Donald Trump woke up Wednesday in the early morning hours, hopped on Truth Social, and cancelled a Senate confirmation hearing he does not actually have the power to cancel. The goal: keep Bill Pulte, the former chair of a federal mortgage regulation agency, in charge of the entire American intelligence community for at least a few more weeks. This is real. This is happening.
The 3 A.M. Post That Blew Up His Own Nomination
According to The Guardian, Trump posted on Truth Social in the early morning hours Wednesday declaring "we are cancelling the Senate Hearing RE: DNI Today." A couple of small problems with that. The president does not technically have the power to cancel a Senate hearing. And he had spent the last several weeks pushing hard to get Jay Clayton confirmed in the first place.
So to recap: Trump nominated Clayton, lobbied Republicans to fast-track the confirmation, watched bipartisan momentum build behind the pick, then blew the whole thing up himself at three in the morning. This is what competent executive governance looks like in 2026.
Trump's stated reasoning was that Republicans had moved so fast that, his words, "Pulte would be gone before the Dumocrats would vote on FISA." The man who runs the executive branch of the United States government is apparently surprised by the speed of a process he initiated. The man misspelled Democrats, as is his custom. The republic endures.
So Who Exactly Is Bill Pulte?
Bill Pulte is the acting director of national intelligence, which means he now oversees 18 U.S. spy agencies and sits at the top of the American intelligence apparatus. His previous job was chairing the Federal Housing Finance Agency, the federal regulator of mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Mortgages. He regulated mortgages.
The Guardian reports that Democrats and some Republicans have both pushed back on Pulte's placement, saying his background is simply not sufficient to run the country's intelligence community. That is a very diplomatic way of saying that the person now theoretically coordinating the CIA, the NSA, the DIA, and fifteen other agencies spent his career thinking about home loans.
Pulte could formally assume the acting director role as soon as this week, per The Guardian. That's the person who will be briefing the president on the most sensitive national security matters in the world. A mortgage guy. From a 3 A.M. Truth Social post.
Clayton Is No Prize Either, Just to Be Clear
In fairness to the critics of this entire situation, Jay Clayton is not exactly a reassuring alternative. The Guardian describes him as having "thin credentials" for America's top intelligence job. Clayton ran the Securities and Exchange Commission during Trump's first term and spent decades before that making millions as a Wall Street attorney. Spy stuff does not appear anywhere in that bio.
What Clayton does have going for him is unwavering loyalty. On CNBC on June 8th, during a conversation about California election results, Clayton said the country is doing "an absolutely terrible job" on election integrity and that American voters "are right to question it." He also described California's mail voting laws as creating an "opportunity for fraud." Trump has called the same elections "rigged" without providing any evidence, and Clayton is apparently happy to carry that water publicly.
The Guardian notes that if Clayton eventually gets confirmed, he could continue the work Tulsi Gabbard started at DNI, which included showing up at an FBI raid on an election facility in Fulton County, Georgia, and authorizing the seizure of voting machines in Puerto Rico based on theories involving Hugo Chavez, who has been dead since 2013. Clayton, for what it is worth, did sign off on the indictment against Nicolas Maduro. So there is a thread of continuity there, in the worst possible way.
FISA Is the Actual Hostage in All of This
Buried inside this chaos is a ticking clock on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The Guardian reports that the confirmation drama has stalled the administration's push to renew FISA's Section 702, a controversial surveillance authority that the government uses to collect intelligence on foreign targets, including communications that sweep up Americans.
Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate intelligence committee, has said publicly that the only way through on FISA renewal is to have Gabbard's deputy Aaron Lukas step in to run the agency until a permanent director is confirmed. That is not exactly a robust set of options.
Trump made it worse Wednesday by announcing he does not want FISA passed at all unless Congress also passes the Save America Act, a restrictive voting bill that The Guardian describes as controversial. So now the surveillance authority that the national security establishment considers critical is being held hostage to a voting bill. The mortgage guy is in charge of the agencies that use the surveillance authority. And the confirmation hearing for the Wall Street lawyer who was supposed to replace the mortgage guy got cancelled by a Truth Social post. It is a perfectly coherent situation.
Bipartisan Praise for a Guy Trump Just Sidelined
Here is the part that really stings. Clayton actually had real bipartisan support, which is genuinely rare in this environment. The Guardian reports that Jim Himes, the top Democrat on the House intelligence committee, said Clayton's "temperament and deep commitment to public service will make him a terrific DNI." Republican Senator Thom Tillis called him an "outstanding choice."
Bipartisan agreement on a Trump national security nominee in 2026 is roughly as common as a solar eclipse. Trump found it, built it, and then personally torched it before sunrise on a Wednesday because he was worried about the timing of a congressional vote.
Tulsi Gabbard resigned as DNI late last month, per The Guardian. The seat has been empty and the agency has been in limbo. The one person with support from both parties to fill it is now apparently not going to get a hearing, at least not yet, because the president changed his mind in the middle of the night.
The Dingo Take
Let's take stock of where we are. The director of national intelligence position, which coordinates the work of 18 intelligence agencies and is supposed to give the president his daily briefing on threats to the United States, is currently being filled on an acting basis by a man whose professional expertise is mortgage regulation. The nominee who was supposed to replace him just had his confirmation hearing cancelled by the person who nominated him. The cancellation happened via Truth Social at 3 A.M. The president does not have the legal authority to cancel Senate hearings. None of this stopped anything.
The FISA surveillance authority that national security professionals across both parties consider essential is now tied to a voting bill as a condition of Trump's support. The voting bill is the kind of thing that would have been considered extreme even by the standards of a few years ago. The intelligence community is effectively leaderless while all of this gets sorted out, assuming it ever does.
What we are watching is not dysfunction in the traditional sense. Traditional dysfunction is bureaucratic delay, turf wars, slow-walking nominees. This is something different. This is a president who generates chaos as a governing strategy, who treats the national security apparatus as a casting call for loyalists, and who apparently has no problem leaving America's spy agencies in the hands of a mortgage regulator while he fumes about California mail ballots at 3 A.M. The people who said this was the plan were right. The people who said it would be fine were very, very wrong.
