President Donald Trump’s ability to shock and outrage Washington elites is a superpower when it comes to solidifying his political base.
His elevation on Tuesday of Bill Pulte, director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, to serve as America’s new acting top spymaster was therefore a classic political move.
Mystified senators of both parties publicly struggled to comprehend the selection of an official with no obvious qualifications for such a critical role. Pulte lacks background in intelligence, espionage or national security. Sen. Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, told reporters that she was unaware whether Pulte had ever held a security clearance.
CNN reported Tuesday that Trump’s reasoning was simple: He wanted a loyalist that he could trust. And he also sees Pulte playing a role in election security, sources said.
That expectation already has Democrats worried, since Trump is accelerating his baseless claims that November’s midterm elections could be scarred by fraud, and Pulte has shown in his current role that he’s willing to use federal power in his current role to boost politicized investigations into the president’s foes.
“Americans have every reason to worry about what happens when the official charged with overseeing everything from counterterrorism to foreign election threats is chosen for his willingness to advance the president’s political agenda rather than his experience,” Democratic Sen. Mark Warner, the vice chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said in a statement.
Trump’s vision for the director of national intelligence post is, to put it politely, idiosyncratic.
The DNI is charged by law with acting as America’s top intelligence official. The role may include briefing the president on potential terrorist attacks, assessing an adversary’s possible moves in wartime, overseeing the most secret counter-intelligence activities and securing presidential approval for covert actions.
The job was born in the ashes of disaster: the 9/11 attacks in 2001 that killed 2,977 people in Washington, New York and Pennsylvania. Osama bin Laden’s suicide hijackers had exploited loopholes opened by a catastrophic failure of US intelligence agencies to coordinate.
With America embroiled in a new war in the Middle East, there were already fears before Pulte’s appointment that Trump-era politicization is eroding the DNI’s capacity to fulfill its founding role.
The statute creating the Office of the Director of National Intelligence stated the director “shall have extensive national security expertise.” Trump said Tuesday on social media that Pulte had “deep experience managing the most sensitive matters in America, the safety and soundness of the Markets” and $10 trillion at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. But Pulte’s record, despite a successful career in high finance, appears to fall well short of the law’s stipulation.
Pulte is nevertheless a perfect pick for Trump because he shares many of the qualities exhibited by the president’s previous high-level appointments.
In the scrambled conventions of Trump’s ecosystem, someone’s lack of customary qualifications for the role, can paradoxically make them a good fit.
Pulte is an uber-loyalist and a regular in the Mar-a-Lago inner circle; he’s known for rigorously defending Trump on television; and he has shown he’s willing to use the power of government to go after Trump’s enemies. As housing director, he sent the Justice Department criminal referrals on allegations of mortgage fraud against several of Trump’s perceived political enemies.
Pulte’s appointment also charts Trump’s political evolution. The president’s first DNI in his first term was Dan Coats, a respected former Republican senator with whom Trump seemed destined to clash. Coats, for example, said that Russia had interfered in the 2016 elections — a heresy in Trump world.
Trump demonstrated with his Cabinet picks this time around that he’d permit no repeats of senior officials’ efforts in his first term to restrain him. This is how MAGA personalities like FBI Director Kash Patel and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ended up with top national security jobs. Pulte is squarely within this tradition.
Rhode Island Sen. Jack Reed, the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, blasted Pulte as the most unqualified official in the history of the intelligence community to assume such a critical role. He added: “President Trump’s desire to surround himself with unqualified ‘yes men’ is one of the factors that misled our nation into disastrous war with Iran.”
Trump’s selection of an intelligence neophyte is also a not so-subtle insult to the covert community, which has long drawn his suspicion following his claims he was spied on during his 2016 campaign. Some MAGA influencers have called for the abolition of the DNI altogether. But despite Trump’s disdain, the agency plays a critical role. It oversees the president’s daily intelligence brief. And leaders of all US intelligence agencies, such as CIA Director John Ratcliffe, report to the DNI.
The best way to understand Pulte’s promotion is as a political gambit.
Trump has been under intense political pressure recently, including from his base, especially over the war and the Jeffrey Epstein drama. By choosing Pulte, he is showing MAGA hardliners and the conservative media ecosystem that he’s still a disrupter, an outsider and a scourge of the “deep state.”
Right-wing activist Jack Posobiec praised the selection of “Wild Bill” Pulte on Steve Bannon’s podcast. “He’s been the one to get the criminal referrals. … Pulte is the kind of guy who gets stuff done, then he just goes back to work.”
One of Trump’s earliest and most resonant MAGA themes has been the idea that a permanent professional class of bureaucrats and establishment elites suppress the goals of regular Americans and have thwarted previous GOP presidents.
Vice President JD Vance — who must always cultivate the base and Trump’s favor as a potential future GOP presidential candidate — tapped into this sentiment, praising Pulte on X for recognizing that “the bureaucracy of the intel community must respond to the elected leadership (rather than the other way around).”
It may be no coincidence that Pulte’s selection — a classic Trump MAGA reflex — came as Republican senators derailed another base-pleasing move: a $1.776 billion compensation fund for those who claim they were victims of weaponized justice during the Biden administration — including, potentially, those convicted of offenses in the 2021 US Capitol riot.
If early reaction from senators is any guide, Pulte would stand little chance of being confirmed to the role permanently. Ironically, many senators had balked at the unconventional political views of the current DNI, Tulsi Gabbard, who is stepping down to support her husband, who has cancer.
But Gabbard seems far more suited to the role than Pulte: She was a four-term member of Congress who served on the Armed Services, Homeland Security and Foreign Affairs committees in the House and deployed to the Middle East and Africa and is a battalion commander in the US Army Reserve.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune told reporters that the country needed “professionals” at the department. “If they nominate (Pulte) to take the position permanently, he’ll have to go through a confirmation process and hearings and everything else, so we’ll see.”
But an official in an acting appointment does not need Senate confirmation. According to the Federal Vacancies Reform Act of 1998, a president can appoint an official who, like Pulte, has secured Senate confirmation for another position, on an interim basis. The official can hold the job for a baseline of 210 days.
That timeline will worry Democrats. The opposition party was already spooked by Gabbard’s most controversial act — showing up at an FBI search of a Fulton County, Georgia, voting center. Multiple courts have refuted Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was stolen. And the Constitution puts states rather than the federal government in charge of elections. Some critics fear Trump aides could find or concoct an example of foreign interference as a pretext for declaring a national emergency and taking over election administration.
Pulte could legally serve as acting DNI until at least the end of the year, a timeframe encompassing November’s midterms, which Trump has already repeatedly claimed could be tainted by fraud.
Fears about Pulte’s willingness to use federal power to pursue Trump’s fixations and to punish his enemies is exacerbated by his role at the FHFA, when he sent the Justice Department criminal referrals on allegations of mortgage fraud against four Democrats who investigated Trump: New York Attorney General Letitia James, then-Rep. Eric Swalwell, Sen. Adam Schiff and Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis. He also referred Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook over similar allegations.
In his statement, Warner warned that “the president has chosen an official who has demonstrated not just willingness but eagerness to use the authorities of government to pursue political retribution.”
Ironically, the Virginia senator’s concerns mirrored Posbiec’s contention that Pulte “gets stuff done” for Trump.
Both views suggest that Pulte’s promotion should be seen through a political rather than a national security lens. And they imply that, despite claims he’s receding into lame duck status, Trump plans to make the rest of his second term just as tumultuous as his first year-and-a-half back in office.
