Just over a week ago, the question facing the American “intelligence community” — all of the assorted spies and spooks at 18 different agencies — ran roughly as follows: Are things so bad that they can only get better? Or is there another step down?

There was another step down, it turns out, and it is Bill Pulte, whom President Donald Trump has tapped to replace Tulsi Gabbard as Director of National Intelligence, a position created after the attacks of Sep. 11, 2001, to bring a semblance of coordination to the institutions analyzing the worst threats facing Americans.

Gabbard — who resigned for good and private reasons unrelated to her tenure — had been bad: A colorful but unqualified conspiracy theorist in her political career, as DNI she politicized the spy agencies by sidelining analysts who produced narratives that were inconvenient to the president: that Venezuela was not an imminent threat to national security, say, or that the election of 2020 was not in fact “stolen” from Trump.

Veterans of the IC worried that blind loyalty to Trump, rather than expertise, was the new standard, and that America’s spies were losing the ability and willingness to speak truth to power, at a potential cost of American lives.

Pulte, though, appears to be worse. He seems even less qualified for the job than Gabbard (who at least had military experience). A scion of one of America’s largest home-building empires, PulteGroup, he fell out with his relatives, the family foundation, and the group’s other directors and in 2020 left in a huff. He then started a private-equity firm that invests in air conditioners and heaters, an industry adjacent to building which only Trump, as builder-in-chief at the White House, may find relevant. Pulte also dedicated himself to winning the Trump family’s attention and affection, by making its enemies his own.

The president rewarded Pulte by putting him in charge of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, which was set up during the financial crisis of 2008 to oversee the mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, among other institutions. Normally, the job is, and is meant to be, staid if not boring. Not under Pulte. He made himself chairman of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, axed layers of directors and managers and turned his office into a bully pulpit in the service of the president.

As part of that effort, Pulte expanded his footprint on X and other social media, where he attacked personal enemies (even family members) in the president’s own rapid-fire, no-holds-barred style. A bit like other sycophants — the influencer Laura Loomer springs to mind — Pulte also went after anybody the president designated as an adversary.

When Trump vented his frustration with Jerome Powell, the previous chairman of the Federal Reserve, “Little Trump,” as Pulte was by then known, trolled Powell. He also hurled allegations of mortgage fraud against other Trump targets, such as Lisa Cook (also on the Fed) and Letitia James (a prosecutor from New York who sued Trump). Pulte played so fast and loose with facts and decorum that he attracted the attention of a government watchdog.

In all these ways, Pulte was just another MAGA crony, notorious among those in the know but obscure to the wider public. That will change if he becomes DNI and wields real power — by whispering into Trump’s ear which domestic politician to investigate or which foreign country to bomb; by influencing decisions of life and death.

Nobody can plausibly argue that Pulte was chosen for any competence in the immensely sensitive and important functions of a DNI. Instead, Mark Warner, the ranking member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, has it right. Pulte, he says, was “selected precisely because the White House believes he will provide the narrative it wants, not the intelligence we need.” Odds are, Warner thinks, that Pulte will “shape intelligence around the president’s wishes, regardless of the cost to the American people.”

At a time when America is fighting, on-again-off-again, in the Middle East, contemplating strikes in Cuba and elsewhere and hoping to deter the real adversaries in places like Beijing, decisions to nominate lackeys such as Bill Pulte are worse than irresponsible. They show a president who has lost the plot, a leader who cares not a whit for America but always and only puts POTUS First.

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This column reflects the personal views of the author and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Andreas Kluth is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering US diplomacy, national security and geopolitics. Previously, he was editor-in-chief of Handelsblatt Global and a writer for the Economist.

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