracy sites that claimed the chemical attacks were false flag operations designed to bring the United States into the war.
Her credulousness — if that’s what it is — looks particularly obscene this week, as stories are coming out about the grotesque human rights abuses committed by Assad in Sednaya prison and at other places around Syria. Within hours of Assad’s departure, people swarmed the prisons in hopes of finding loved ones alive. At Sednaya, they forced open the doors of the prison morgue and found bodies in conditions reminiscent of the Holocaust or the Cambodian genocide.
The New York Times reported some of the grisly details: “One woman shrieked at what she found. Most of the bodies were emaciated, the skin hanging off their bones. The shoulders of one man was covered in the scars of puncture wounds. Another had a thick red scar around his neck — a rope burn, the examiners believed. Yet another man was missing his eyes.”
Some of the women prisoners were found with toddlers in their cells, doubtless the result of prison guards raping them. Rape and torture were routine in the prison Amnesty International labeled a “human slaughterhouse.” Human rights groups vary in their estimates of the number of Syrians murdered by their designer-clothes-clad, Bentley-driving dictator, but the range is between 13,000 and 30,000 dead at Sednaya alone since the uprising against Assad began in 2011. The total of all Syrians killed since 2011 in the civil war is estimated to be 620,000, with 12 million refugees.
Gabbard demonstrated similar credulousness about Russia and Putin, mouthing so many Kremlin talking points that Russian TV hosts referred to her as “Russia’s girlfriend.” She repeated the propaganda that the United States and NATO were responsible for Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, tweeting in 2022 that “This war and suffering could have easily been avoided if Biden Admin/NATO had simply acknowledged Russia’s legitimate security concerns.” She has denounced Volodymyr Zelenskyy as corrupt and repeated the baseless smear (originated in the Kremlin) that the United States was operating biological weapons laboratories in Ukraine and was responsible for sabotaging the Nord Stream gas pipeline.
There is something wrong with Gabbard. The pull of conspiracism — particularly anti-American conspiracism — seems to be her overriding mental frame. In this, she and Trump (and RFK Jr. and so many others) are united. If she were merely a member of Congress, her tropism toward murderous dictators would be disturbing, but as head of America’s intelligence community, it’s utterly insane. This is the furthest thing from America First.
Mona Charen is policy editor of The Bulwark and host of the “Beg to Differ” podcast.
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