Bill Pulte does not have a habit of publicly saying admiring things about Vladimir Putin or Bashar al-Assad, so in that one respect his appointment as acting director of national intelligence represents an improvement over Tulsi Gabbard.
In every other respect, the appointment is baffling. Pulte has no intelligence background; no national security expertise. He’s an ultra-partisan with a highly quarrelsome personality and great inherited wealth. Beyond that, there’s not much to say about his record of public or personal achievement.
[Shane Harris: Tulsi Gabbard takes the exit ramp]
Yet Pulte does have a disgraceful record of putting the prosecutorial powers of government at President Trump’s vindictive service. In his role as director of the Federal Housing Financing Agency, Pulte referred Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook and New York Attorney General Letitia James for criminal prosecution for mistakes on mortgage documents so commonplace that they were also committed by Trump Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent.
In making sense of this otherwise bizarre appointment, Friedrich Hayek said it best in his 1944 book about totalitarian systems, The Road to Serfdom, in the chapter “Why the Worst Get on Top”:
The totalitarian leader must collect around him a group which is prepared voluntarily to submit to that discipline they are to impose by force upon the rest of the people.
Advancement within a totalitarian group or party depends largely on a willingness to do immoral things.
To be a useful assistant in the running of a totalitarian state, therefore, a man must be prepared to break every moral rule he has ever known if this seems necessary to achieve the end set for him.
Public criticism or even expressions of doubt must be suppressed because they tend to weaken support of the regime.
[Conor Friedersdorf: Show me the person, and I’ll show you the crime]
America under Donald Trump is not a totalitarian state. Free institutions are too strong here. Trump’s methods are too chaotic and lazy. Trump’s goals are more fundamentally larcenous and criminal than ideological and political. But Trump does aspire to cripple the rule of law—and the proper functioning of institutions—at every opportunity. In Bill Pulte, he has the perfect tool for any improper goal, an appointee who is plainly willing “to do immoral things.” Friedrich Hayek had Pulte’s number before either Pulte or Trump was even born.
The director of national intelligence exists to coordinate the government’s vast information-gathering capabilities so that the country is never again blindsided as it was on 9/11. It’s a job that demands judgment, wisdom, expertise, and integrity. To install Bill Pulte in this high position is to put every American at risk of abuses of power at home and dangers from abroad. Whether this latest Trump brain-burp is more outrageous or more absurd is hard to say. But maybe we don’t have to choose. It’s both.
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