Trump the Weaver

There’s been a goodly amount of wailing and gnashing of teeth in my corner of the world about some of President-elect Donald Trump’s recently announced appointments. Particular dismay has attended those of Rep. Mike Waltz (R-FL) to the position of national security advisor and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) to the State Department. Both men have voiced hawkish—sometimes very hawkish—sentiments in the past, and the collective feeling among those who feel the United States is overexposed abroad is that these two appointments signify the triumph of zombie Bushism and the War Party.

Maybe. I remain unpersuaded. First, a bare political reality has gone unmentioned in these conversations: Rubio and Waltz both backed the once and future president early in the nomination race against Ron DeSantis, the popular governor of their own state. Rubio especially, as a focus of anti-Trump yearning in the ’16 race, could have added heft to the DeSantis insurgency; while I doubt this would have changed the outcome, it could very well have made the journey longer, more expensive, and more acrimonious, leaving the party weaker and less well-funded for the general election. Both men might reasonably expect favors in return. There are a limited number of jobs that are a promotion from a safe Senate seat and influential committee positions. The flip side is that able men who were not loyalists—to take the most prominent example, Elbridge Colby, who was associated with the DeSantis camp—have been shut out. This is just how politics works.