Republicans and conservatives who once dreamed that Donald Trump’s emergence on the scene was an aberration will have to grapple with another in a steady stream of hard truths: His reascension to the presidency is creating a new foreign policy establishment for the Republican Party. Out are any remaining Reaganites: conservatives who value strong, active, and strategic American leadership in the world. In are those dedicated to, for lack of a better term, a Tucker Carlson-ism of American retrenchment.
Multiple midcareer national security and foreign policy experts with years of experience on Capitol Hill or in the executive branch—Republicans in good standing who are not reflexive haters of the current president—have been denied posts in the Trump administration, I’m told, for reasons having little to do with whether they could provide sound advice or craft good policy. It has a lot to do with sweeping the old order aside.
In my conversations with multiple qualified Republicans who have been nixed or not even considered for foreign policy jobs in the Trump administration, there appears to be no single litmus test that kept them out of serving at the Pentagon, State Department, or the White House. Many were not sure exactly what they had done or said to get denied.
What is clear, however, is that they fail to measure up on the only quality that matters: They’re not in the new foreign policy realists’ club made up of powerful Trump ultra-loyalists. Meanwhile, plenty of jobs are going to people with limited experience or a record of expressing noxious views that would have automatically disqualified them in an earlier era.
The poster child for this is Darren Beattie, who was appointed acting undersecretary for public diplomacy and public affairs at the State Department last month. Beattie, a past guest on Carlson’s television and streaming shows, left a White House speechwriting job during the first Trump administration after it became known he had spoken at a conference where several prominent white nationalists had also appeared. And in recent years Beattie has tweeted musings on race in America and foreign affairs, stating that white men are treated worse in America than the persecuted Uyghurs have been by the Chinese government.
“Competent white men must be in charge if you want things to work,” he tweeted just in October. “Unfortunately, our entire national ideology is predicated on coddling the feelings of women and minorities, and demoralizing competent white men.”
Besides a tendency toward bigotry (or palling around with bigots), what distinguishes these hires from the aforementioned rejects is their alignment with Carlson and his hand-picked selection for Trump’s running mate, J.D. Vance, on a more nationalist foreign policy. This ideology views America’s attempts at leadership in world affairs as inherently toxic, poisoned by a left-wing elite that has the interests of everyone but actual Americans in mind. Carlson’s rhetorical shield against claims that it’s not in America’s interests to oppose authoritarian strongmen like Vladimir Putin is an apt description of the zero-sum calculus that nationalists espouse: “Why is Putin my enemy? He’s never done anything to me.”
Anyone deemed faithless to this broad viewpoint—by word, deed, or association—need not apply to the current Trump administration.
At the head of this bulwark against these would-be subversives is Sergio Gor, the unctuous director of the White House Presidential Personnel Office (PPO) who has immense power to spike new hires. Aiding Gor are not just his team at PPO but a network of younger political operatives, activists, and writers who work together as a sort of unofficial campaign war room. A poor review from this nationalist peanut gallery can sink a hire: They scour the internet, searching for evidence that a potential hire has said or written the wrong things, according to someone familiar with this unofficial vetting process.
This group of dozens of 20- and 30-somethings share their findings over text messages or during bull sessions at the hottest MAGA hangouts in Washington, Butterworth’s on Capitol Hill or the Ned, a private club two blocks from the White House. It’s certainly a twist on the typically staid process in other administrations that sift through résumés and balance qualifications with political patronage to find suitable candidates for the 4,000-plus political appointments a president must make.
“You’d think this administration would try to bring in competent people who know how to do what Trump did the first time,” a former Republican staffer said. “Instead they’re keeping out highly competent Reaganites aligned with Trump 45 and they’re bringing in people who are worse than Obama leftists because they claim to be surrendering in the name of macho ‘strength’ and ‘realism.’”
Those witnessing from the outside the effective blackballing of Reaganite, peace-through-strength personnel from high-level national-security jobs, say they fear an ideologically uniform slate of advisers and policymakers will undermine the foreign policy of Trump, who they insist is no strict ideologue. Even worse for those who want the president to be successful on the world stage, Trump could be served by below-replacement-level officials in important positions.
Consider Katherine Thompson, currently the acting assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs. The Senate-confirmed position is a principal adviser to the defense secretary on all things concerning strategy and policy involving other nations and international organizations like NATO. It’s the sort of job that Thompson, who until earlier this year was the national security adviser to Sen. Mike Lee of Utah, very well may be qualified for.
But contrast her résumé with those of two others who have held the post in recent years. For three years during the Obama administration, the job was held by Elissa Slotkin, at that time a former CIA analyst who had held staff positions at the White House and the State Department before going to the Pentagon. Slotkin is now a Democratic U.S. senator from Michigan. Or consider Robert Karem, a longtime national security aide on Capitol Hill to Republicans like Mitch McConnell and Eric Cantor who also worked for Vice President Dick Cheney and as a research fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute—all before he was named to the same assistant secretary position.
On the other hand Thompson, who did not respond to a request for comment Monday, lacks the extensive experience and varied background her predecessors had. Since she graduated from college in 2017, she has worked for two Trump allies in the Senate, Lee and Josh Hawley of Missouri, plus in an entry-level role at the Heritage Foundation. But what matters much more than any credentials is her demonstrated membership in the club. Her X feed shows Thompson is intensely loyal to Trump, dismissive of the Reaganites, and aligned with the new foreign policy of retrenchment.
“Bridge Colby is a man in the arena, pushing back against failed national security establishment dogma and taking the arrows that come when one dares to question,” Thompson wrote in November of Elbridge Colby, a chief proponent of the new realism and Trump’s nominee for the top policy position at the Pentagon.
When Republicans start talking up the foreign policy achievements of Trump’s first administration, there are a few greatest hits: The Abraham Accords normalizing relations between Israel and several Gulf Arab states; the withdrawal from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action with Iran, otherwise known as the Iran nuclear deal; the killing of Qassem Suleimani, leader of Iran’s Quds force and a designated terrorist since 2005; and a renewed focus on the threat from China. What’s remarkable is that most of the advisers involved in those decisions, from former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to Avi Berkowitz, the young lawyer who led the Abraham Accords negotiations, are nowhere to be found in this administration.
In much the same way that Trump’s signature domestic accomplishment of his first term—the reforms of the tax code to deliver rate cuts for millions of Americans—was the brainchild of movement conservatives, the president’s foreign policy achievements were thanks to his advisers’ ability to shape existing ideas to fit Trump’s preference for tangible “wins.”
The parallel may go further. Trump appears to be squandering the goodwill he earned on the economy in the first term by going whole hog on tariffs. And on foreign policy, he may find himself hampered by a narrow cohort of strict ideologues who appeal to his Jacksonian id for regional hegemony. If they are successful in pulling the country back from its global leadership role, a more passive America could make the sort of legacy-building wins he craves—brokering peace treaties and staving off wars—harder to come by.
Or, more likely, the Trump administration’s embrace of full-on Carlson-ism is a more accurate reflection of where the president truly wants to take the country. If so, he’s building the right team.
