At a political rally in June 2009, Donald Trump’s soon-to-be deputy national security adviser, K.T. McFarland, offered a jarring prediction.

China might cancel the Fourth of July, she said.


“They’re going to want something for their money. They’re not our sugar daddy,” McFarland told a tea party crowd in Times Square, referring to America’s more than $1 trillion in debt to Beijing. “So, 10 years from now, you might not have American Independence Day. … The Fourth of July might just end up being another day on the calendar.”

Unless voters “throw the bums out,” McFarland said, “we can all start learning Chinese.” She then read aloud Mandarin phrases from an index card, including ones for “How can I help you?” and “What do you want from me?”

McFarland’s theatrical performance might have been lighthearted, but its breezy and simplistic tone underscores why national security experts in both parties worry she is unqualified for what national security veterans say is among the hardest — and most important — jobs at the White House. McFarland, whose initials stand for Kathleen Troia, has not worked in government since the mid-1980s. Her main occupation for the past decade was as a national security analyst for Fox News, where her contract ended this fall.

Her appointment, announced in late November, has fueled concerns that Trump is not taking seriously enough the need for a top-flight foreign policy team at a moment of high global instability.

Though less visible than the national security adviser, a job for which Trump has picked retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, the National Security Council’s principal deputy carries an even more crushing workload, NSC veterans say. Coordinating the government’s foreign policy, intelligence and national security arms is a herculean task requiring endless hours of meetings among deputy officials who develop policy options for cabinet and agency chiefs, and the president himself, to consider.

“The schedule is relentless. It’s incredibly exhausting. You are under constant pressure to respond to events and breaking news in real time,” says Julianne Smith, a former national security adviser to Vice President Joe Biden.

Under President Barack Obama, the job has been held by Tom Donilon, a former State Department chief of staff; Tony Blinken, a former national security adviser to the vice president; and, currently, Avril Haines, a former deputy CIA director.

McFarland, 65, last worked in government three decades ago, as a public affairs official in Ronald Reagan’s Pentagon. In 2006, she mounted an improbable bid for Hillary Clinton’s New York Senate seat that ended in a GOP primary drubbing. She then became a paid commentator for Fox News, which people who know McFarland said was her springboard onto Trump’s team.

McFarland’s stock may also have been boosted by her friendship with her onetime boss, former national security adviser and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who has spoken to Trump several times.

“I have very high regard for her. Her knowledge of international affairs has developed in all the years I’ve known her,” Kissinger said in a brief phone interview. “She has a strong personality, but with great tact and personal skill, which is needed to handle the inherently complex relationships of a White House.” Kissinger said he recently met with Flynn and McFarland for two hours.

But many of those who are skeptical of the McFarland appointment — a group that includes NSC officials of both parties, speaking to POLITICO under condition of anonymity — dismiss the fabled Kissinger’s praise as loyalty to an old friend and a nod to the reality of her new influence.

They insist she is a policy lightweight with no real personnel or crisis management experience. Several said her job would test the stamina even of someone a decade younger. And their concern is heightened by Trump’s own unfamiliarity with foreign policy, as well as questions about Flynn’s suitability for the top NSC job. Critics have spotlighted reports about Flynn’s rigid management style and his circulation of false news stories online.

A Trump transition aide said McFarland was not available for an interview and did not reply when asked whether McFarland will share her workload with other deputies. But White House officials say McFarland spoke by phone last Tuesday with Haines and made clear she would directly fill Haines’ well-defined role as principal deputy to the national security adviser.

Though she is a wealthy resident of uptown Manhattan, McFarland was not close to Trump before the campaign. Sources said her path to one of Trump’s first national security appointments ran through Fox News headquarters on New York City’s Sixth Avenue, where, she joked to an audience of conservative activists in March, “I’m the brunette.”

In the Fox News hallways, McFarland met and befriended Trump’s sons Eric and Donald Jr. She also saw Flynn there and hosted her future boss at least three times on her online talk show, “DEFCON 3.”

McFarland also caught the eye of Trump himself, sources said.

“As a guy who watches Fox all the time, I think he basically saw her on there, saw how articulate she was,” said Republican political consultant Ed Rollins, who advised McFarland’s 2006 campaign. He added that McFarland “became close to the two sons — in particular Eric [Trump], who is over there a lot. That’s kind of how she developed her connection.”

Rollins called McFarland “extraordinarily smart,” adding that “she deals very well with the worlds of both generals and billionaires, which is what this administration is becoming about.”

McFarland’s support for Trump and his positions also made her welcome in his inner circle. Since her ill-fated Senate campaign, McFarland has positioned herself as an anti-establishment outsider wary of globalism and U.S. interventions abroad. Trump is “willing to rethink a lot of the conventional wisdom,” she said on Fox in August.

McFarland has celebrated Brexit, the United Kingdom’s vote to leave the European Union; called the 2011 U.S. intervention in Libya “insane”; and said the U.S. might be able to find “common ground” with Russian President Vladimir Putin. She has also called Islamism a “death cult” that demands a more aggressive U.S. response.

“My impression is she sees the world the way Trump does, and that must be why he trusts her,” said Morgan Ortagus, McFarland’s 2006 campaign spokeswoman.

McFarland will return to the NSC nearly 50 years after her first arrival there, as a George Washington University student who worked nights as a typist for the Nixon White House, where Kissinger was national security adviser. “I was a really good typist!” she told an audience last month.

After college, she worked as a research assistant on the NSC staff, then earned a bachelor’s degree at England’s Oxford University. She returned to Washington to work on the staff of the Senate Armed Services Committee, then became a speechwriter and assistant secretary of defense for public affairs under Ronald Reagan’s defense secretary, Caspar Weinberger.

“During her years in the Reagan administration, she absorbed the importance of communications in assuring public understanding of and support for national security policies,” said Robert “Bud” McFarlane, who served as national security adviser to Reagan, told Politico in a statement. “President Trump has made a wise choice and will be very well served by it.”

But critics say McFarland’s Pentagon experience offers little guide to the muddy trenches of NSC policymaking.

“She would be at [Pentagon] meetings, but she was not talking substantively then. It was all about how to sell the message,” said Lawrence Korb, who served with McFarland in Reagan’s Pentagon and is now at the Clinton-friendly Center for American Progress.

One Republican foreign policy insider who knows McFarland put it this way: “She is not a thinker — but, more importantly in that job, not a doer. … Anyone who’s watched her show knows she’s sort of a follower, someone who gets all her talking points off the [Republican National Committee’s] Web page.”

Ortagus, however, insists McFarland was a quick study. As a Senate candidate, McFarland displayed “an extraordinary ability to consume copious amounts of information in order to formulate policy proposals,” she said.

McFarland’s boosters say she has been unfairly dismissed for having stayed home to raise three children after her 1984 marriage to a wealthy Manhattan investment banker. They note that a woman friends call a cheerful extrovert and a mentor to younger women comes from blue-collar Wisconsin roots. “She worked very hard to get where she is,” said one longtime friend.

Skeptics say McFarland will find government and foreign policy radically changed since the 1980s. But McFarland often invokes her child-raising hiatus as a source of special wisdom.

“I’ve studied nuclear weapons at MIT, philosophy at Oxford and politics at George Washington University,” McFarland wrote in a June op-ed about the Iran nuclear deal, “but some of the most important lessons I ever learned were as a mother enrolled in the school of life.”

The essay criticized the agreement’s provisions under such headers as, “Don’t let your kids eat dessert before dinner” and “You DO want to see what’s in that backpack, especially if your kid’s been caught smoking pot in the past.”

McFarland has deleted her Facebook and Twitter accounts and scrubbed her personal website, although Politico reviewed several months of her tweets before her account disappeared. In one of them, on March 29, she wrote: “islam is religion, islamism is death cult.”

In September, McFarland tweeted, after Putin denied interfering in the 2016 election through email hacking, “Guilty as charged.” (Trump has said he does not believe Russia had a cyber role in the election.)

And when Turkey’s military attempted a coup against the country’s Islamist government on July 15, she tweeted: “Military are good guys trying to restore democracy.” The Obama administration condemned the coup as an assault on Turkey’s democracy.

In 2012, McFarland was also at the center of a peculiar episode of intrigue when an audiotape emerged of a conversation she had with Gen. David Petraeus, then the chief U.S. commander in Afghanistan, during a 2011 visit she paid to the country.

McFarland told Petraeus she was relaying word from then-Fox News chief Roger Ailes that Petraeus should run for president. “At some point when you go to New York next you might just want to chat with Roger, and Rupert Murdoch, for that matter,” she said.

When Petraeus said he was “surprised” the Obama administration had intervened in Libya in 2011, McFarland replied, “Oh, that was insane!”

After the recording became a public embarrassment, Ailes told The Washington Post that he had asked McFarland to carry the political message to the general, but as “a joke.”

“It sounds like she thought she was on a secret mission in the Reagan administration. ... She was way out of line,” Ailes said.

But McFarland’s relationship with Fox, where she kept a desk, continued until this fall. The network that helped pave her way back to the White House terminated her contract after her appointment to Trump's national security team.

Madeline Conway contributed to this report.