On Wednesday, a Donald Trump administration official waiting for his background check to be completed was removed from a top post in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence before he officially began. Retired U.S. Army Lt. Col. Daniel Davis, a foreign policy expert at the Charles Koch-backed Defense Priorities, was set to become the agency’s No. 3 official, deputy director for mission integration (DDMI). Among other duties, the DDMI is responsible for preparing the presidential daily briefing (PDB), the U.S. intelligence community’s most important and most sensitive document, produced specifically for America’s No. 1 customer for intelligence.
Even before Davis’ appointment was made public, it raised serious concerns among Trump insiders, including former intelligence officials who served during the president’s first term. The issue, as they explained to Tablet, was not just Davis’ lack of experience in intelligence matters but also his idiosyncratic foreign policy views, which are at odds with Trump’s on virtually every key issue—including China, Iran, Russia, Hamas and pro-Hamas campus protesters.
“The DDMI has to be aligned with the president he serves,” a former intelligence official in the first Trump administration told Tablet. “The job requires an experienced, knowledgeable official who can ensure analytical integrity protecting the president’s interests while engaging in the knife fight with the intelligence bureaucracy.”
Thus, the big worry is that an official in charge of the PDB opposed to Trump’s policies might try to curate intelligence so as to steer the customer-in-chief away from his preferences and toward his own.
Take Iran, for instance. Trump has said that he’d prefer negotiations, but the terror regime cannot be allowed to have a bomb and he’ll use military force if he has to. Davis thinks that’s “absurd.” In response to a question about Trump’s position on Iran, Davis wrote on X, “I don’t know who Trump has hired for his advisor, who’s giving him such absurd advice, but hitting the nuclear facilities of Iran is far more dangerous and difficult than what he believes.”
What we’re seeing is an external faction trying to attach itself to MAGA in order to strangle Trump’s America First foreign policy. And the reason why has little to do with Israel, the Middle East, or the Jews.
In December Davis attacked Sen. Ted Cruz after the Trump ally posted in support of the president’s campaign promises and wrote that “the antisemitic protests we’ve seen at universities will end next year. Universities that tolerate antisemitism will have their federal funding cut off.” Davis replied, “Where is ur moral outrage at the Israeli gov that continues to kill kids and other civilians without remorse or military necessity? ... you want to suppress any demonstrations directed against the policies of the Netanyahu gov, even peaceful ones, because you don’t like their message.”
In fact, Davis’ criticism of Trump foreign policy dates back to the start of the president’s first term. In an April 2017 column, Davis criticized Trump for ordering missile strikes against former Syrian regime chief Bashar Assad for using chemical weapons on civilians; bombing Afghanistan; and sending two aircraft carrier strike groups into waters near North Korea. What Trump called peace through strength, Davis argued, was likely to “result [in] the accelerating decline of our national security.”
He also criticized Trump’s first-term decision to withdraw from the Iran deal and implied he was a warmonger. “Diplomacy has long been available to incentivize Iran to agree to a path of restraint,” Davis posted on X in October. “But when we had a plan—the JCPOA—those wanting war chose to destroy the imperfect plan rather than work with what we had to build something better.”
Then this week, just as word of Davis’ appointment started to spread in D.C. circles, the Trump administration arrested 30-year-old Columbia University graduate student Mahmoud Khalil, and announced plans to deport him for his leading role in the pro-Hamas demonstrations that roiled the Manhattan campus, where Jews were routinely harassed, threatened, and beaten by the pro-terror activists. With Trump promising more arrests and more deportations of campus thugs, Davis found himself at odds not only with the administration’s foreign policy but also its key domestic initiatives.
Making an official who has consistently publicized his opposition to the president’s own policies responsible for the president’s intake of intelligence is a mistake best caught early.
And that’s what happened when, on Wednesday, a story in Jewish Insider reporting Davis’ appointment and showcasing his policy ideas set off alarm bells throughout the America First movement. All morning, Trump allies on Capitol Hill, prominent media and social media figures, as well as donors, had questions for the White House. By midafternoon the plug had been pulled on Davis’ appointment, apparently by the commander-in-chief himself. “Thanks goes to President Trump,” author and broadcaster Mark Levin posted on X regarding Davis’ dismissal.
Davis’ allies pounced. “Mr. President this is genuinely your loss,” wrote Kelley Vlahos, in a post on X now deleted. Vlahos is editorial director of Responsible Statecraft, the online magazine of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. A nominally centrist foreign policy think tank started in 2019 by Charles Koch and progressive megadonor George Soros, Quincy is best known in the D.C. foreign policy world for its pro-Iran regime posture. The organization’s Executive Vice President Trita Parsi played a key role selling the Barack Obama administration’s 2015 Iran nuclear agreement, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), to legalize the terror state’s bomb. Its board includes Iranian American magnate Francis Najafi, who funds several prominent left-wing anti-Israel groups; Katrina vanden Heuvel, longtime editorial director of The Nation; and Stephen B. Heintz, president of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, among others.
Vlahos called the Jewish Insider article a “smear job over Gaza, Iran”—though even a cursory scan of the piece shows that the JI reporter simply cataloged the positions that Davis has repeatedly expressed on social media and in his own podcast, Deep Dive. Vlahos wrote that Davis “is the kind of America First guy that the administration needed. He is a Christian conservative with a stern moral compass and had been hopeful for the new administration and its early foreign policy moves.”
In a podcast Thursday, Davis’ friend (ret.) Col. Douglas Macgregor said that the reason Davis lost his job before he started is because “he’s willing to stand up to those who are doing things that he thinks are wrong. What he’s done that has deeply offended the people that control Washington is that he has said he cannot support what the Israelis are doing in Gaza, that this is inhumane and it is beyond the pale for him as an American and as a Christian to support this. That’s unacceptable today in Washington, D.C. Everyone in Washington, D.C., with very few exceptions, has decided for personal reasons that they are going to support whatever Mr. Netanyahu’s government wants to support, regardless of how many deaths that means among the populations of Gaza, or for that matter the West Bank, or ultimately anywhere else in the region, unconditional support for whatever he wants to do. That’s something that Dan can’t publicly do.”
Macgregor must be referring to the American president who cashiered Davis, for there is no one in Washington, or Jerusalem for that matter, who has taken a more hardline stance on Gaza than Trump. He’s said he wants Gaza evacuated, cleared not just of Hamas, but of all Gazans. In a recent post on Truth Social he warned that if the residents of Gaza did not return all the hostages in their keeping that they, like the terrorists they elected to lead them, would pay a terrible price for their cruelty and bloodlust.
Thus, even Davis’ allies underscore his fundamental differences with Trump foreign policy. That Davis nonetheless sought a foreign policy job in the Trump administration that would routinely put him in the same room with the president and give him the opportunity to shape intelligence collected and assembled expressly for the president lends weight to the concern that Davis planned to undermine Trump.
A further danger is that the Davis affair is being used by some to argue that there is a split inside MAGA—between a “realist” or isolationist contingent, and a more traditionally forward-leaning Reaganite faction.
While gaining traction on social media, this conceptualization of the White House is wrong. It’s premised on the flawed assessment that Trump is beholden to a coalition that helped elect him and thus he must accordingly balance competing interests. In reality, no one helped Trump get elected, just as no one else was subjected to a campaign of lawfare purposed to impoverish and imprison its target, nor was anyone else in the crosshairs of two assassins while on campaign. There are no real divides within MAGA because Trump, and he alone, is the president.
What we’re seeing rather is an external faction trying to attach itself to MAGA in order to strangle Trump’s America First foreign policy. And the reason why has little to do with Israel, the Middle East, or the Jews.
During Trump’s first term, Charles Koch and his late brother David spent millions on ads attacking Trump for putting tariffs on China. And this term, too, tariffs are a key instrument in Trump’s China policy, purposed to shrink the U.S. trade deficit and bring Beijing to the negotiating table for a trade deal that will at last put an end to the ongoing carnage that has laid waste to the American heartland. Given the billions Koch has invested in manufacturing plants in China, he’s got to fight Trump again.
Koch & Co. are not ‘isolationist.’ They absolutely have a foreign policy—it’s pro-Iran, and even more consequentially pro-China, which makes it specifically anti-Trump.
The dividing line between the two sides is clearly drawn because Trump drew it himself. In January he posted on Truth Social that he didn’t want any Koch people inside his administration. And yet within a week, the Pentagon announced the appointment of Michael Dimino as its top Middle East analyst.
Formerly a fellow at Defense Priorities like Davis, Dimino believes that the Middle East does “not really” matter for U.S. interests. It’s striking that someone who thinks his area of specialization isn’t important is yet nonetheless billing Americans for his expertise—in contrast, the USAID officials cut loose by DOGE who funded, say, pro-trans comic books in Chile believed that pushing their boutique causes on foreigners at U.S. taxpayer expense was vital work.
It seems that what Dimino, and “Koch world” generally, means is that the Middle East wouldn’t be a problem if it weren’t for Israel. Therefore, legalizing the nuclear weapons program of Iran, the world’s largest state sponsor of terror, is good policy because it checks Israel—which was precisely Obama’s rationale for putting Iran on the pathway to a bomb.
The point is that Koch and his foreign policy institutions are not, as they are often described, “isolationist.” Koch & Co. absolutely have a foreign policy—it’s pro-Iran, and even more consequentially pro-China, which makes it specifically anti-Trump. Thus, if they didn’t disguise their preferences under labels like “realists” or “restrainers,” they’d have no hope of a hearing among the MAGA faithful, confident that Trump will break the half-century long pact that has hurt ordinary Americans in direct inverse proportion to the enrichment of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and its elite U.S. partners.
Incentivizing American corporate giants to lobby for Beijing is just how China planned it years ago, when Henry Kissinger started Kissinger Associates a decade after the 1972 opening to China and began escorting U.S. business leaders through Beijing’s halls of power. Sure, they could draw from China’s enormous pool of cheap, often slave, labor and make their goods there to sell back to the United States, at four times the profit or more—so long as they used their power and connections, and the money made in China, to make Beijing’s case in Washington. That way, everyone had a stake in pretending China wasn’t plotting to destroy America. Until now, every U.S. president since George H.W. Bush played along, ensuring that Beijing and its U.S. friends got rich at the expense of working Americans. And that’s what Trump means to stop.
And yet just as the tariff regime is taking off, the markets show, as expected, that tariffs have had a disruptive effect. Trump and his allies have warned that it may get worse before it gets better but it’s difficult to build human responses, like panic or patience, into the formula. In the meantime, says Trump, “I’m not going to bend at all.”
The pro-China play to unravel tariffs then is to show that Trump is forcing an economic downturn, and for no good reason, since—despite the fact the president has named China as America’s No. 1 foreign threat—China isn’t really a problem after all.
“China isn’t a problem,” Macgregor told Davis on Deep Dive. “China is not evil, China is not murdering millions,” said Macgregor. “It’s all bull.”
Given China’s serial campaigns of mass murder against its own people — from the Great Leap Forward through the Cultural Revolution and then the Tiananmen Square massacre and up to the current enslavement, torture, and execution of minority populations and political dissidents, there’s a good case to be made that the CCP truly is evil—at least as bad as Benjamin Netanyahu. And it’s a fact that China is responsible for many millions of deaths worldwide, including more than a million in the U.S. alone, after it concealed the origins and nature of COVID-19 after the virus leaked from a Chinese government lab in the fall of 2019.
Macgregor helped restage the same theme this week in a podcast with Tucker Carlson, subtitled “The Mexican drug cartels are a far greater threat to the United States than China, Russia or Iran, says Doug Macgregor.” It’s a curious formulation, since: one, Trump supporters know the border is a very bad problem, because a big reason they elected him is to fix the border problem; two, as Carlson has previously acknowledged, China first manufactured, and then helped the drug cartels manufacture, the fentanyl responsible for hundreds of thousands of American deaths, more than 70,000 last year alone, nearly as many as were killed by the Chinese and their proxies in the wars in Vietnam and Korea combined; three, it countersignals Trump’s clear message that the top threats to American peace and prosperity are China, Russia, and Iran. It’s hard not to conclude that Macgregor’s aim is to minimize China’s threat to U.S. security.
The same day that Davis was removed from the administration, he advertised a podcast to be aired later that day with Jeffrey Sachs who, unlike most Trump supporters, believes “that the U.S.-China trade over the last 40 years has been hugely beneficial, both for China and the United States.” It appears now that the announcement for Davis’ interview with Sachs and the podcast itself were scrubbed from the internet.
Funded by what MAGA rightly sees as villains, like Soros and Bill Gates, and employed by the U.N. to advance the climate agenda, Sachs appears regularly on Chinese state media to read back Beijing’s talking points in English for U.S. audiences. And since appearing on Carlson’s show in December, Sachs has become a hero to certain conservative audiences for being right about Ukraine. But Sachs is not right about Ukraine. Trump is right about Ukraine. Insofar as there is a U.S.-related proximate cause for Vladimir Putin’s war, it is not, as Sachs claims, NATO’s post-Cold War imperial ambitions but rather Trump’s corrupt and venal successor, and predecessor, Joe Biden, who lifted Trump’s Nord Stream 2 sanctions on Moscow to effectively greenlight the invasion. What Trump has said about the conflict in Eastern Europe is true: Were he president, there would have been no war between Russia and Ukraine because he had Putin boxed in.
Nonetheless, having been laundered for right-wing consumption, Sachs is already broadcasting Beijing’s message on Trump’s tariffs here and abroad,. Last month, for instance, he told China Daily, owned by the CCP’s Central Propaganda Department, that Trump’s tariffs “will squander [U.S.] leadership in global development, finance, and trade, and lose competitiveness.” Trump’s “protectionism will fail and will increasingly isolate the US in the world economy and politics. There are few countries that will accept Trump’s approach, even in Europe,” Sachs said. China, on the other hand, “will diversify its trade to the rest of the world, while the US will increasingly lose competitiveness of its own exports in third markets.”
Sachs’ message is CCP propaganda in its crudest, and most ludicrously transparent, form: Trump is wrong. China is good, not a problem. Trump should learn from China and cooperate, not fight China, which will win because China is superior.
If Koch, his allies, and fellow travelers manage to collapse Trump’s tariff regime, it would eliminate a powerful economic tool and leave the president with fewer options to confront Beijing. What a costly irony that in the view of Koch & Co., responsible statecraft seems to mean leaving the president with a choice between allowing the ongoing impoverishment of Americans for the sake of a reckless oligarchy and its partners in Beijing, or escalated hostilities with a powerful adversary.
