President-elect Donald Trump has nominated a pair of unqualified and unacceptable individuals to fill two critical national security posts in his upcoming administration: Fox News personality Pete Hegseth as secretary of defense and former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence. Neither nominee possesses any experience managing organizations the size, scope, and scale of the Defense Department or America’s intelligence community. Both hold extreme views that ought to disqualify them from holding any senior national security position, much less ones with the duties and responsibilities they have been nominated for.
The Senate must exercise its Constitutional responsibility of advice and consent to reject these two presidential nominees. If confirmed, both Hegseth and Gabbard would do grave harm to American national security — primarily via the damage they would inflict on the institutions they have been nominated to lead.
