Quinta Jurecic and Benjamin Wittes: Trump’s Playbook Is Terribly Ill-Suited to a Pandemic

Or maybe power does. Far from being inhibited by the foreign-policy establishment that shunned him, Trump has destroyed it. The list of names on the letters now reads like a memorial wall for the party’s old power brokers. Trump has barred them almost entirely from jobs in his administration, and built a new pro-Trump establishment on the wreckage of the old GOP elite.

Heinrichs is the rare young intellectual to have lived in both worlds. By 2016, she had worked on missile-defense issues on the Hill and held research posts at a number of conservative think tanks, headlining panels on issues such as “the future of missile defense” and co-authoring a paper on “deterrence and nuclear targeting in the 21st century.” Now a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, she has been described as “one of the leaders of the next generation of experts on nuclear strategy and arms control” and is a regular TV commentator on U.S. foreign policy. She, along with a few other members of the GOP’s most resistant segment—which includes people who have spent their careers devoted to alliances, worrying about presidential character, and banging on about norms and values—have now come around to Trump’s foreign policy.

Even in primary season, Heinrichs saw hints of Trump’s appeal. People she knew back home in small-town Ohio found the candidates she was informally advising, including Marco Rubio and Scott Walker, too wooden. “I have some lifelong Democrat friends and family members who, for the first time in their life, supported the Republican candidate and voted for Donald Trump,” she said. “He’s like, ‘I’m tired of Americans dying in Afghanistan.’ And they’re like, ‘Yeah, so are we.’”

Trump, of course, made it through the primaries despite the Republican opposition, and Heinrichs knew she couldn’t support Clinton, whom she saw as dangerously accommodating to foes such as China and Iran. She had also noticed patterns in what Trump was saying. Just because he wanted to avoid overseas “nation-building” didn’t make him an isolationist—he also wanted better trade deals, so clearly wanted to be engaged in the world. So, she said on a Federalist podcast then, “I was open to this idea of a different kind of commander in chief.”

There was something else, she told The Federalist. “I didn’t like the direction that the Never Trump national-security establishment was going.” The suggestion that Trump would start a nuclear war, or a war with Muslims all over the world was “incredibly irresponsible coming from people who I think, and know, know better.”

This, after all, was the president that the election had delivered, and clearly many of the notions the old GOP foreign-policy establishment considered sacred were very much open to question. “Ordinary Americans … look at the establishment and say, ‘I don’t think you guys necessarily know what you’re doing,’” she told me. Many in the establishment were the same people who had advocated or helped mismanage wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. And anyway, was Trump being ignorant or spooking allies when he asked what the point of NATO was and why the U.S. had troops in South Korea? Or was he asking questions that average Americans wanted to know the answers to?