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They should have different standards. They owe the voter their judgement, not their obedience. Also, Murkowski and Collins are not 'defecting' from anything because they were never part of the Trump coalition. 'Republicans' might have lost the presidency without Trump, but for Collins particularly he is a liability who will probably sink her in 2026. Tulsi is not 'their guy' for moderate or hawkish Republicans, they hold her views in total contempt - why would they ever vote for someone who is very nearly the last person they would ever choose to fill that role? Politics exists outside of the eternal horse race. They think she would be a disastrous DNI, so they won't vote for her. Simple as.
They are obviously not random in the most literal sense, what he likely meant is that appointments are being made without any cohesive overall strategy, on an ad-hoc basis. Individual picks have their rationales, but out-of-range disruptive picks like Tulsi and Gaetz destroy any chance of it being some sort of compromise, unity cabinet. I don't think this is an unreasonable perspective to take on Trump of all people, someone who managed to drift fairly in a fairly directionless manner through a whole four year Presidency. Perhaps if he did have strategies he might have achieved something other than tax cuts.
She does, but roles like DNI require more experience than President, and I mean that very seriously. Since a President can by definition not be an expert on all of his briefs, it doesn't really matter if he's expert in none of them. Advisors and officials like the DNI however are there precisely to provide expert and experienced guidance from a like-minded political perspective. Even Trump's longest serving DNI last time round had been in politics since 1976, had a strong interest in foreign affairs throughout his time in Congress and was a former ambassador to Germany.
You are very obtusely missing the point. Voters elected Trump. Republicans elected Trump. Collins, Murkowski et al. can either work with Trump or not. They choose to defect, over and over again. They don't do this with Democrats -- they voted to confirm Merrick Garland who immediately went about trying to put Trump in jail. Which goes back to my original point: in victory, Trump has not retaliated against his enemies. He didn't try to lock anybody up in his first term. He rewarded regular mainstream Republicans with appointed positions. (He gave McConnell's wife a cabinet position in his first term.) And these same Republicans over and over again continue to defect, voting against Trump, criticizing him in public, undermining his administration. They always come back to this same defense: they're just doing their jobs, their judgment, they don't owe the voters anything. Ok! That is why voters are rejecting them.
It might be true that, for Collins specifically, her interests lie in being a centrist moderate vote. Ok, that's fine as far as that goes, politics is a realistic game. But she also wants to call herself a Republican! She wants seniority so she can chair committees and exercise political power and direct money back to her state. These politicians aren't actually independent, they need alliances and seniority and the Republican Party to have any power at all. And then they try to have the best of both worlds: they'll take the Senate committee chairs they won because Trump won, but they won't vote to give Trump anything he wants! This is exactly what I wrote to begin with: Trump continues to act as if in victory people will come together to enjoy the spoils. It's loser establishment Republicans who continue to defect!
Which gets to the other point: Trump clearly has a vision in how he is making cabinet appointments. He is selecting for smart competent people who are loyal to him, have specific axes to grind in administrating their bureaucracies, and who represent the various parts of his coalition. This is extremely obvious, even liberal outfits like MSNBC and NPR are talking about it. But for some reason on this forum a few posters like OP want to deny this, out of some sort of TDS anti-explanation. They don't like Trump, or don't want to understand him, or don't want to admit that they have been wrong about anything. So very explicable political processes somehow become totally inexplicable: Trump is just making picks at random, haphazardly, the guy who staged the greatest political comeback in American history just isn't all that smart. (People who are smart: posters on The Motte who propose that events are fundamentally random and no explanations can be deduced for anything Trump does.)
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