Good on Television

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

86% : Rubio at State, John Ratcliffe at CIA, Lee Zeldin at EPA, Elise Stefanik as ambassador to the United Nations, and Mike Huckabee (a Fox News alumnus who's good on television!)
65% : You can see why Trump likes him.
61% : Trump probably rolled out their nominations early simply because they were easy picks.
55% : And Trump knows it.
54% : As I was writing this on Wednesday afternoon, Trump announced that his director of national intelligence will be Tulsi Gabbard, yet another telegenic good-on-TV crank with a curious history of freelance diplomacy with Bashar Assad and a taste for Kremlin propaganda.
49% : After all, the reason he wasn't back on the ticket this year is because Trump wanted a vice president who won't serve the country well, no?
48% : A few years later Hegseth landed at Fox News and a few years after that Trump landed in (or, rather, on) politics.
40% : When Trump orders his new SecDef to politicize the officer corps by purging "woke" generals and replacing them with loyalists who'll obey him unquestioningly -- and that order may have already been drafted -- he wants someone who'll salute and not give a second thought to the implications.
40% : "Trump likes Hegseth, appreciates his bootlicking, and admires his ruthless advocacy for accused war criminals.
39% : They know he's a Reaganite at heart and find him suspicious for that reason, but the great fear of an "adult in the room" converting Trump to his or her worldview is absent this time.
35% : How's this for three-dimensional chess: What if Trump wants Rubio at State because he knows he'll be confirmed easily and can then be fired and replaced at any time by a zombie loyalist as "acting secretary" who's more to Trump's liking, like Kash Patel?If you doubt that he's playing one-dimensional chess with even the "bloodiest" arms of his administration, sit with this report on Tuesday from Semafor's Shelby Talcott: "Seems like Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense deal came together very quickly:
34% : Trump will be giving the orders on foreign policy in consultation with J.D. Vance and Tucker Carlson, so why would he obsess over who holds America's formal diplomatic positions?
29% : But Trump doesn't want Rubio at State because he's keen to build a "team of rivals" stocked with Reaganites who'll challenge his thinking on foreign policy.
28% : Believing that Trump chose to roll out his nominees in a deliberate sequence gives him too much credit for strategic thinking, frankly.
24% : I'm likewise skeptical that Trump chose Rubio for State reluctantly, as a sop to the right's "sane" conservative faction in hopes of purchasing their support for less sane nominees.
21% : It's not Trump who's moved toward Rubio's foreign policy, it's Rubio who's moved toward his.
18% : Hours after he wrote that, Trump shocked Washington by naming Hegseth his nominee for the Pentagon.
18% : If Hegseth or Gabbard or Gaetz can't earn 51 votes initially, Trump will browbeat and threaten the GOP majority until they acquiesce.
8% : "I am concerned that this first pass is a head fake, in which Trump nominates people he knows are controversial (such as Zeldin) but who are still confirmable, and then sends far worse candidates forward for even more important posts," he warned.

*Our bias meter rating uses data science including sentiment analysis, machine learning and our proprietary algorithm for determining biases in news articles. Bias scores are on a scale of -100% to 100% with higher negative scores being more liberal and higher positive scores being more conservative, and 0% being neutral. The rating is an independent analysis and is not affiliated nor sponsored by the news source or any other organization.