Trump’s Menswear Guy at the State Department

Plus: Hegseth’s nomination comes back from the brink.

(Composite / Photos: GettyImages / Shutterstock / Screenshot via YouTube)

On Sunday night, President-elect Donald Trump named Michael Anton to serve as a director of policy planning at the State Department. Anton is known for his long history of isolationist foreign policy views, his work in the previous Trump administration, and his pseudonymous 2016 essay, “The Flight 93 Election,” in which he essentially argued that destroying the country by electing Trump was preferable to four years of Hillary Clinton as president.

Anton also has a long history of writing about clothes and posting on menswear forums. Under the pseudonym Nicholas Antongiavanni, Anton wrote The Suit, a book on how men should dress for success.

On his Styleforum profile, Anton (we think in jest) identifies himself as a “RINO,” or Republican in Name Only.¹ While on Styleforum, a menswear enthusiast platform, Anton regularly mused about clothes, wine, why New York City sucks, and the reasons one should hate San Francisco.

Things he likes include a 1996 Dom Perignon Oenotheque, swimming and lifting weights, and charcoal brown suits. He also has strong opinions about what kind of shirt to wear depending on the rest of the ensemble. In a 2012 post, he outlined the way to properly wear a white dress shirt, writing:

White is not a country shirt. White with tweed is the mark of a stooge, someone who knows only that white is “formal” and a tailored jacket is “formal” so they “go together.” White with brown cannot altogether be ruled out but it is not for n00bs.

White is almost never good with an odd jacket. Doc can talk all he wants about the 60s and he will not change my mind about this. For virtually any odd jacket combo you can think of, it's not just that a blue shirt would be better but that a white shirt is wrong. The only exception is a blazer and grays, worn at night. (A blazer and khakis--aka the "California Tux"-- demands a blue shirt.) A blazer and a white shirt in the daytime is not "wrong," but it's also never the best choice. A white shirt worn with a blazer should really be a button-down and should never have French cuffs.

White is thought to be the perfect background for a variety of ties, a "blank canvas." But this is not so. Many colors look absolutely terrible with white: yellow, orange, rust, lavender, purple, nearly all greens. Even red, a very common paring with white, always looks better on a blue background (not that you should be wearing true red ties) and burgundy or maroon looks better against pink.

So does work with white? Above all navy. Black. Gray. Silver. Combinations thereof. Certain very pale (I mean VERY pale, so pale it takes a second to recognize what they really are) golds and greens. Any shade of blue, especially the light blues which look best against white.

When he’s right, he’s right.

It’s not Anton’s sartorial tastes that will determine how well he fits in at Foggy Bottom, however. It’s his larger foreign policy worldview. And on that front, he could be an awkward fit.

At a forum in the U.S. Capitol complex last year, Anton described the kind of reforms he and other likeminded wonks would seek to implement. These included significantly reducing the number of detailees to the president’s National Security Council. That’s a not-altogether-crazy idea if the goal is to return some prerogative to the State and Defense Departments and make the White House more nimble. But Anton sees limiting the inner circle of foreign and national security policy staffers and removing credentialing barriers as tools to root out heretics.

You do all these things and you can have a staff of two or three hundred people inside the White House, completely loyal to the president and his agenda—and then those people will be a force to be reckoned with by the rest of the bureaucracy that will want to fight with him—as opposed to being essentially spies and enablers of the bureaucracy within the White House, which is what we have now. . . .

I think a future administration needs to be a lot less concerned—certainly in positions that don’t require Senate confirmation—with credentialing. It’s like, well you don’t have quite the résumé yet to be x, y, or z—you’re too young. I’m not saying everyone should be 21 years old on the National Security Council staff, but they’re gonna need to be a little looser about that than prior administrations.

Since then, Anton has reviewed books for the Claremont Review of Books and delivered speeches at National [read: Nationalist] Conservatism conferences around the United States and U.K. How much influence Anton will have as the director of policy planning depends on how much presumptive Secretary of State Marco Rubio wants to give him. (How much influence Rubio will have in turn depends on Trump—ha ha ha.) But at the very least, Anton will have a prime perch to make sure no one at State Department headquarters besmirches the Dear Leader or wears French cuffs with a blazer.

Hegseth’s revival demonstrates Senate GOP’s tolerance for dangerous nominees

Pete Hegseth, the Fox News anchor-turned-nominee for secretary of defense, appears to be coming back from the brink of what could have been Trump’s second failed cabinet nomination since winning the 2024 election.

Hegseth’s stumbles were due to reports of alleged excessive drinking habits, abuse of women, infidelity, and more. His lack of qualifications and tendentious policy positions were largely unimportant to the few senators who were willing to briefly delay their support for him.

That lawmakers are coming around to him represents a notable contrast to how Trump’s selection of the almost universally reviled Congressman Matt Gaetz flamed out. The former Florida congressman’s bid to be attorney general failed because just enough senators were uncomfortable with the very credible and well-documented allegations that he had sex with at least one teenager. This is a key, early lesson for a long, chaotic second Trump administration: Notorious and unavoidable crimes against minors might derail a confirmation; anything else appears not to be a problem. That includes lack of experience, potential substance abuse, potential criminality, and moral and characterological unfitness. Policy doesn’t even enter into the calculation.

Speaking to reporters Monday evening, Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) made quite the admission when asked about his to-be-determined vote on director of national intelligence nominee Tulsi Gabbard.

“I don’t think I have ever voted in opposition to anyone who came out of the Foreign Relations Committee with an affirmative vote,” Tillis said. “And therefore, I would put deference in the committee process.”

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) made a similar remark, telling reporters, “I don’t think she’s a Russian agent. She has a different view of foreign policy than I do, [but] that’s not disqualifying.”

Gabbard’s positions on many foreign policy issues aren’t just “different”—they’re what many Republicans and Democrats alike would describe as antithetical to American interests. She’s cozied up with Bashar al-Assad, the recently deposed Syrian dictator, and regularly sided with the Russian government against the United States and its allies.

Nonetheless, Gabbard is facing little to no opposition among Senate Republicans. Neither is Kash Patel, Trump’s pick to lead the FBI, who has listed individuals he wants to target and launched a potentially frivolous lawsuit at a pundit who criticized him on TV during the confirmation process.

That hasn’t stopped Patel from receiving a warm welcome from the chamber’s most senior Republican, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa).

“I went very deeply with him,” said Grassley, referring to a meeting with Patel. “Congressional oversight, I pointed out how for maybe eight years, we’ve been stymied by the FBI on getting answers to [our questions]. We’ve had a politicalization of the FBI and I guess I’m satisfied that he wants Congress to be able to do its job as oversight, answering our letters. Not doing like [current FBI Director Christopher] Wray did a couple weeks ago, turned down testifying before a committee. All those sorts of things.”

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump’s pick to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, is receiving similar treatment. His deranged policy views on vaccines, chemtrails, and infectious disease research are being largely ignored.

There is a low floor for what Republicans will tolerate. Any resistance to these nominees has to be about their personal lives. And even then, that might not be enough. In the end, expect the whole gang to sail to confirmation.

Death row records

President Joe Biden got a lot of flack from Republicans, members of his own party, and the press for going back on his word and granting a sweeping pardon to his son, Hunter Biden. The moral and ethical reasons both for and against it have been argued to death, but an underexplored criticism is how he moved so swiftly to help his son while the prisoners whom he vowed to help if elected president are still waiting on death row.

During his first term in office, Donald Trump executed more prisoners than the presidents of the past several decades combined, killing 13 before begrudgingly leaving office in 2021.

Since Trump’s election victory, Democrats have pleaded with Biden to do something—anything—to ensure that Trump doesn’t have the ability to ramp up executions once he’s sworn in next year.

Today, Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) renewed her calls for Biden to act on clearing the federal death row. She sent a letter to Biden on this and the use of his broader clemency powers in November. The White House confirmed to Pressley an initial receipt of the letter, “but nothing beyond that,” she said.

“As you said in that time, he has pardoned his son. Hunter Biden was targeted because he’s the president’s son and he was pardoned because he’s the president’s son,” Pressley added. “And Joe Biden—President Biden—should not stop at Hunter Biden because there are hundreds of thousands of people whose lives are hanging in the balance.”

Beyond Pressley, Pope Francis has publicly called for Biden to commute the sentences of prisoners on federal death row. Whether these calls actually persuade Biden is unclear. But there’s not much time left. He’s out of office in 41 days.

1. The signature that Anton used on Styleforum—the phrase that appeared beneath each of his posts—was “Ea natura multitudinis est: aut servit humiliter aut superbe dominatur.” It’s a quote from the Roman historian Livy, and means: “Thus is the nature of the mob: It serves humbly or rules proudly.” Anton did not include the following sentences: “Freedom, which is between these two things, they cannot manage to take or keep moderately. And there is no lack of indulgent assistants of their rage, men who provoke eager and unbalanced minds to blood and murder.”