WASHINGTON — Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, opted not to name a critic of Israel’s war in the Gaza Strip to a top post managing briefings for the president, after the proposed appointment upset some members of President Donald Trump’s coalition, according to officials familiar with the deliberations.
Daniel Davis, a senior fellow at a Washington think tank who is skeptical of American intervention overseas, was undergoing a background check to become the deputy director for mission integration, the officials said. The post is a powerful job that oversees the compiling of the President’s Daily Brief, a compendium of intelligence assessments that goes to the White House and top policymakers.
But news of the proposed appointment generated blowback on the right. A senior administration official said Gabbard reconsidered her choice given the criticism, and other officials confirmed the decision.
Davis is a senior fellow at Defense Priorities, a think tank with funding from Charles Koch that has a number of alumni in key positions in the Trump administration. Defense Priorities has taken a skeptical view of U.S. military involvement in the Middle East and has supported Trump’s efforts to reach an immediate ceasefire in the war in Ukraine.
The abandoned appointment has highlighted an emerging foreign policy fault line in the new administration. The Trump administration has appointed both more hawkish Republicans, like Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Michael Waltz, the national security adviser, and officials far more skeptical of American intervention, including Gabbard.
The tug-of-war over Davis’ appointment also highlighted the strain among supporters of Trump’s over U.S. support of Israel.
Before Davis’ appointment was pulled, the Anti-Defamation League said Wednesday that the appointment would be “extremely dangerous.” In a social media post, the group accused Davis of minimizing Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack and undermining American support for Israel.
Consideration of Davis had also upset some hawkish conservatives in Congress who began quietly trying to get the administration to rethink it. These officials believed Davis’ skepticism of the war in Gaza could weaken the Trump administration’s support for Israel.
Former intelligence officials were also critical of the pick. Marc Polymeropoulos, a former CIA operations officer and a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, said Davis’ positions were outside the ideological mainstream of the Republican Party.
“His overt criticism of Israel and total opposition to any military action against Iran seems to run counter to current administration policy,” Polymeropoulos said.
Allies of Davis had defended him and said there was no hint of antisemitism or opposition to Israel in his work. He is skeptical of military action when it does not directly align with American interests, they say, and troubled by the use of proxies when the United States is unwilling to put its own troops in harm’s way.
While some of Davis’ criticisms of Israel are well outside the mainstream of the Republican Party, they are similar to certain critiques by liberal Democrats. He has spoken frequently about the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza.
While Trump has repeatedly called for Palestinians to be removed from Gaza to allow it to be redeveloped into a beach resort, Davis has said the removal of people from the territory would be “ethnic cleansing.”
In January, he wrote on social media that U.S. support for Israel’s war in Gaza was a “stain on our character as a nation, as a culture, that will not soon go away.”
Consideration of Davis for the intelligence post was reported earlier by Jewish Insider.
Gabbard has said little about the war in Gaza recently. But many of Davis’ other positions, including a skepticism of American support for Ukraine’s war effort and his worries about the consequences of the fall of the Syrian government, match her views. And Davis’ social media feed has been supportive of Gabbard’s foreign policy positions.
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