The East Wing of the White House is still just a hole in the ground while funding for the ballroom languishes in Congress, but Donald Trump is warming to some of the White House’s other cool new features, like the pop-up UFC arena on the lawn.

“We’re building something in front of the White House that’s quite attractive to a lot of people,” Trump said in a TikTok filmed from the Oval Office yesterday. The Eiffel Tower, he noted, had begun as a temporary installation too—so hey, why not his arena? “I’m looking at it, and maybe we’ll never, ever take it down.” Happy Wednesday.

Mark Hertling and Ben Parker will be live on Substack and YouTube today at 10:30 a.m. EDT for a special episode of Command Post with special guest Lt. Gen. Dr. Eric Shoomaker, former surgeon general of the Army, to talk about our government’s response to the Ebola outbreak.

Director of National Retribution

by Andrew Egger

Donald Trump is facing a host of crises at once. His political agenda is on the rocks, his popularity has never been lower, and his quest to punish his personal and political enemies for their crimes has all but stalled out.

At times like these, a guy’s got to make some hard choices about which priorities to push hard for and which to let fall by the wayside. And Trump’s selection yesterday of Federal Housing Finance Agency chair Bill Pulte as his new pick for acting director of national intelligence makes it crystal clear: Punishing his enemies is the one goal he’s determined to see through to the bitter end. Virtually everyone not in the bag for Trump—both lawmakers and veterans of the intel community—has been left aghast.

“That’s what politicization fundamentally is,” Susan Gordon, who served as principal deputy director of national intelligence during Trump’s first term, told The Bulwark. “You’re putting into this messy fray, this difficult thing in which the president already has distrust, you’re putting someone in charge that wants to support the president by going and finding the things that he wants to be true. You’ve now just corrupted the whole discipline.”

Gordon is right to worry. By practically any metric you can imagine, Pulte—the scion of a construction dynasty who parlayed minor MAGA e-celebrity into a housing-policy post—is an insane pick for a top intelligence role. He has zero experience, none whatsoever, in any national-security-related field, making him not only a silly pick but also perhaps an illegal one: Literally the first thing federal law has to say about the DNI is that any nominee to the post “shall have extensive national security expertise.”

Nor has Pulte earned the post by proving to be a lion of good government in his current post. Just the opposite: He’s routinely earned the scorn of other D.C. Republicans for the clownish ideas he regularly feeds into Trump’s brain. It was Pulte who briefly sold Trump on a housing policy built around the “50-year mortgage,” which sent White House officials scrambling to do damage control after Trump posted an endorsement of the idea with no explanation and no warning last November. When Trump posted a bizarre AI image of himself as Jesus Christ healing a sick man in April, prompting outrage from his evangelical base, it came out that Pulte was the one who had “brought the image to Trump’s attention.”

“I’m going to punch you in your fucking face,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told Pulte at a dinner last September after hearing Pulte had been badmouthing him to the boss. This earned (anonymous) applause from Republican lawmakers on the Hill: “He’s a nut,” one House Republican told Politico. “The guy’s just a little too big for his britches,” groused another. “I would have done the same [as Bessent],” said a third.

But Pulte has done one thing that Trump has really, really liked: He has gone after Trump’s enemies with ferocity, tenacity, and an utter lack of shame. The Federal Housing Finance Agency might have seemed a strange perch from which to wage the president’s war of retribution. But as soon as he got there, Pulte busied himself finding ways to use the limited tools at his disposal to get scalps for his boss. Eventually he found a promising route. In fact, the strategy he put together—rooting through opponents’ federally filed mortgage applications in search of discrepancies he could trumpet as fraud—became one of the White House’s go-to strategies in 2025, with Pulte laying the groundwork for mortgage-fraud investigations into a host of Trump foes, including then-Rep. Eric Swalwell, Rep. Adam Schiff, Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook, and New York Attorney General Letitia Jame