The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - Insulating the President with Loyalists || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: June 10, 2026

It looks like we have a new acting Director of National Intelligence, Bill Pulte. You may know his name as he's both a housing executive and the current head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency. Join the Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/PeterZeihan Full Newsletter:

Hey, everybody, Peter Zine here coming to you from Vegas. To find a quiet corner for this one was a little hard with all the people running around. Anywho, today we're talking about the new acting director of national intelligence. Guy by the name of Bill Pulte. If you're familiar with home building, Pulte Homes, that Bill Pulte. He already has a position in the government. He's a Trump loyalist and he's appointed to the, so to get this right, FHFA, the Federal Housing and Finances Agency, which is responsible for, among other things,

backstopping about 70% of American mortgage. There's a big job. And most of the insurance agencies under FHFA, most notably Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, are in conservatorship and have been since the financial crisis. So it's a big, important, full-time job. The fact that he comes from housing and is now managing the mortgageing system

suggests a conflict of interest when he was going through his confirmation hearing last year several senators piped up about that, most notably Elizabeth Warren, but, you know, she hates everybody, so it's hard to take that too seriously. Anyway, he has now been deputized as the acting head of national intelligence, and his job there is to coordinate the dozen plus federal agencies that have intelligence arms, everybody from the NSA and the CIA to law enforcement. Anyway, that is a full-time job as well.

And what it really tells us is that President Trump doesn't really care. about the national security agencies at all. He certainly doesn't want them talking to him about what's going on in the world. Trump feels the need to be the smartest person in the room, and if somebody from the intelligence agency is there talking about Moldova or Kyrgyzstan or Bolivia, they will obviously know them more than the precedent about that topic, and so they're just not allowed into the room. Now, the outgoing Director of National Intelligence was Tulsi Gabbard,

who had some foreign leanings, and so seeing her gone is great, but now replacing her with somebody who is completely unskilled and there's no background in intelligence or military affairs or project management is really not great either. About the only good news I can say is at least this guy is not beholden to foreign interests like Tulsi Gabbard was. He's a loyalist, so he's unlikely to tell Trump anything that he doesn't want to hear, which probably means that all of the intel agencies basically now have a ceiling above them between them and the president. So Trump is continuing to go down this path of being the least informed leader that we have had in modern history. The only other one that is even remotely in the same bucket would be Barack Obama, who was famous for not wanting anyone in the room at all. This is just the other side of that coin.

So good news, not really, but considering that Donald Trump hasn't have anyone in his circle with real foreign policy experience except for Marco Rubio, who has similarly been vanished and now had. It's two agencies, State Department and NSA, for the similar purposes of keeping of an arm's length from the president, keeping those institutions away from the president. It's kind of par for the course.