For over a month, even as Pete Hegseth has faced extensive scrutiny over his personal conduct and fitness to be Defense secretary, high-level Republicans have quietly considered former Democratic Rep. Tulsi Gabbard to be President-elect Donald Trump’s most imperiled nominee.
Hegseth’s appearance Tuesday before the Senate Armed Services Committee illustrates why Gabbard still may yet be confirmed to oversee the nation’s intelligence services.
The disproportionate attention to Hegseth’s appointment by the press and senators in both parties, as demonstrated in the hearing’s onslaught of pointed questions from Democrats and the robust Republican defense, has been a gift to Gabbard.
Since Hegseth’s November nomination, Democrats have focused the bulk of their attention on the former Fox & Friends weekend host, effectively taking their cues from the extensive press coverage of his drinking, sexual conduct and views on women in combat. For a time, when Senate Republicans seemed to be wavering on Hegseth and Trump was privately floating alternatives, that was logical.
Yet, intimidated by threats hurled by Trump’s allies, Republican lawmakers have in recent weeks rallied to Hegseth and many of them have made clear that, absent new and more damaging revelations, they will likely support his nomination. At the same time, Trump has made clear he won’t yank Hegseth’s nomination.
Surprisingly, though, this GOP show of support has not prompted Senate Democrats to pivot toward confronting Gabbard. That has surprised, and even disappointed, their Republican counterparts, some of whom told me that they would be more willing to make common cause to stop the former Democrat from Hawaii, who holds isolationist and libertarian national security views outside the Senate GOP mainstream. Why wouldn’t Democrats shift toward a softer target, especially knowing that few of their Republican colleagues want to cast one, if that many, votes against a Trump nominee?
Yes, this is a commentary on the bargain pre-Trump Republicans have made. They may malign the press and Democrats, but they’d sure like the media to dig up damaging stories on Gabbard so that Democrats can amplify them, which in turn would prompt Trump to grow irritated at the skeptical coverage and abandon her. A version of the Matt Gaetz appointment, in other words. That’s much easier than publicly opposing Gabbard, to say nothing of voting her down on the Senate floor.
Profiles in courage, it’s not.
Of course, it’s hardly a secret that Senate Republicans have misgivings about Gabbard: one aide to a senior lawmaker told me that, in a secret ballot, she’d lose at least 15 Republicans (and that may be a conservative estimate).
One of the few willing to go public with their concerns is Sen. John Curtis, the Utah freshman. Curtis told my colleague Alex Burns Tuesday morning at a POLITICO forum in Washington that Gabbard has been too “low-profile” and that he needs “more information” before he can consider her nomination.
His unease may be ameliorated by the one-on-one meeting he’s yet to have with Gabbard. She’s also sought to mollify Republicans by disavowing her past opposition to an important surveillance tool, the section in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act which allows the U.S. to spy on the electronic communications of non-Americans without a warrant.
That pledge, as expedient as it may be, offered enough cover to win over Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.), who sits on the Intelligence Committee.
Seemingly unmoved was The Wall Street Journal editorial page, which still reflects the views of Republican internationalists.
Trump’s payoff to Gabbard for endorsing his candidacy, the Journal noted, “doesn’t mean the Senate must accept that political transaction, especially on national security.”
It is, as one well-placed Senate Republican official explained to me, easier for the GOP to swallow Hegseth.
His military background, years on Fox News and well-documented views on so-called wokeness in the military effectively make him “one of us,” said this official. Few Senate Republicans have any such connections to Gabbard, who backed Sen. Bernie Sanders’s 2016 presidential bid before her rightward drift.
Moreover, Hegseth can explain away his drinking and womanizing by vowing to stay sober, pointing to his current marriage and Christian awakening. His personal shortcomings are just that, in other words, and they’re now in the past.
Gabbard’s challenges with Republicans, on the other hand, are on substance and therefore more difficult to undo.
What bodes well for Gabbard, however, is that this is the Trump era, and policy takes a backseat to fealty. Look no further than the rapid capitulation of House hard-liners to Speaker Mike Johnson earlier this month once it became about Trump’s preference rather than the party’s agenda.
Not even the most Trump-skeptical Senate Republican wants to begin the year on a bad foot with the president-elect.
That’s to say nothing of pro-Trump lawmakers whose hawkish views diverge from those of Gabbard. Consider Sen. Tom Cotton, the Arkansan who now wields the Intelligence panel gavel and harbors high ambitions in his party. He surely has no interest in beginning his committee leadership by publicly torpedoing Trump’s choice for director of national intelligence.
Republicans well-connected in the national security sphere also believe there’s something else at work that may save Gabbard: the hope that she can effectively be marginalized by Trump’s choice to run the CIA, former Rep. John Ratcliffe.
These Republicans argue that the DNI role, created in 2004 on the recommendation of the 9/11 commission, is new enough that it lacks inherent clout and the CIA is still tasked with crafting the president’s daily brief and running clandestine activity. (Of course, part of the reason the post was created was because of the so-called stove-piping between intelligence agencies ahead of 9/11, a practice that could return with a weak or distrusted DNI.)
With Hegseth poised to be cleared by the Armed Services panel — that vote has been set for Inauguration Day — and headed toward the floor, Gabbard’s fate will be determined by time and attention. How quickly can Senate Republicans set a vote and how much scrutiny does she draw in Trump’s sure-to-be frenetic first days?
Lawmakers in both parties who’ve met with Gabbard, an Army veteran, told me they found her to be pleasant and even persuasive but without a deep well of knowledge on foreign affairs and intelligence work. She also lacks the practiced communications skills of a TV veteran like Hegseth.
Her hearing, therefore, will be pivotal and perhaps the most high-stakes of that of any of Trump’s appointees.
This all would have been far easier on Senate Republicans had Trump tapped Gabbard for, say, the Veterans Affairs Department rather than overseeing the nation’s spycraft.
But since when does Donald J. Trump make life easy for traditional Republicans?