There Is Only One Reason Trump Would Put These Absolute Crackpots in Charge of Military and Intelligence Agencies

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

56% : Of course, Trump is one of that show's regular viewers, and, to the surprise of his advisers, he picked Hegseth to run the Department of Defense -- the country's largest bureaucracy, with 2.8 million employees and a budget this year of $841 billion -- because he liked a lot of what the rugged-looking co-host was saying.
39% : The Pentagon bureaucracy is deeply entrenched; it can wear out far more agile players than Hegseth.Before launching a political crusade against military officers, Trump might also want to review the biography of his own early business lawyer and mentor Roy Cohn, who began his career as the counsel for Sen. Joseph McCarthy.
32% : The anti-woke attitude may be what appealed most to Trump, who wants to fire generals who display insufficient loyalty to him.
28% : On his Fox show, Hegseth also vigorously protested the prosecutions of soldiers for war crimes, even to the point of persuading Trump, while he was president, to pardon two perpetrators of particularly heinous murders of civilians.
27% : Among them was a claim that in the 2016 election, the Russians had backed Hillary Clinton more than they backed Trump, and that in the 2020 election, the Iranians had hacked into the servers of the pro-Trump Proud Boys militia group and sent emails to voters in three battleground states, warning them, "You will vote for Trump on Election Day, or we will come after you."
20% : Cohn, who died in 1986, could have told Trump that McCarthy -- who rose to prominence by rooting out and prosecuting suspected Communists in government -- made his big misstep when he went after Army officers.
19% : Trump wanted to nominate Ratcliffe as director of national intelligence until even Republican senators warned him that the Texas congressman was too partisan and inexperienced for the job.
17% : Both, however, have been ardent supporters and defenders of Trump; Stefanik enjoys the special distinction of rising to become chair of the House Republican Conference after Rep. Liz Cheney was ousted for criticizing Trump over the Jan. 6 riots.
17% : In fact, other intel agencies concluded that the Russians had backed Trump, not Clinton, in 2016.
9% : Trump nominated a more moderate congressman, Dan Coats, who filed too many honest reports that were at odds with Trump's own talking points about Iran, North Korea, and Russia.
7% : In his final year as president, Trump fired Coats and nominated Ratcliffe, this time sticking by his defender.

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