Donald Trump has yet to pull back the curtain on his defense brain trust as he continues to make controversial statements on foreign policy and how he would handle terrorists. The little information he has disclosed on the subject has been in the form of national security endorsements. And they’re not turning heads.
Trump has touted three endorsements from “top national security experts and a national Gold Star mother,” according to his website They’re not the sort of weighty, Beltway names one might expect.
“These people are not well known in foreign policy circles … I never heard of any of them,” Harvard professor and former Kennedy School of Government Dean Joseph Nye told Reuters.
Trump’s campaign did not return a request for comment.
The endorsers Trump cited are Gary Berntsen, a former CIA officer, and retired Col. James Waurishuk, a former deputy intelligence chief of U.S. Central Command.
Susan Price, the mother of a fallen Marine, also endorsed the businessman.
“I am proud to be endorsed by such accomplished and well-respected military experts. Additionally, to be endorsed by a Gold Star mother is such a wonderful honor,” Trump said in a release last month. “Homeland security and strengthening our military are two of the most important issues and cornerstones of my campaign.”
Berntsen wrote a book on his role in the raid that killed Osama bin Laden after retiring from the intelligence community and regularly appears as a foreign policy commentator on TV, according to Trump’s website. Waurishuk served in combat in multiple theaters and is an independent national security adviser, according to his LinkedIn profile.
A fourth national security endorsement came separately from retired Cmdr. Jeff Gordon, a former Navy public affairs officer who started Protect America Today, a super political action comittee focused on national security issues, writes columns for The Hill and served as Mike Huckabee’s foreign policy adviser.
“I’ve been in touch with the campaign and am glad to endorse Mr. Trump for president,” Gordon told the Washington Examiner in a statement, saying that Trump’s experience in business has made him a successful negotiator and job creator.
Gordon made headlines in 2009 for accusing the Miami Herald’s Guantanamo Bay reporter of sexual harassment. He alleged that the Herald’s Carol Rosenberg had made multiple “abusive and degrading comments of an explicitly sexual nature,” including implying that Gordon was gay and asking if he’d ever “had a red hot poker shoved up your [butt].”
“Her behavior has been so atrocious over the years,” Gordon told the Washington Post in 2009. “I’ve been abused worse than the detainees have been abused.”
After speaking with the paper’s editor, Gordon said he was “satisfied” that the Herald looked into his complaint.
After Gordon made the allegations, several reporters defended Rosenberg as a dogged journalist who constantly pushed for more access and straight answers.
Who’s advising Trump?
For weeks, Trump has said he would release the names of people who advise him on national security.
“Yes, there is a team. There’s not a team. I’m going to be forming a team. I have met with far more than three people, and I will be forming a team at the appropriate time,” Trump said Tuesday on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”
Trump said during the March 3 GOP debate that he respects and listens to the advice of retired Gen. Jack Keane, a former vice chief of staff of the Army, Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, and retired Col. Jack Jacobs, who received the Medal of Honor during the Vietnam War.
Of those, only Haass has briefed Trump and, even then, the two spoke only once. The other two experts said they assumed Trump was taking his advice from their appearances on TV as analysts.
The Daily Beast reported on Thursday that retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, a former intelligence official who has been critical of the Obama administration, is also one of Trump’s go-to voices on national security issues.
Michael O’Hanlon, an analyst with the Brookings Institution, noted that having smart, well-respected advisers is only beneficial if Trump actually takes their advice to heart.
“It’s a strong list of advisers — if indeed they really are his advisers and if indeed he listens!” O’Hanlon wrote in an email. “I can’t imagine all of them are advocating walls with Mexico, trade wars with Japan and China, cozying up with Putin, and extreme suspicion towards Muslim would-be immigrants.”
James Carafano, the Heritage Foundation’s vice president of foreign and defense policy studies, said all the controversy surrounding Trump’s national security advisers is “overblown,” because whoever is advising Trump now will play little role in who actually makes policy in his administration if he’s elected.
“You’re not electing a foreign policy team,” he said. “At the end of the day it’s about: Is it a person that you trust? If you trust them, you’ll support team he pulls together.”
Trump did name Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., to lead his national security efforts this month.
The GOP front-runner’s national security stance was amplified last week when a group of well-respected Republican experts wrote an open letter calling Trump “utterly unfitted” to be president.
The letter, which has now been signed by 117 people, takes issue with several points of Trump’s vague national security strategy, including expanding the use of torture, anti-Muslim rhetoric that could harm ties to allies in the Middle East, and misrepresenting his past views on the Iraq war and 2011 conflict in Libya. Trump has since walked back some of those comments.
“His equation of business acumen with foreign policy experience is false,” the letter states. “Not all lethal conflicts can be resolved as a real estate deal might, and there is no recourse to bankruptcy court in international affairs.”
Signatories say they cannot support a GOP presidential ticket led by Trump and that they will work “energetically” to prevent his election as commander in chief.
But Gordon counters that the letter is “politically motivated” and was launched by Eliot Cohen, one of Marco Rubio’s advisers.
“Americans ought to see right through it,” Gordon said. “While I agree with many of Sen. Rubio’s foreign policy positions and deeply respect his career in politics, I personally believe he is far too young and experienced to be president at this point in time.”
