Trump just won’t let go of his loyal if totally unqualified DNI.
Photo: Eric Lee/Bloomberg/Getty Images
With celebrations of his 80th birthday and the nation’s 250th birthday to look forward to, you might think that Donald Trump would be in a good mood. Instead, he is reportedly in a state of perpetual fury these days. Iran won’t bend to Trump’s demands. His political advisers talked him into an Iowa gubernatorial-primary endorsement that failed, damaging his reputation as GOP kingmaker. And his allies in Congress keep letting him down. They took his ballroom-security money out of a must-pass bill while publicly trashing the “anti-weaponization fund” he had devised to pay off his strongest allies. Last night, Trump pitched a fit on Truth Social about the urgent need for both a massive influx of Defense spending and passage of his wildly extremist version of the SAVE America Act. He commanded congressional Republicans to enact both as part of a third party-line budget-reconciliation bill. That’s unlikely to happen for too many reasons to count.
So the president is hardly in a mood to pay attention to bipartisan pleas that he get rid of his plan to make the totally unqualified Bill Pulte the temporary director of national intelligence when Tulsi Gabbard formally steps down on June 19. Pulte’s nomination is blocking the path to passage of a congressional extension of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
FISA gives the executive branch lots of allegedly essential spying powers, but it’s also perpetually the object of complaints from both the progressive left and the libertarian right that it encroaches on privacy interests. While reauthorizing it is always difficult, there was bipartisan momentum for getting it done right before the current authorization lapses tomorrow. That changed when Trump announced he wanted Pulte as acting DNI. An effort to extend FISA temporarily just failed in the House, mostly because every Democrat opposed it. Yet Trump remains stubborn about Pulte, as Politico Playbook reports:
For days, Senate Republicans hoped the administration would find an off-ramp to the standoff, name a permanent nominee to replace Pulte as director of national intelligence, and clear the way to reauthorize FISA Section 702 before it expires on Friday. …
Instead, Trump publicly doubled down on Pulte. …
Interviews with Trump allies, GOP Senate aides and people close to the White House reveal a president “increasingly frustrated with everyone, from his own team to the Senate,” a MAGA world operative close to the White House told Playbook.
“He’s pissed, and people are not recognizing the level of pissed that he is,” the operative said, pointing to Senate Republicans’ opposition to Trump’s “Anti-Weaponization Fund,” White House ballroom funding and resistance to firing the parliamentarian as the fuel for Trump’s resentment.
Trump says he wants Pulte to stay in place in order to downsize and eventually dismantle the DNI’s office. It’s still unclear why Trump won’t go along with finding a different and more obviously qualified placeholder for the position, if only in order to get FISA across the finish line.
The president’s stubborn streak was underlined when he waited until after the U.S. Senate adjourned for the week to announce his pick for permanent DNI: former SEC chairman and currently U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York Jay Clayton. This step has no bearing on Pulte’s takeover as acting DNI next week or his presence in the job until Clayton can be confirmed. Therefore, it likely won’t end the logjam over FISA.
If the president intends to keep up this bizarre slow-motion temper tantrum against the whole world’s resistance to his plans, he should at a minimum tell his faithful follower Mike Johnson to stop saying a FISA extension is urgently needed to keep terrorists at bay. It’s obviously not a high priority to Trump or not high enough for him to find some other job for the hapless Bill Pulte.
