The New York Post, Donald Trump‘s onetime “favorite newspaper,” has told the president-elect to ditch his embattled Cabinet nominees Matt Gaetz and Tulsi Gabbard.
“Gaetz and Gabbard are dreadful,” wrote the Rupert Murdoch-owned tabloid’s editorial board in Wednesday’s print edition. “We plead that he rethink them.”
The Post accused Gabbard, Trump’s director of national intelligence nominee, of being “sympathetic to dictators in Syria and Russia,” and worried she will “downplay threats with the intention of isolationism.”
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The former Democratic congresswoman turned MAGA convert has a history of denying and disputing atrocities committed by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s forces and for holding geopolitical views similar to those of the Kremlin, which has made her a darling of Russian state media.
Attorney general nominee Gaetz, meanwhile, “has neither the ethics nor the discipline to rebuild a proper system that will pursue fair prosecutions,” the Post‘s editorial board wrote.
Gaetz is the subject of a House ethics probe that reportedly heard witnesses accuse him of paying for sex, taking drugs, and sleeping with a minor. He denies any wrongdoing.
Since Gaetz has resigned from Congress, it is unclear whether the report on the ethics probe into his alleged behavior will be released.
“They’re distracting chaos agents who won’t accomplish what Trump wants them to, and will most likely backfire on his agenda,” the Post wrote of Gabbard and Gaetz.
“There are plenty of people who can cast a jaundiced eye at our intelligence services and purge the Department of Justice of bias—and do so without a bus full of baggage.”
Trump is, of course, likely to call any media outlet that disagrees with him “fake news,” but the Post, at least at one time, held a special place in his heart.
In an August 2022 rage post on his Truth Social platform, Trump referred to it as his “once favorite newspaper,” as he complained that the Post defended former Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell for not using the threat of the debt ceiling to stop “the ridiculous, record-setting spending being done by Democrats.”
A Trump pal told Axios in 2017 that he liked to read hard copies of the paper at Trump Tower, especially lingering on Page Six, the Post’s celebrity and gossip section. The friend said Trump considers the tabloid to be “the paper of record for him.”
The Post is owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp and, like its magnate owner, has had a complicated love-hate relationship with Trump.
The paper endorsed him in the lead-up to the 2020 presidential election and again this year, but also called his election denialism and behavior during the Jan. 6 Capitol riot “damning” and an “eternal shame.”
The Post editorial board gave mostly high marks to Trump’s other Cabinet nominees, though classified his nominee for health and human services secretary, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., as “controversial.”
They wrote that RFK Jr.‘s “heart is in the right place, even if his ideas aren’t always.”
Perhaps the Post’s editorial board could have consulted their own op-ed from a week earlier, where they wrote, after interviewing RFK Jr. in 2023: “We came out thinking he’s nuts on a lot of fronts.”
“It’s hard to see how he’s the guy to lead HHS and its staff of 83,000 to practical solutions,” they added.
