President-elect Donald Trump officially named Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) as his choice to be secretary of state on Wednesday.
Rubio joins a slew of pro-Israel officials Trump has tapped in recent days, including former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee as U.S. ambassador to Israel and Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) as his U.N. ambassador with a seat in the cabinet.
Brian Katulis, a senior fellow for U.S. foreign policy at the Middle East Institute, told JNS that the picks signal a strong departure from how the Biden administration handled foreign policy in the Middle East and the U.S.-Israel relationship.
“It’s a big middle finger to those on the so-called progressive left and others in the Biden camp, who essentially had a different theory of the case that failed in the election,” Katulis said.
Blaise Misztal, vice president for policy at the Jewish Institute for National Security of America, told JNS that Trump’s focus so early in the transition process on Israel-related foreign policy picks is a mark of how his second administration will approach the region.
“That, in and of itself, signals that President Trump and his administration are going to take the region, the Middle East, the threats confronting Israel, seriously and take the U.S. friendship with Israel seriously,” Misztal said. “The people that we’ve seen are known to be tremendously strong friends of Israel, first and foremost, but also very clear-eyed about the threats that the United States and Israel face together in the region.”
The Trump team has reportedly chosen Brian Hook, the former U.S. special representative for Iran and one of the architects of the “maximum pressure” sanctions policy against the Islamic Republic, to lead the transition at the U.S. State Department.
Misztal told JNS that Hook, who is one of several former Trump administration officials who has a permanent security detail because of Iranian death threats, will understand the dangers that Tehran poses.
“The involvement of anyone that is on Iran’s hit list in our foreign policy is a signal of taking the threat seriously and knowing what they’re up against, and bringing a focus and a seriousness to dealing with that threat that is much needed,” Misztal said.
Controversial appointments
The nomination of Rubio drew congratulations on Wednesday from Republicans and even some Democrats like Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.), who called the pick a “strong choice.”
Other Trump nominations have raised concerns from Republicans about their viability to make it through the confirmation process and their effect on the Republican majority in the House.
Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-La.) announced on Wednesday that Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) had resigned his seat in Congress “effective immediately” after Trump nominated him to be attorney general earlier that day.
“That caught us by surprise a little bit,” Johnson said of the resignation.
The nomination of Gaetz and former Democratic congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard to be director of national intelligence elicited reactions ranging from confusion to laughter to shock in some corners of the Republican Party.
“I don’t think it’s a serious nomination for the attorney general,” said Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska).
Gaetz cannot afford many defections in his nomination vote since Republicans will likely hold a 53-47 majority in the Senate. His resignation, following the picks of Stefanik and of Rep. Mike Waltz (R-Fla.) to be national security advisor, will also dig into the razor-thin Republican majority in the House.
Johnson said that Gaetz resigned in part to allow Florida to initiate a special election that could fill his seat as early as Jan. 3, when the incoming Congress is sworn in.
Trump has also suggested that he wants his nominations to be made as recess appointments, bypassing the Senate approval process, though it’s not clear that Senate Majority Leader-elect John Thune (R-S.D.) is willing to take that approach, or if it would pass constitutional muster if challenged in court.
Gaetz is widely reviled within the Republican caucus for his role in ousting former House speaker Kevin McCarthy in 2023, his chaotic persona and politics and his sexual scandals.
In 2023, the U.S. Department of Justice informed Gaetz that it would not bring charges against him following a years-long investigation into whether he was involved in the sex trafficking of a 17-year-old girl. He was under investigation by the House ethics committee for sexual misconduct, drug use and accepting improper gifts until his nomination, but Johnson said Wednesday that his resignation terminated that investigation and the ethics committee would not issue a report. Gaetz has long denied any wrongdoing.
Fetterman mocked the choice of Gaetz, calling it “God-tier level trolling” to “own the libs in perpetuity,” but that it would ultimately harm Republicans.
“Dem opinions on Gaetz aren’t that interesting,” he wrote. “The good ones will come from my GOP colleagues to justify a vote for that jerkoff.”
Both Gaetz and Gabbard have also faced controversy related to Israel and Jew-hatred.
Gaetz was one of just 21 Republicans who voted against the Antisemitism Awareness Act in May, saying that he could not support a definition of antisemitism that labeled claims of “Jews killing Jesus” as antisemitic.
“The Gospel itself would meet the definition of antisemitism under the terms of this bill,” he wrote.
In 2021, he called the Anti-Defamation League “racist” after the group criticized former Fox News host Tucker Carlson.
The ADL condemned the nomination of Gaetz on Wednesday evening, citing his invitation of former political activist Charles Johnson, who once denied the Holocaust in a since-deleted Reddit post, to the State of the Union in 2018.
“Gaetz has a long history of trafficking in antisemitism—from explaining his vote against the bipartisan Antisemitism Awareness Act by invoking the centuries-old trope that Jews killed Jesus to defending the Great Replacement Theory and inviting a Holocaust denier as his 2018 State of the Union guest,” wrote Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO and national director of the ADL. “He should not be appointed to any high office, much less one overseeing the impartial execution of our nation’s laws.”
In his 2020 memoir Firebrand: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the MAGA Revolution, Gaetz defended the invitation. “I can look past the worst some have (falsely or fairly) been accused of doing,” he wrote. “I know no one bats a thousand. I sure don’t.”
Gaetz bills himself as a supporter of Israel and has supported previous Israel aid legislation, but he also was in the small minority of Republicans who opposed the bipartisan Israel aid package in April.
Gabbard, who has undergone a political transformation that saw her shift from endorsing Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) in 2016 to endorsing Trump in 2024, has a mixed record on Israel and Jewish issues.
In 2019, she defended Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) from charges of antisemitism after the House voted to condemn Omar for Jew-hating bigotry. In 2018, she criticized Israel for using live ammunition at the Gaza border fence, but she has come out as a strong supporter of the Jewish state since the Hamas terrorist attacks in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
As she seeks to head the U.S. intelligence community, the former Hawaiian congresswoman is also likely to face scrutiny from lawmakers about her 2017 meeting with Syrian dictator Bashar Assad and her views on Russia, which she said had “legitimate security concerns” in Ukraine shortly after the start of Russia’s February 2022 invasion.
“Dear Presidents Putin, Zelensky and Biden. It’s time to put geopolitics aside and embrace the spirit of aloha, respect and love, for the Ukrainian people by coming to an agreement that Ukraine will be a neutral country,” she wrote three days after the start of the invasion.
Another Trump nominee likely to face hurdles in the Senate is Pete Hegseth, a Fox News anchor whom Trump has tapped to be the defense secretary. Hegseth is a retired U.S. Army major, who served in Iraq and Afghanistan but lacks the experience leading large bureaucracies in government or the private sector that has typified most of the men who have been chosen to oversee the Pentagon.
Unpredictable moves
Experts told JNS that a second Trump would likely overturn Biden administration policies but that it might not be possible to return to some of the approaches Trump took in his first term, like the “maximum pressure” Iran policy.
“It’s a much more complicated region,” Katulis, of the Middle East Institute, told JNS. “It’s one where the demands for a two-state solution on the Palestinian front are now being voiced more strongly by the Saudi Arabias of the region. That was not the case in the first term of Trump, and I think that’s one thing his team will have to reconcile.”
“What I heard across Arab Gulf states is that we don’t want escalation with Iran,” he added. “A lot of these countries may not be as aligned with the attempted restart of maximum pressure, in part because they’ve hedged their bets with Iran and also with China. China is a major consumer of Iranian oil and Arab Gulf oil.”
One area where Trump might act swiftly would be to lift the Biden administration’s sanctions on Israelis, whom the White House accuses of being engaged in “extremist settler violence” in Judea and Samaria, and to green light arms sales to Israel that some Republican senators allege the Biden administration has slow-rolled through the bureaucratic U.S. approval process.
“This idea that the United States would try to hamstring or restrain Israeli operations by controlling the flow of weapons is not going to be a concern in the Trump administration,” JINSA’s Misztal told JNS.
Trump has reportedly told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that he wants Israel’s war against Hamas to be concluded by the time he takes office.
During the campaign, Israel and the Middle East played a relatively small role in Trump’s messaging compared to domestic issues, immigration and U.S. competition with China.
But Katulis warned that Trump, like his recent predecessors, is unlikely to succeed in extricating America from the Middle East to focus on those more pressing challenges.
“In the last 25 years, almost every president has had his Michael Corleone moment on the Middle East, which is, ‘Just when I thought I was out, I get pulled back in,’” Katulis said.
“Even if Trump goes in and doesn’t prioritize the Middle East relative to these other files, things will happen,” he said. “Something will force his hand.”
Originally published in Jewish News Syndicate.