Bill Pulte Is a Putz--But a Dangerous Putz

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.”

https://www.thebulwark.com/i/200442402/director-of-national-retribution