Know Your Enemy: Trump the Dove? Or Trump the Neocon?

Know Your Enemy: Trump the Dove? Or Trump the Neocon?

Matt and Sam are joined by Curt Mills of the American Conservative to assess Trump’s national security team.

Know Your Enemy is a podcast about the American right co-hosted by Matthew Sitman and Sam Adler-Bell. Read more about it here. You can subscribe to, rate, and review the show on Apple Podcasts and Stitcher, and receive bonus content by supporting the podcast on Patreon.

The second Trump administration hasn’t started, but it’s already proving chaotic, disturbing, and downright bewildering. (Not unlike the first!) Trump’s picks for key staff and cabinet positions display a discordant, if not altogether surprising, mix of ideologies, experience, and scandalous baggage. (Indeed, one of his picks, Matt Gaetz for attorney general, withdrew from consideration between the time we recorded our interview and when we recorded the intro.)

For this episode, we’re focused on Trump’s national security team, which is shaping up to be divided against itself: neoconservatives like Marco Rubio (State Department) alongside quasi-isolationists like Tulsi Gabbard (Director of National Intelligence) and bellicose TV personalities like Pete Hegseth (Department of Defense). To make sense of it all, we’re joined by Curt Mills, a longtime foreign policy reporter and executive director of the American Conservative. A semi-enemy, Curt hails from the paleoconservative school of foreign affairs, which prioritizes realism and restraint. (That is to say, he’s not thrilled about Rubio.) Based on Trump’s appointments thus far, we ask Curt to assess, from his perspective, the relative strength of various factions of the Trump coalition: Will Trump listen to the warmongers in his midst? Will he side with the America Firsters? Or will he ignore everyone and just make some deals? Listen to find out.

Further Reading:

Curt Mills, What a Trump Cabinet Might Look Like, The American Conservative (2024)

— What Trump Could Do in Foreign Policy Might Surprise the World, New York Times (2024)

Patrick Smith & Peter Alexander, Police report details alleged sexual assault by Trump’s defense pick Pete Hegseth, NBC News (2024)

Peter Baker, Maggie Haberman, Jonathan Swan, Gaetz’s withdrawal follows revelations in a sex-trafficking inquiry. New York Times (2024)

Dave Phillips and Carol Rosenberg, The Metamorphosis of Pete Hegseth: From Critic of War Crimes to Defender of the Accused, New York Times (2024)

David Frum, Unpatriotic Conservatives, National Review (2003)