Bill Pulte Is a Putz—But a Dangerous Putz
He’s unserious, unqualified, disliked, ill-prepared, inexperienced, and exactly what Trump is looking for.
The East Wing of the White House is still just a hole in the ground while funding for the ballroom languishes in Congress, but Donald Trump is warming to some of the White House’s other cool new features, like the pop-up UFC arena on the lawn.
“We’re building something in front of the White House that’s quite attractive to a lot of people,” Trump said in a TikTok filmed from the Oval Office yesterday. The Eiffel Tower, he noted, had begun as a temporary installation too—so hey, why not his arena? “I’m looking at it, and maybe we’ll never, ever take it down.” Happy Wednesday.
Mark Hertling and Ben Parker will be live on Substack and YouTube today at 10:30 a.m. EDT for a special episode of Command Post with special guest Lt. Gen. Dr. Eric Shoomaker, former surgeon general of the Army, to talk about our government’s response to the Ebola outbreak.
Director of National Retribution
by Andrew Egger
Donald Trump is facing a host of crises at once. His political agenda is on the rocks, his popularity has never been lower, and his quest to punish his personal and political enemies for their crimes has all but stalled out.
At times like these, a guy’s got to make some hard choices about which priorities to push hard for and which to let fall by the wayside. And Trump’s selection yesterday of Federal Housing Finance Agency chair Bill Pulte as his new pick for acting director of national intelligence makes it crystal clear: Punishing his enemies is the one goal he’s determined to see through to the bitter end. Virtually everyone not in the bag for Trump—both lawmakers and veterans of the intel community—has been left aghast.
“That’s what politicization fundamentally is,” Susan Gordon, who served as principal deputy director of national intelligence during Trump’s first term, told The Bulwark. “You’re putting into this messy fray, this difficult thing in which the president already has distrust, you’re putting someone in charge that wants to support the president by going and finding the things that he wants to be true. You’ve now just corrupted the whole discipline.”
Gordon is right to worry. By practically any metric you can imagine, Pulte—the scion of a construction dynasty who parlayed minor MAGA e-celebrity into a housing-policy post—is an insane pick for a top intelligence role. He has zero experience, none whatsoever, in any national-security-related field, making him not only a silly pick but also perhaps an illegal one: Literally the first thing federal law has to say about the DNI is that any nominee to the post “shall have extensive national security expertise.”
Nor has Pulte earned the post by proving to be a lion of good government in his current post. Just the opposite: He’s routinely earned the scorn of other D.C. Republicans for the clownish ideas he regularly feeds into Trump’s brain. It was Pulte who briefly sold Trump on a housing policy built around the “50-year mortgage,” which sent White House officials scrambling to do damage control after Trump posted an endorsement of the idea with no explanation and no warning last November. When Trump posted a bizarre AI image of himself as Jesus Christ healing a sick man in April, prompting outrage from his evangelical base, it came out that Pulte was the one who had “brought the image to Trump’s attention.”
“I’m going to punch you in your fucking face,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told Pulte at a dinner last September after hearing Pulte had been badmouthing him to the boss. This earned (anonymous) applause from Republican lawmakers on the Hill: “He’s a nut,” one House Republican told Politico. “The guy’s just a little too big for his britches,” groused another. “I would have done the same [as Bessent],” said a third.
But Pulte has done one thing that Trump has really, really liked: He has gone after Trump’s enemies with ferocity, tenacity, and an utter lack of shame. The Federal Housing Finance Agency might have seemed a strange perch from which to wage the president’s war of retribution. But as soon as he got there, Pulte busied himself finding ways to use the limited tools at his disposal to get scalps for his boss. Eventually he found a promising route. In fact, the strategy he put together—rooting through opponents’ federally filed mortgage applications in search of discrepancies he could trumpet as fraud—became one of the White House’s go-to strategies in 2025, with Pulte laying the groundwork for mortgage-fraud investigations into a host of Trump foes, including then-Rep. Eric Swalwell, Rep. Adam Schiff, Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook, and New York Attorney General Letitia James.
Now Pulte will get to bring this hatchet-man zeal to a much bigger perch with a much more powerful set of dirt-gathering tools: the office of the director of national intelligence. (Have no fear, though: The president said Pulte will keep his housing job at the same time.)
Gathering dirt on Americans, particularly political foes of the government, isn’t what our intelligence agencies are supposed to be for, but it’s long been obvious that it’s Trump’s primary use for them. When Tulsi Gabbard was DNI, she was routinely sidelined or excluded from matters of foreign affairs like the raid to capture Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro. Instead, the president sent her haring off on all sorts of revenge-tour missions: relitigating the launch of the 2016 Russia investigation, or supervising raids on election offices in an attempt to prove 2020 voter fraud. (When the FBI raided an office in Fulton County, Georgia, Gabbard wasn’t just bizarrely on hand—she even facilitated a speakerphone call from Trump to the on-site agents congratulating them on their success.)
But at least Gabbard had national-security experience—as an Army officer and as a Democratic lawmaker who served for years on the House Armed Services, Homeland Security, and Foreign Affairs Committees. She was a putatively qualified nominee who Trump liked because she would do what he wanted, where he wanted. With her gone, Trump is dropping the fig leaf. All that national security experience, it turns out, was just window dressing. The main thing for a director of national intelligence is to be willing to hit Trump’s foes where it hurts.
It’s worth stressing, too, how bad a candidate for this job Pulte would be even if you set this evidence of obvious malice aside.
“There’s so much uncertainty in intelligence, just in general,” Gordon said. “To put someone who has never in his whole life probably even seen intelligence, to understand what it means, is I think profoundly disturbing and sends a lot of signals about how the president values intelligence, how the president understands the job.”
If Pulte’s appointment suggests Trump intends to keep doubling down on his revenge tour, it will do little to help either his swooning popularity or his growing problems keeping lawmakers in check. It’s far from their top issue, but the polls have been clear for months that Americans disapprove of Trump’s weaponization of government against his enemies. Continuing to burn more political capital in pursuit of this goal won’t help dig him out of the popularity pit he’s in. And as Republican lawmakers keep finding new reasons to resent the ways Trump has tried to short-circuit their oversight and policymaking authorities, they can’t love the fact that Trump is nominating an unqualified person they disdain to a top national security role—all in an “acting” capacity that spares Pulte of needing to get the Senate’s consent for the job.
Year two of his second term has left Trump battered and wounded, but in his instincts he remains an authoritarian to the last. He could be spending his time trying to shore up Americans’ living conditions and attempting to win back the voters he’s already lost since 2024. But why bother with that when there’s all these Democrats left to crush?
What Congress Can Do
by William Kristol
One additional point on Donald Trump’s ludicrous—but more importantly, dangerous—selection of Bill Pulte as acting director of national intelligence.
The pick is bad for U.S. intelligence and a threat to the civil liberties of American citizens. But the greatest danger of appointing Pulte as DNI is that it’s a further step in Trump’s plans to subvert free and fair elections in the United States, to some degree in 2026 but especially in 2028.
As Andrew reminds us, Tulsi Gabbard as DNI has already used the excuse of possible foreign election interference to try to help out the Trump administration’s efforts at injecting itself into election supervision in the swing state of Georgia. But the appointment of Pulte takes the danger to another level. With Pulte in charge of the intelligence community—along with Todd Blanche at Justice, and Kash Patel at the FBI, and Markwayne Mullin at DHS, and Pete Hegseth at Defense—we have the clear and present danger of a full-fledged effort of election subversion, perhaps in 2026, but I would say almost certainly in 2028.
Many actors in our system have to be alert to this and be ready to fight this. The general public, state officials, the legal community, the courts, and many institutions in the private sector and civil society all have a role. But Congress will need to step up as well. It will be able to do so far more effectively if the Democratic party controls it. So electing Democratic majorities in both the House and the Senate is the single most important step for democracy that could happen this year.
This means we all have to focus on free and fair elections in 2026, so that we can have a Congress that can ensure free and fair elections in 2028.
But there are things that Democrats in Congress can do even before the midterm elections. As we’ve seen recently, even as a minority they have leverage in both houses. They can sometimes block legislation and appropriations bills. They can use oversight mechanisms and opportunities for publicity. They can sometimes pressure a few Republicans to break from the administration.
Different kinds of what we might call guerilla legislating, all types of imaginative and creative resistance, efforts to use the different levers of power—these need to be mobilized on behalf of democracy for the rest of this year and of course beyond, in 2027 and 2028, when, let’s not forget, Trump will still be in power.
In the case of Pulte, Democrats—and pro-democracy Republicans—need to take a fresh look at every legislative and appropriations measure that affects the intelligence community in light of saving democracy and the rule of law. This means, for example, that one arrangement for handling intercepts involving American citizens under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act that might be reasonable for a normal administration may well not be suitable for this one, and should be opposed given that Pulte would be in charge. Along these lines, Senate Intelligence Committee Vice Chairman Mark Warner has reportedly warned Majority Leader John Thune that an extension of Section 702 might fail unless Pulte is removed.
To put it simply: Democrats—and responsible Republicans—need to avoid the trap of trying to help Pulte—or Blanche, or Patel, or Mullin, or Hegseth—to be as effective in doing their jobs as possible. Given what they are trying to do, Congress needs to make them all as ineffective as possible.
AROUND THE BULWARK
Playing Politics with Military Promotions… When personal preference trumps professionalism and merit, trust breaks down, argues MARK HERTLING.
Yes, Russia Is Losing the War in Ukraine… And Putin seems to be the last person not to know it, writes CATHY YOUNG.
The Party of Vicemaxxing… DEREK THOMPSON joins TIM MILLER on the flagship pod to discuss why Republicans never defend Trump’s corruption on the merits but serve up anti-moral excuses for his repeated acts of immorality instead.
Quick Hits
IRAN HITS KUWAIT: The war in Iran is getting hot again, with limited strikes between Iran and U.S. forces expanding yesterday into Iranian strikes on the broader region. Here’s NBC News:
Iran launched a deadly new set of attacks in the Persian Gulf on Wednesday as it traded strikes with the United States, the latest exchange to threaten the fragile ceasefire and stalled peace talks between the two countries.
One person was killed and flights were suspended in Kuwait, officials said, after missile and drone strikes including an attack on its international airport. The U.S. military said it shot down Iranian drones near the Strait of Hormuz and struck Iran’s Qeshm Island a day earlier.
Repeated military exchanges between Washington and Tehran, as well as Israel’s escalating campaign in Lebanon, have added strain to efforts to end the war and reopen the crucial trade route. The two sides offered mixed messages on the status of talks, with President Donald Trump insisting they were ongoing after Iran signaled it may walk away.
Trump, who on Monday told CNBC he “couldn’t care less” if Iran negotiations had stalled out since they had “started to get very boring,” insisted yesterday on Truth Social that “Fake News Reports” to that effect are “false and erroneous.”
THE 60 MINUTES PURGE CONTINUES: CBS News didn’t wait long to punish veteran 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley for his public objections to the purge of the program’s leaders this week. One day after Pelley took over new executive producer Nick Bilton’s introductory meeting to grill him about Bari Weiss’s leadership and firing decisions, the company informed him he was being terminated for cause, effective immediately.
“Your antipathy to the future of the show has come through loud and clear,” Bilton told Pelley in his termination letter. “And I have heard you.”
In a statement, Pelley castigated CBS’s new leadership for casting aside the legacy of “the most successful program of any kind in history,” accusing “new management” of instructing him to “inject falsehoods and bias” into politically sensitive stories. “The collapse of values at the top has become untenable,” Pelley wrote. “The leadership of 60 Minutes is no longer recognizable. The principles I hold dear are gone, and so I must leave as well.”
PRIMARY RESULTS: California and Iowa held their party primaries last night. Because California counts its votes with ludicrous slowness, we still don’t know the outcomes of some of the major races there, but as of now the governor’s race seems to be heading for a runoff between Republican Steve Hilton, a former Fox News host, and Democrat Xavier Becerra, a former congressman and state attorney general who served as secretary of health and human services under President Joe Biden. Billionaire Tom Steyer, who briefly looked like the race’s frontrunner after the campaign implosion of Rep. Eric Swalwell, currently lags in third. Meanwhile, in the Los Angeles mayoral race, former reality star Spencer Pratt seems likely to advance to a runoff against Democratic Mayor Karen Bass.
Over in Iowa, Democrats got the candidates for governor (Rob Sand) and senator (Josh Turek) they expected, but there was one big surprise on the Republican side: The Trump-endorsed candidate for governor, Rep. Randy Feenstra, was edged by insurgent challenger Zach Lahn by less than a single percentage point. Trump’s endorsement came late in the cycle, and Feenstra was widely seen as having run a lackluster campaign. But it’s a notable outcome in a GOP primary season that has so far featured mostly big successes for the president’s picks.
Cheap Shots
Bed bugs at the USDA, rats in the national intelligence office, weasels at CBS - it's just pests all over the place!
"'I’m going to punch you in your fucking face,' Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told Pulte at a dinner last September after hearing Pulte had been badmouthing him to the boss."
Forget those UFC fighters. Make Bessent v. Pulte the main event at Trump's Thunderdome Arena. That'll get solid ratings.