Trump Just Handed His Enemies List To the Intelligence Community

Donald Trump has made plenty of dangerous appointments. He has elevated cranks, sycophants, ideologues, Fox News greenroom warriors, revenge fantasists and people whose only evident qualification was their willingness to say “yes, sir” while democracy was being fed into the wood chipper.

Naming Bill Pulte as acting director of national intelligence may be the most dangerous appointment Trump has made yet.

Pulte is deeply unqualified for this post. His background is not in intelligence, national security, counterterrorism, cyber, military affairs, or foreign policy. It is in inherited proximity to housing, private equity, and MAGA politics. He is the grandson of William J. Pulte, the founder of PulteGroup, one of the country’s major homebuilders. After graduating from college, Pulte founded Pulte Capital Partners in 2011, an investment firm focused on building and housing products, and later served on the board of Pulte Homes/PulteGroup. Trump then installed him as director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency in 2025, where he oversees Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and the Federal Home Loan Banks.

In public life, Pulte has demonstrated the opposite of sober judgment, independence, discretion and national security expertise required to oversee the most sensitive secrets on earth. That is what should scare every single one of us who lives in a world where the danger is coming from both outside the country and inside the house.

https://saltypolitics.substack.com/p/breaking-trump-just-handed-his-enemies