The Trump Administration’s Very Online Celebrities Are Its Biggest Headaches

By Noah Rothman

Thursday, August 28, 2025

 

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before:

 

America’s governing institutions are so sclerotic, corrupt, and co-opted by the undemocratic permanent bureaucracy that only a really destabilizing shake-up can right their course. We need fresh eyes — heterodox figures unbeholden to the staid Washington conventions that made it the swamp it is today. Indeed, those who object to flipping the tables in D.C. are part of the problem; either they don’t understand the scale of the challenge or they’re acting in concert with the deep state. Thus, there can be no good-faith objections to a revolutionary reversal of fortunes in the bureaucracy.

 

If you did not encounter this argument or some variation of it when the Senate was rubber-stamping Trump’s nominees, keep doing whatever it is that you’re doing. It sounds like a blissful existence. The rest of us, however, were shouted down more than once as we observed that, while iconoclasts have much to offer, they often cause more problems than they solve — particularly when they are placed at the top of sprawling institutions that they neither understand nor appreciate. Those of us who voiced that contemptibly conventional wisdom, we were told, just didn’t know what time it was.

 

We’re now confronted with an entirely predictable situation: The Trump administration’s appointees who represent the biggest departures from convention are also its squeakiest wheels. They demand attention, and they receive plenty of it, but not the sort that reflects well on them or their boss.

 

Late Wednesday night, the Wall Street Journal provided an update on Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard’s follies. Recently, the DNI ordered 37 current and former members of the intelligence community stripped of their security clearances, one of whom was an “undercover CIA officer” whose identity was exposed as a result.

 

“Gabbard didn’t know the CIA officer had been working undercover, according to a person familiar with the fallout from the list’s release,” the report read. “Three other people with knowledge of the situation said that Gabbard’s office didn’t meaningfully consult with the CIA before releasing the list.” Moreover:

 

The national intelligence office didn’t seek the CIA’s input about the composition of the list, and the CIA had no foreknowledge of Gabbard’s posting on X the following day that revealed the names, including that of the covered CIA officer, according to two of the people familiar with the events.

 

In sum, the person whose only job is to coordinate with and synthesize the information produced by America’s intelligence agencies didn’t bother to do her only job before outing and defenestrating a 20-year veteran of America’s clandestine services. That’s a potentially prosecutable dereliction — or it would be, if appointed or elected officials were charged with offenses for which public servants of lower rank would doubtlessly find themselves in the dock. Not exactly the high-test populism we were promised from this administration.

 

Of course, this violation of protocol will not register as an offense to those who are consumed with contempt for the intelligence and security establishment. Disruption for disruption’s sake is, however, only a majority proposition on social media. The voters who are warm to bold experimentation in these institutions want them to function better, not worse. For that reason, the broader voting public is unlikely to be as dismissive of such scandals as the MAGA cheering section may be.

 

This is only the latest rake the ODNI has stepped on during Gabbard’s tenure. She recently returned to her portfolio after freelancing an unsettlingly bizarre warning about imminent nuclear conflict, a message that irritated the president. “Sidelined” in advance of the strikes on Iran’s nuclear program, Gabbard was tasked with keeping the online influencer set happy — by uncovering a “treasonous conspiracy” orchestrated by the Obama administration to “promote this contrived narrative that Russia interfered in the 2016 election to help President Trump.” Her contention rests on “a nonexistent contradiction in the 2017 intelligence assessment,” Robert Farley’s fact-check observed, and it contradicts the work of a 2020 bipartisan Senate committee, which found “no reason to dispute the Intelligence Community’s conclusions.” But it gave Gabbard a way back into the president’s good graces.

 

The totality of Gabbard’s work suggests that her role is not to coordinate intelligence but to frustrate the intelligence community — and to undermine rather than contribute to the restoration of its credibility. Indeed, she seems to see her own credibility as inversely proportional to that of the agencies she oversees. That would make sense given the degree to which she has staked her reputation on the contention that the American security establishment actively and deliberately thwarts her conception of what U.S. grand strategy should be.

 

Gabbard is not the only reckless freelancer in the administration who’s busily creating bad headlines for the president. So far, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s role as secretary of health and human services has been a madcap romp from one humiliating episode to the next.

 

“I know what a healthy child is supposed to look like,” the HHS secretary said during a “Make America Healthy Again” event alongside Texas Governor Greg Abbott. “I see these kids that are just overburdened with mitochondrial challenges, with inflammation, you can tell from their faces, from their body movements, and from their lack of social connection, and I know that that’s not how our children are supposed to look.”

 

That’s some searing medical insight. And that’s not all. Kennedy claimed at that event that a staggering 38 percent of U.S. teenagers are “diabetic or pre-diabetic” (it’s closer to 0.35 percent for people under 20, according to the CDC) and that, when he was young, autism was not a phenomenon at all (rather than a less regularly diagnosed phenomenon). The longtime vaccine skeptic then spent this Thursday morning venting his frustrations with the CDC over its promotion of vaccinations as one of the “greatest advances in medical science.”

 

If it seems to you that the CDC is in the way of Kennedy’s crankish advocacy, it apparently seems that way to Kennedy, too. He recently ignited a bureaucratic scandal attributable almost entirely to the qualities that endeared him to the MAGA movement in the first place: his contempt for protocol.

 

CDC Director Susan Monarez was abruptly dismissed by Kennedy on Wednesday, only one month after her Senate confirmation. Or, she would have been, if Kennedy had the constitutional authority to fire her. He doesn’t. Monarez is suing the administration over the abridgment of the president’s sole (and debatable) authority to terminate Senate-confirmed appointees. Monarez is refusing to resign, but three of her CDC colleagues tendered their resignations in protest.

 

Kennedy’s backers in the very online ecosystem are already mounting a counterattack. At least one departee has a history of flamboyance — a pattern of odd behavior that is illustrative of the public health establishment’s estrangement from the American majority during the pandemic. What we’re left with are dueling eccentricities, right? Who could possibly adjudicate that?

 

The answer: practically anyone who has not subordinated his or her capacity for logic to the demands of partisanship. Once again, we’re left to conclude that RFK Jr.’s fan base does not care if the institutions he’s tasked with overseeing function as advertised. That is probably not a majoritarian view.

 

There are few Republicans who would say that the CDC handled itself with aplomb during the pandemic. And yet, the agency is not held in especially low regard by the GOP, to say nothing of everyone else. In fact, according to the Pew Research Center’s August data, the CDC is one of the most favored federal agencies. Owing entirely to RFK Jr.’s ill-planned flight of fancy, the Trump administration must now devote bandwidth to this organizational fight with the CDC, and it’s not starting from a position of inherent advantage.

 

In fact, RFK’s antics are already creating cracks in the GOP’s united front. “Serious allegations have been made about the meeting agenda,” Senator Bill Cassidy (R., La.) said of a forthcoming summit of CDC vaccine advisers. Cassidy wants it postponed. “If the meeting proceeds,” he added, “any recommendations made should be rejected as lacking legitimacy given the seriousness of the allegations and the current turmoil in CDC leadership.”

 

Indeed, both Gabbard and Kennedy have taken initiative more than once, and more than once they’ve derailed more-considered administration priorities. That’s what we should have expected from figures whose unconventionality was their foremost qualification for the roles they occupy — that, and their unfailing loyalty to the president, because nothing screams fealty like the convert’s zeal evinced by these former Democrats.

 

Their defenders are liable to retreat into the abstractions they retailed during these officials’ confirmation hearings. They will claim that these actions are a belated and justified response to long-forgotten grievances. That will work on those on whom it has always worked: those who cloister themselves in heady, ideologically homogeneous salons and online forums. The rest will be forced to witness an administration that is increasingly set against itself, and they will conclude that they are witnessing chaos. And despite what infotainment addicts tell themselves, the voting public has never responded well to chaos.