Three Trump cabinet picks who should not be confirmed

Donald Trump has “flooded the zone” with controversial selections to staff his administration. The most controversial one — Matt Gaetz — quickly fell by the wayside because (1) the House Ethics Committee apparently was about to find that he engaged in serious sexual misconduct and (2) very few people like him.

Pete Hegseth seemed destined for a similar outcome due mainly to a criminal complaint filed by a woman who accused him of sexual assault. However, no charges were ever filed against Hegseth, and his meetings with key Senators may have gone reasonably well.

If Senators come away from Hegseth’s confirmation hearing believing him innocent of criminal wrongdoing and capable of running the Defense Department, notwithstanding allegations of mismanagement in prior, far less demanding, positions, he should be confirmed, given the deference owed to any president.

In my view, three of Trump’s selections should not be confirmed. One is his choice for Secretary of Labor, Lori Chavez-DeRemer. The case against her is set forth here.

But Chavez-DeRemer will have the support of Senate Democrats (which tells you something, right there). She will be confirmed.

The two other selectees I think shouldn’t be confirmed are Robert Kennedy Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard. Both are former Democrats, but don’t figure to gain much (if any) support from Democratic Senators. Thus, Republican Senators can defeat them, if several are of a mind too.

Kennedy strikes me as a disastrous pick for Secretary of Health and Human Services, primarily because of his positions on vaccinations. Megan McArdle lays out this case here. She writes:

It’s nice for [Kennedy] to acknowledge that polio is worth preventing. But when it comes to the proposed head of the Department of Health and Human Services, you’d rather that went without saying. The reason it doesn’t is that Kennedy has spent much of his life casting doubt upon one of the greatest public health achievements in human history.

We’ve eradicated smallpox, brought polio to near extinction, and made various other killing, blinding and crippling diseases into rare curiosities. Yet that victory remains fragile thanks to the efforts of people like Kennedy. Vaccination rates are declining, and diseases such as measles, which used to kill hundreds of people a year, are rising: In 2023, the United States had four measles outbreaks and 59 cases, while this year, we had 16 outbreaks and 283 cases. Only 92.6 percent of kindergartners had received the full four doses of polio vaccine in the most recent data, and though this is still above the 80 percent vaccination rate thought to provide herd immunity, several states, such as Indiana and Idaho, are inching close to that line.

Has Kennedy received a bum rap from those who criticize his positions on vaccines. I don’t think so. Neither does McArdle:

I tried to approach [Kennedy’s 2023 book Vax-Unvax: Let the Science Speak] with an open mind. I have many quarrels with the public health establishment and could easily believe that officials had gone overboard trying to vaccinate everyone for everything, just as they pushed hard for coronavirus vaccine mandates long after it became clear that the vaccines could not prevent transmission.

My mind snapped shut when I saw Kennedy and co-author Brian Hooker cite Andrew Wakefield, who wrote a famous paper linking vaccines to autism, as an example of “the systematic gaslighting and vilification of physicians and scientists who dare to challenge vaccine orthodoxies.” In fact, Wakefield’s paper was retracted, and his medical license withdrawn, because he violated research standards and failed to disclose a clear conflict of interest: He accepted funding from a lawyer representing parents who believed vaccines had harmed their children. An investigative series published by the British Medical Journal in 2011 found that “not one of the 12 cases reported in the 1998 Lancet paper was free of misrepresentation … in no single case could the medical records be fully reconciled with the descriptions, diagnoses, or histories published in the journal.”

Pushing conspiracy theories is part of a broader pattern of weak evidence bolstered by dubious assertions. Superficially compelling vaccine-skeptical studies turn out, upon closer examination, to have serious methodological flaws, to which the authors apply ludicrously lopsided standards: randomized, placebo-controlled vaccine trials are criticized for using the wrong kind of placebo, while an unrepresentative online survey of home-schooling parents, which didn’t even have medical records for its subjects, is presented as plausible evidence that unvaccinated kids are healthier than vaccinated ones.

This, in a nutshell, is Kennedy’s modus operandi: half-truths deployed in support of a great lie. Senators tempted to trust his professed support for polio vaccination should remember that. They should also remember that, last year, he told podcaster Lex Fridman that contaminated polio vaccines might have killed more people than they saved (there’s no evidence for that), and that one of his advisers has petitioned the government to withdraw or suspend polio vaccines.

(Emphasis added)

Like any president, Trump is owed considerable deference in picking his Cabinet. But Kennedy’s record is too awful to be overcome by even a significant amount of deference and some “confirmation conversions.”

Moreover, Kennedy’s nomination seems less the product of Trump’s judgment and more the product of Kennedy’s agreement to drop out of the presidential race and support Trump. The incoming president may be thus indebted to Kennedy, but Republican Senators aren’t. I hope enough of them vote against the guy to deny him confirmation.

Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s choice to be the Director of National Intelligence is also dreadful. In early 2017, Gabbard made a secret trip to Syria alongside Dennis Kucinich, the former far-left congressman, where she met with Bashar al-Assad.

Shortly after that meeting, Gabbard said she was “skeptical” of U.S. conclusions that Assad had used chemical weapons against civilians in Khan Shaykhun. She cited the flawed intelligence that led the United States to invade Iraq in 2003.

Later, the Trump administration and a joint Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons-U.N. investigation concluded that the Syrian government was behind the attack. But Gabbard continued to question its origins while campaigning for president in 2020.

This raises a question about how Gabbard forms her views on intelligence. Did the intelligence failure in Iraq cause her to doubt all intelligence reports, including those vouched for by Trump’s team? Or does she just doubt intelligence reports that cast our adversaries in a bad light.

Either way, she shouldn’t be the Director of National Intelligence

The latter view — that Gabbard is, in effect, an apologist for our adversaries — finds support in her approach to Vladimir Putin. In 2022 she endorsed one of Russia’s main justifications for invading Ukraine: the alleged existence of dozens of U.S.-funded biolabs working on some of the world’s nastiest pathogens.

Moscow claimed Ukraine was using the labs to create deadly bioweapons similar to COVID-19 that could be used against Russia, so that Russian President Vladimir Putin had no choice but to invade Ukraine to protect his country. In fact, the labs are public and part of an international effort to control outbreaks and stop bioweapons.

Gabbard’s willful misreading of intelligence and her apologetics for Assad and Putin should disqualify her from the position of Director of National Intelligence.

And let’s not forget Gabbard’s positions on Trump’s foreign policy during his first term. She slammed his plan for a wall on the southern border, his policies on Iran, and his support for Saudi Arabia in its war with Houthi rebels. In 2018, she even referred to Trump as “Saudi Arabia’s b----” in a charming social media post, according to this report.

Furthermore, in 2020 Gabbard condemned Trump over his decision to order a U.S. drone strike against Iran’s top general, Qassem Soleimani. She called it a dangerous and unconstitutional escalation.

To me, Gabbard looks like the new Joe Biden — wrong about every consequential foreign, military, and intelligence issue that comes up.

Some observers say that Gabbard will not be able to influence intelligence and security policy because the DNI job won’t put her in a position to do so. Jim Geraghty made this argument here.

But no one as clueless about intelligence and national security should be rewarded with the DNI job, regardless of how influential, or not, that position is. Furthermore, Geraghty and others are too sanguine.

As DNI, Gabbard will likely have access to Trump. She might well be in the room where the merits of key policies are discussed.

It’s well known that Trump likes to hear officials with opposing positions argue them out. And Trump has been known to change his mind as a result of the give-and-take (and maybe depending on whom he talks to last). Whatever the formal limitations on the DNI, we cannot assume she won’t be influential.

To be clear, I don’t favor uniform thinking for all national defense-national security advisers. Trump should have access to conflicting views on such issues from within the administration. This should include those who are skeptical about interventionist foreign policies and who don’t readily accept consensus views on intelligence matters.

But there should be no room for an serial apologist for the likes of Assad and Putin — just as there should be no room for a vaccination skeptic as head of the Department of Health and Human Services.