Trump Has Given Up

No longer interested in governing, he is filled with rage and obsessed with revenge

Another day of many errands and meetings, so another short, informal post.

Donald Trump will never admit that his gratuitous Iran war has been a total disaster. But the debacle has clearly broken him. So we are now saddled with a president who has given up governing, but will maintain his grip on power wherever he can. And his power will be exclusively focused on rage and revenge.

Hence Trump has appointed Bill Pulte as the acting Director of National Intelligence (DNI), a position critical to national security.

The word “acting” is crucial. The statute creating the position of DNI explicitly requires that the appointee “shall have extensive national security expertise.” Pulte, the head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, has no background in anything related to national security. So Trump is trying to bypass a Congressional confirmation process that would put Pulte under the spotlight. Even Republicans might shed their slavish obedience at this point, given Trump’s plummeting poll numbers and his betrayal of John Cornyn.

But pointing out that Pulte is unqualified for his new job doesn’t convey the extent to which Trump is trolling America with this new appointment.

For Pulte isn’t merely unqualified for a sensitive national security position. He’s unqualified, intellectually and morally, for any government position. All he has are the qualifications that matter to Trump: he is a shameless lackey and willing hitman for Trump’s vendettas.

Who is Pulte? He’s a wealthy nepo-baby, the grandson of the founder of PulteGroup, the nation’s third-largest residential builder. He likes to present himself as the face of the family business, but as a devastating New York Times profile last year explained, he was pushed off PulteGroup’s board in 2020. The family’s charitable foundation has issued a statement that “Bill Pulte does not represent, nor is he a spokesperson for, all members of the Pulte family, in any capacity.”

The Times goes on to note that

These days, one of Bill Pulte’s primary connections to the residential real estate business is a group of five aging mobile home parks he owns in Florida, some badly in need of repair.

How has Pulte handled his falling out with his family?

Mr. Pulte has spent years battling with his aunt, the foundation’s president, over his grandfather’s legacy and other issues. In social media posts he has called her “totally fake and phony” and has written that she “defecates” about him and his late grandfather’s legacy on the foundation website.

Thousands of nasty political posts on social media landed Pulte a powerful post in the Trump administration. And while his former role in his family’s business may have led to his appointment as director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, his real job has been weaponizing the agency as a tool against Trump’s perceived enemies — weaponization that is being investigated by the Government Accountability Office as a potential misuse of authority. Pulte confected false claims of mortgage fraud to try to push out Lisa Cook, the only black woman on the Federal Reserve Board. He has leveled similar trumped-up charges against Letitia James, New York’s Attorney General, and several Democratic politicians. And he pushed groundless fraud accusations against Jerome Powell, the former Federal Reserve chair, who stood in the way of Trump’s attempt to politicize monetary policy.

Pulte is a bumbling hatchet man: so far none of his attempted lynchings have succeeded. But for Trump, willingness to engage in unethical behavior is all that matters.

What will Pulte do as America’s senior intelligence official? You might think that even someone like Trump, who has no desire to serve the national interest, who sees wars only as ways to enrich himself and distract from his domestic woes, would want accurate intelligence. After all, if you’re going to wag the dog, you don’t want the dog to bite back the way it has in Iran.

But Trump appears to have given up on governing — even governing aimed at consolidating his own power and legacy. He wants to punish everyone he imagines has wronged him but has lost all interest in making the government work, even for nefarious purposes. So he don’t need no intelligence, just someone who will indulge his rage. And that will be Pulte’s job.

Just to be clear, I am by no means saying that Trump’s descent into rage-madness has ended the threat to U.S. democracy. The Koch-backed Federalist Society, which now controls the Supreme Court, is going all in on rigging U.S. elections with the goal of locking in permanent Republican rule. The architects of Project 2025 are marching ahead with their goal of turning the federal government into a spoils system that answers only to billionaires and their political pawns. Politicization of research funding is getting very close to destroying a scientific community that took generations to build.

But Trump himself is, at this point, little more than a festering ball of anger and hate.

MUSICAL CODA