Trump's loyalty test: How his new nominees could turn America into a police state

The most powerful levers of control in the United States government are found in the six positions where intelligence-gathering and brute force overlap — the Secretary of Defense, Joint Chiefs of Staff, Secretary of Homeland Security, Attorney General, Director of the CIA, and Director of National Intelligence.

These six constitute the raw muscle of the federal government, where information about the nation’s security is gathered and force is wielded.

Trump could turn America into a police state by putting people into these positions who are more loyal to him than they are to America and the U.S. Constitution.

Trump has repeatedly warned of a so-called “enemy within.” If he is serious about this putative threat — and we must assume he is — he, and the people around him now planning all of this, must be ready to wield the power of the nation to spy on and use military force against such so-called internal enemies.

Consider Trump’s nominations this week, and he seems well on his way.

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Trump has chosen Pete Hegseth, a Fox News TV host, for Defense Secretary; Matt Gaetz, a firebrand right-wing congressman, for Attorney General; Kristi Noem, governor of South Dakota, for Secretary of Homeland Security; Tulsi Gabbard, a former Democratic member of Congress turned fierce Trumper, for Director of National Intelligence; and John Ratcliffe, a former Republican member of Congress, to be director of the CIA.

What do these people have in common?

For one thing, none of them has any experience or expertise that would make them a natural fit in any of these roles, if experience or expertise mattered to Trump.

Their most important “qualification” is that they have demonstrated fierce and unblinking loyalty to Trump.

Pete Hegseth showed on Fox News that he was a dedicated Trump loyalist during his first term, defending Trump’s “America First” agenda and espousing far-right views about rolling back “woke” policies in the armed forces and rooting out military leaders who implemented them.

Hegseth has already promised to purge the Pentagon of top brass harboring questionable loyalty to Trump. “Well, first of all, you got to fire … the chairman of the Joint Chiefs,” Hegseth said on the “Shawn Ryan Show” podcast last week, when talking about how to take control.

Trump’s transition team is drawing up a list of military officers to be fired. Trump is also considering a draft executive order to create a “warrior board” of retired senior military officials to review three- and four-star officers for dismissal, allowing a fast-track to reshape the military command structure, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Surely anyone who was elevated or appointed by General Mark Milley, Trump’s former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff — who was quoted in Bob Woodward’s book War as calling Trump “fascist to the core” — will be gone.

Kristi Noem — whom Trump has nominated to run the Department of Homeland Security — was an early backer of Trump’s reelection campaign and echoed Trump’s harsh rhetoric on illegal immigration — calling the situation at the southern border an “invasion.”

Since becoming governor of South Dakota, Noem has deployed her state’s National Guard troops to the southwest border at least five times.

The Department of Homeland Security is an enforcement powerhouse with a $60 billion budget and more than 230,000 employees, most of whom are involved in enforcement. Only the Defense Department is larger.

Homeland Security contains the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Transportation Security Administration, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Customs and Border Protection, and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.

DHS also has the capacity to spy on Americans. It is tasked with cybersecurity and election security, has an in-house intelligence office, and includes the Secret Service.

Policies for cracking down on the U.S.-Mexico border and rounding up and deporting undocumented immigrants will be run out of the White House by Stephen Miller and incoming border czar Tom Homan, but Noem would enforce the policies.

Matt Gaetz, Trump’s pick for Attorney General, has zero qualifications for the job but has been one of the most outspoken Trump loyalists in Congress.

As I said yesterday, ever since Trump was indicted for seeking to overturn the 2020 election, Gaetz has defended him — alleging that the prosecutions of Trump were politically motivated, that Biden was behind them, charging the Biden administration with vindictiveness toward Trump and asserting that Trump would have every right to engage in similar vengeance toward Trump’s political enemies.

In making these bogus charges, Gaetz has often used identical language to Trump’s wildly partisan and incendiary claims.

Tulsi Gabbard, a former Democratic congresswoman whom Trump has picked for Director of National Intelligence, has advanced many of the same conspiracy theories that Trump has floated — which defy the conclusions reached by the U.S. intelligence agencies she would oversee.

She has also espoused narratives peddled by Russia. Soon after Russia invaded Ukraine in February, 2022, Gabbard tweeted that the “war and suffering” could have been avoided if the Biden administration had acknowledged “Russia’s legitimate security concerns regarding Ukraine’s becoming a member of NATO.”

The following month, she called for a cease-fire in a video message, citing the alleged presence of twenty-five or more U.S.-funded “biolabs in Ukraine” which could release and spread deadly pathogens — the same claims Russian officials had made and U.S. officials had denied.

The Director of National Intelligence has charge over all sources of information coming into the U.S. government about potential threats, foreign and domestic.

Gabbard’s portfolio would include the CIA, Defense Intelligence Agency, National Security Agency, National Security Council, and Homeland Security Council for intelligence matters. In effect, she’d be the nation’s chief spymaster.

John Ratcliffe, Trump’s pick for the CIA, was an aggressive Trump defender as a member of Congress. Ratcliffe was skeptical about former special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, forcefully questioning the prosecutor and blasting his report.

Ratcliffe called the House vote to impeach Trump over the phone call he had with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, “the thinnest, fastest and weakest impeachment our country has ever seen.”

As Trump’s Director of National Intelligence during Trump’s first term, Ratcliffe rejected claims by a dozen former intelligence officials that disclosure of emails from a laptop dropped off by Hunter Biden at a Delaware computer repair shop bore the hallmarks of a Russian disinformation campaign.

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Keep your eyes on these people and these positions. They are the places where information about potential threats to the nation is assembled and where America’s power and force are exercised.

If — and I emphasize if — Trump is aiming to replace our system of self-government with an authoritarian or fascist one, he would begin by gaining control over these centers of intelligence-gathering and enforcement — staffing them with unquestioning loyalists — and aiming them at so-called “enemies within” the nation.

I don’t want to be unduly alarmist, but within just 10 days after the election, Trump appears to be well on his way.

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Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/.