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The media’s favorite storyline about the Trump administration — that it’s spiraling into unprecedented chaos — is starting to look less like analysis and more like wishful thinking. Foreign policy commentator David Rothkopf declared this week that Trump’s presidency has hit a “breaking point,” citing the president’s nomination of Bill Pulte to lead the Office of the Director of National Intelligence as evidence of administrative meltdown.
Rothkopf’s argument, delivered on The Daily Beast podcast, follows a familiar pattern. Any Trump appointment that doesn’t come from the traditional intelligence community establishment is automatically labeled dangerous, unqualified, or part of some sinister plot. Pulte, currently director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, is Trump’s nominee to oversee the nation’s intelligence apparatus — and according to Rothkopf, this represents “the worst appointment Trump has ever made.”
The evidence? Pulte lacks the traditional intelligence background that Rothkopf and his sources in the national security community believe is essential. “He has absolutely zero experience in intelligence,” Rothkopf declared, noting that even Secretary of State Marco Rubio acknowledged this fact. What Rothkopf frames as disqualifying, Trump supporters might see as the point — bringing fresh eyes to an intelligence community that has repeatedly failed the American people.
Rothkopf’s real concern isn’t Pulte’s resume. It’s Pulte’s loyalty. “He is purely being picked because he will do exactly what Trump says,” Rothkopf complained. There’s an implicit assumption here that has dominated Washington thinking for decades — that the intelligence community should operate independently of elected leadership, that career bureaucrats know better than the president the American people elected.
The commentator went further, suggesting dark motives behind the appointment. “Trump wants him there because he thinks that the intel community can help him invalidate upcoming elections,” Rothkopf claimed. This is the same intelligence community, mind you, that Rothkopf and his colleagues spent years criticizing for its failures — from missing the 9/11 plot to the weapons of mass destruction fiasco in Iraq to the Russia collusion hoax that consumed the first two years of Trump’s first term.
The “breaking point” narrative requires us to forget that Trump has been president before. We’ve seen this movie. The Republic did not collapse. The institutions survived. What happened instead was a president who challenged the permanent bureaucracy, questioned long-held foreign policy assumptions, and refused to defer to the same experts who had been wrong about virtually everything for a generation.
Rothkopf describes the current moment as a “golden age of chaos,” but one wonders whose chaos he’s actually describing. Is it chaos when a president nominates someone who will implement his agenda? Or is the real chaos the hysterical overreaction from a commentariat that still hasn’t accepted the results of the last election?
The intelligence community that Rothkopf defends has not covered itself in glory. These are the same agencies that spied on American citizens, that promoted the Steele dossier, that assured us the Afghanistan withdrawal would go smoothly. Perhaps a little outside perspective is exactly what they need.
The “breaking point” crowd has been predicting Trump’s imminent collapse since 2015. Every controversy, every appointment, every tweet was supposed to be the one that finally ended him. Yet here we are, a decade later, and Trump is back in the White House with a mandate to reshape the federal government. If this is chaos, it’s the kind of chaos that wins elections.
Rothkopf and his fellow travelers in the national security establishment would do well to consider a possibility that never seems to cross their minds — maybe the American people want something different from the same old intelligence apparatus that has failed them repeatedly. Maybe they elected Trump precisely to shake things up. And maybe, just maybe, that’s what democracy looks like, not chaos.
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