This is an adapted excerpt from the Nov. 20 episode of "All In with Chris Hayes."
The Republican Party and the American political right have had, for multiple decades now, a project: make Americans hate and distrust their government. Republicans then use the hate and distrust they have sown as cover to break the government, wherever possible, and campaign on the failures of that broken system.
It’s been, unfortunately, a pretty successful project. So, on a certain level, it's no real surprise that Americans are skeptical of the federal government and its bureaucracies but, the thing is, our government actually really matters – in so many ways, big and small.
You need hundreds of thousands of professional civil servants to keep the country running, no matter who controls Congress or the Oval Office.
It matters that we have scientists and researchers at the National Weather Service or the National Hurricane Center. It matters that we have people who are competent at modeling hurricanes and can actually alert people when to get out of the way of disaster and how to minimize their risks.
It matters that we have sufficient food inspectors to ensure safety standards are being met in the plants that provide our meat, vegetables and fruits. It matters that we have inspectors who are able to track down a salmonella outbreak, isolate the source and oversee a recall whenever it is necessary.
You need hundreds of thousands of professional civil servants to keep the country running, no matter who controls Congress or the Oval Office.
The places where many Americans see this the most concretely and obviously are defense and intelligence. So, what could happen when this establishment is purged and taken over by a corrupt and feckless chief executive?
Well, we actually have a recent example of a Republican administration that came to power with an open contempt for federal civil servants in general, and for the national security apparatus in particular.
After the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, George W. Bush’s Cabinet, led by then-Vice President Dick Cheney and then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, politicized the U.S. intelligence apparatus and basically took it over with the goal of cooking up a pretext to go to war with Iraq.
A big tool the Bush administration used is called “stovepiping,” which means creating new groups with names like “the Office of Special Plans” and filling them with political appointees who would directly contact intelligence officers. These appointees would press the officers for any raw information they could spin into a case for war and send up to the White House. It was something career intelligence officials knew was specious, even as it was presented to the international community by then-Secretary of State Colin Powell.
And we all know how that turned out: The U.S. began its war with Iraq, one of the most colossal catastrophes in recent history. That was a product of a Republican administration that was hostile to the career civil servants in the security establishment and was determined to bring them to heel, to make them “loyal” to the president above all else.
If you look beyond the U.S., there’s another recent example of why competence matters in intelligence affairs: Israel.
Right now, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a man who has been indicted on charges of bribery, fraud and breach of trust, is attempting to kick away the last remaining checks on his power in the liberal democracy through a judicial reform bill.
In the meantime, he has committed, above all else, to an ideological project of military domination over the Palestinian territories. However, Netanyahu somehow managed not to see the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks coming, the worst attack on Israeli civilians in history. This is despite the fact army and intelligence officials flagged multiple warning signs of the plot, and despite the fact that Netanyahu and his far-right political allies have been running around for a generation saying that they are the only ones who can keep Israel safe.
That is why it matters that elected officials do not politicize intelligence and do not work to deconstruct it.
President-elect Donald Trump has promised to target the U.S. national security establishment in his second term, people he calls the “deep state” operatives, and to do it, he is leaning on a group of appointees whom even Republicans are challenging as morally and professionally unfit for high office.
There’s Pete Hegseth, Trump’s pick for defense secretary, overseeing the largest organization in America, with nearly 3 million employees. Just a few weeks ago, Hegseth was a Fox News host and has no experience leading an organization anywhere near that big or complex. He’s a guy who admitted to paying off a woman who has accused him of sexual assault. (Hegseth, who was not charged, denies the allegation and says they had consensual sex.)
He’s also a guy who as, a National Guard officer, was pulled from a detail protecting President Joe Biden’s inauguration after a fellow soldier flagged Hegseth as a possible “insider threat” over a tattoo on his arm that is associated with white supremacist groups. Heidi Beirich, a co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, told The Associated Press that several of Hegseth's tattoos have symbols that have been adopted by some far-right groups and violent extremists but said their meaning depends on context. Hegseth has called the controversy over his tattoo an example of "anti-Christian bigotry."
It matters that elected officials do not politicize intelligence and do not work to deconstruct it.
Then there is Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s pick to be director of national intelligence — despite having a history of appearing to parrot the talking points of Russian President Vladimir Putin and Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad. For example, Gabbard posted a video in 2022 claiming the existence of U.S.-funded “biolabs” across Ukraine. As NBC News reported, the Ukrainian government, the U.S. government and independent researchers have all said there is no evidence for the claim, which originated from Moscow. And in 2017, Gabbard said she was "skeptical" that Assad's regime was behind a deadly chemical weapons attack in Syria, contrary to U.S. intelligence findings.
These appointees are either of low character or unqualified to oversee the American national security apparatus or both. But they are loyal to Trump and that’s what the president-elect cares about.
So far, the Trump transition team has not signed the required agreements to allow the FBI to screen his nominees. It’s a process put in place to avoid hiring government officials who are vulnerable to being blackmailed or enticed into working for foreign intelligence agents.
I’ve lived through two recent examples of right-wing governments that essentially were at war with their own civil service, particularly in the intelligence agencies, leading to genuine national security catastrophes as a result.
That stuff matters a tremendous amount, as does whether our intelligence apparatus is functioning correctly. The MAGA party is announcing that it wants to break all these functions and go to war with the people who uphold them. And I don’t know what’s going to happen but, if recent history tells us anything, I don’t think it’s going to be good.
Allison Detzel contributed.