BREAKING: Trump Taps Unqualified Hatchet Man As New Intel Chief | Morning Shots
Bulwark Takes
The Bulwark
4.7 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 2 June 2026
⏱️ 38 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Andrew Egger and Bill Kristol went live to react to Trump’s shocking decision to install housing official Bill Pulte as Acting Director of National Intelligence, despite having no intelligence background. They discuss what the appointment says about Trump’s priorities, growing concerns about the weaponization of government power, signs of Republican resistance on Capitol Hill, and whether Trump’s increasingly frustrated behavior signals deeper problems ahead for his presidency.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | All right. I think we're live. Hi, everybody out there. I'm Andrew Egger, White House correspondent with the Bullwork. This is Bill Crystal, editor at large of the Bullwork. We write the Morning Shots newsletter every weekday morning. Coming to you live on Tuesday mornings to talk about the news. I keep saying it and they keep doing it. We keep getting new news to chew on right as we are going into these Tuesday streams. Great from a programming perspective, even though the news tends to be sort of crazy, sort of alarming. |
| 0:25.2 | That is definitely true today, because the first thing that we have to talk about this morning |
| 0:29.5 | is brand spank and new information from the president, 9.06 a.m. about an hour ago, |
| 0:35.2 | puts this up on truth social. |
| 0:37.0 | I am appointing the director of the federal |
| 0:38.8 | housing finance agency and chairman of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, William J. Pulte, to serve as |
| 0:44.2 | acting director of national intelligence. William has deep experience managing the most sensitive |
| 0:48.7 | matters in America, the safety and soundness of the markets, over $10 trillion at Fannie Mae and |
| 0:52.7 | Freddie Mac, a substantial increase where it was just 12 months ago. During this period, he will remain director of the markets over $10 trillion at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, a substantial increase |
| 0:54.3 | where it was just 12 months ago. During this period, he will remain director of the federal |
| 0:58.0 | housing finance agency and chairman of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac. Congratulations to Director Pulte. |
| 1:03.1 | This is amazing. There's so much to unpack here. Let's start with who he's replacing, right? |
| 1:08.6 | This is Tulsi Gabbard's spot, former DNI, who resigned a little |
| 1:13.7 | a little while ago, a week or so ago, supposedly citing, well, not not supposedly citing, |
| 1:17.9 | citing her husband's ailing health, he has cancer, but but who had also been somebody who had |
| 1:23.3 | been kind of on the outs from the administration for a while, had been crosswise of them |
| 1:26.5 | over the Iran war, over lots of things. The person he is tapping now is, I personally would |
| 1:34.1 | struggle to think of a person who has been sort of a tertiary figure in this administration |
| 1:38.7 | who would be more alarming in this particular post than Bill Pulte, who has taken this small little post of sort of this |
| 1:48.2 | backwater administration, Seneca, of administering Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and has turned that |
| 1:54.0 | into a launching point from which to send out these sort of creative attacks on many of Trump's |
| 2:01.9 | personal enemies in the government. That has endeared him to Trump, and that apparently is |
... |
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