Everything else is going wrong. So the president is turning to his favorite project: settling scores with his many enemies.
Donald Trump speaks with the press aboard Air Force One as he flies from Joint Base Andrews in Maryland to Eau Claire, Wisconsin, June 5, 2026.
(Saul Loeb / AFP via Getty Images)
“Donald Trump lashes out” is not always a newsworthy headline. But recent reporting from inside the UFC-festooned White House suggests that our commander in chief has somehow reached a new level of raging petulance. “He’s pissed, and people are not recognizing the level of pissed that he is,” is how one rattled White House ally put it to Politico .
What’s set Trump off is what always sets him off: the manifest failure of even today’s invertebrate Republican Party to carry out every self-glorifying iota of his bidding. His most recent tantrum concerned the reluctance of GOP lawmakers to sign off on his batshit nomination of Bill Pulte to head the Directorate of National Intelligence—a move that Trump was forced grudgingly to reverse on Thursday.
Not that that’s cause for much celebration. Trump’s new nominee is former Securities and Exchange commissioner and current US attorney for the Southern District of New York Jay Clayton—who, like Pulte, possesses zero intelligence experience and is also a practiced Trump bootlicker , having cheered the president’s $1.8 billion slush fund for January 6 rioters and his unhinged conspiracy theories about election fraud in California.
True, this post-9/11 sinecure is so inconsequential in the cabinet that it initially went to Tulsi Gabbard (for whom the agency’s acronym stood for “do not invite,” per Oval Office gossip hounds ). Yet even so, both Pulte and Calyton were (and are) stunningly unqualified nominees for the post, which under law requires directors to have the kind of intelligence experience that both men conspicuously lack.
Pulte in particular was horrifyingly ill-suited to the job. As the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA), his chief specialty was to go after public figures on Trump’s ever-expanding enemies list, such as New York Attorney General Letitia James and Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook, with content-challenged accusations of mortgage fraud. As intelligence chief, Pulte would have been empowered to carry out a far wider range of ideological vendettas against anyone who might flit across the president’s grievance-addled brainpan. His nomination was so egregious that even the Trump-appeasing Senate majority leader John Thune greeted it with stunned disbelief. “We don’t need a weaponized DNI,” Thune said to a group of reporters . “We need professionals there. If [Pulte] is someone we want in that position permanently, he’s got a lengthy road ahead of him.”
Translated from Capitol Hill–ese, that was a direct message to Trump that the nomination was a nonstarter. But of course the very qualities that make Pulte wildly unfit for a sensitive security post are exactly why Trump wanted him there. His willingness to fabricate baseless assaults on Trump’s political enemies at FHFA was a signal that he’d gladly turn the country’s intelligence operations into a glorified cottage industry of MAGA-branded retribution. (Gabbard, who had eagerly abased herself and, if such a thing is possible, further discredited the country’s spook complex by launching a plainly bogus and likely illegal investigation into Georgia’s voting systems as part of Trump’s bottomless 2020 election vendetta , can now only look on in professional envy.)
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It’s not hard to work out why Trump is selecting characters like Pulte and Clayton to oversee national intelligence. As he fends off record-low approval ratings , a growing defection from his heartland MAGA base over his ruinous economic record, and the stench from the deepening quagmire of his disastrous war in Iran, score-settling remains the only part of his agenda he still has a handle on. So when House Speaker Mike Johnson—another reliable Trump suck-up who’d been forced to acknowledge that the Pulte nomination was dead in the water—begged Trump to pull the nomination in order to expedite passage of the reauthorization of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) ahead of its expiration on Friday, Trump instead stepped up his public effort to get the party behind Pulte. Another unnamed GOP staffer told Politico that his rejection of Johnson’s overtures was “a middle finger to Congress.” And oddly enough for an institution mostly operating on brain-dead autopilot throughout this Trump term, Congress responded in kind; the House voted down a Trump-endorsed last-minute plan to re-up FISA.
Given the kind of unhinged power that FISA would deliver into a DNI run by MAGA lackeys, one can scarcely mourn this turn of events. Yet the bigger picture here is quite instructive, and speaks volumes about what we might call the Roy Cohn phase of the Trump presidency: In order to install a political hit man…
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