May 27: The Restrainers’ Coup

Adventures in Gaza aid; Hamas going broke?; “I don’t know what the hell happened to Putin”

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The Big Story

Late Friday afternoon, when most Americans—and most journalists—were offline preparing to celebrate the unofficial start of summer, Secretary of State and interim National Security Advisor Marco Rubio announced a major “restructuring” of the National Security Council. More than 100 NSC employees (out of a total of upwards of 350) were placed on administrative leave, with the intention to ultimately cut the NSC’s staff by “at least half,” per The New York Times. In comments to various media outlets, administration figures billed the move as a purge of “leakers” and disloyal career bureaucrats, as well as an attempt to streamline decision-making. “The NSC is the ultimate Deep State. It’s Marco vs. the Deep State. We’re gutting the Deep State,” one official told Axios.

Set aside the question of whether NSC employees and detailees—many of whom were hired by this administration only a few months ago—are more “Deep State” than, say, career foreign service officers at the State Department. And grant that President Trump has some legitimate reason to be suspicious of the NSC: His first impeachment, over a 2019 phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, originated with two NSC staffers, Alexander Vindman and Eric Ciaramella, who disagreed with the president’s departures from the standard “interagency process” for policymaking. Instead, let’s look at who just got fired, and by whom.

Among those dismissed at the NSC were Merav Ceren, the director for Israel and Iran policy, and Eric Trager, the senior director for the Middle East and North Africa, who also worked on the Iran file. Both were, unlike Vindman and Ciaramella, Trump’s political appointees—not “deep state” bureaucrats. And Ceren, in particular, had long been a target of the “restrainer” faction on the right as an alleged “neocon.” As we noted in our April 21 Big Story, shortly after Dan Caldwell, a Kochworld restrainer, was fired from the DOD, Ceren was targeted in a messaging op falsely claiming that she was a “member” of the Israeli Ministry of Defense. The story, which was sourced to restrainers in and around the administration, was published by the far-left outlet Drop Site News and amplified on social media by the Qataris, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the National Iranian American Council, and organs of the Koch network, including the Quincy Institute (co-helmed by NIAC founder and Iranian asset Trita Parsi) and Responsible Statecraft (the Quincy Institute’s online journal, which has recently started publishing Drop Site writers on Gaza).

At the time, NSC spokesman Brian Hughes defended Ceren as a “patriotic American.” But apparently that’s not enough once the Tucker Carlson-Don Jr. faction has you pegged as a disloyal Jew. On Sunday, Drop Site took to X to claim its scalp:

So the NSC “hawks” are down. Who is up? Well, according to The Scroll’s sources, the driving force behind the NSC dismissals was Vice President J.D. Vance’s national security adviser, Andy Baker, who is now set to take a “top role” in the restructured NSC while continuing to serve as an aide to Vance, per CBS News.

Meanwhile, those ousted in April appear on their way to getting rehabilitated. On Monday, The Guardian reported that “the White House” had lost confidence in the leak investigation that led to the firing of Caldwell and two other DOD employees in April. According to the report, “advisors” were initially told that Caldwell and the others had been caught leaking via an “unconstitutional” National Security Agency wiretap, which alarmed them so much they raised the matter directly with “people close to J.D. Vance”—only to later be told that there had been no wiretap and that all the information had been gathered within the Pentagon. “One Trump adviser,” The Guardian writes, “recently told [Defense Secretary Pete] Hegseth that he did not think Caldwell—or any of the fired aides—had leaked anything, and that he suspected the investigation had been used to get rid of aides involved in the infighting with his first chief of staff, Joe Kasper.”

Make of that report what you will—British papers have a reputation in D.C. for being particularly easy marks for running narratives up the flagpole. The important part is that Caldwell’s allies saw Vance as their protector, and that they ran to Vance, rather than to the president, with their concerns. At the same time, Vance’s office appears to be taking a leading role in purging the NSC of its Iran hawks—i.e., the people who would (a) oppose a bad nuclear deal with Iran and (b) have the knowledge and experience to tell a good deal from a bad one. And sources tell us that Rubio, who we expected might serve as a brake on some of the administration’s pro-realignment tendencies, has aligned himself with Vance and Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff.

We’d love to be wrong about some or all of this, and predicting Trump’s moves has traditionally been a fool’s errand. But at the moment, it looks as if the restrainers now control effectively every foreign-policy power center in the federal government and in Trump’s inner circle. And with the latest round of “restructuring,” they have sent a message to everyone in the administration: We can protect our friends and hurt our enemies, and the president won’t stop us.

It’s hard for anyone on the other side to say the same.

—Park MacDougald

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The Rest

→The new U.S.-Israeli aid distribution mechanism, run by a nonprofit called the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) and protected by American security contractors, made its debut on Tuesday in southern Gaza. Early results are in, via Ynet:

A Gaza-based source told Ynet that due to the large crowd at the aid distribution point, GHF security personnel fled. The source added that the site was destroyed, fencing was torn down and an Israeli combat helicopter fired warning shots to disperse the crowd. All aid packages, tables and chairs were taken, and the American staff evacuated the area.

Well done, everybody! Both GHF and Israeli officials have downplayed the incident, and the GHF claims that aid distribution has resumed, so maybe it’s not quite as much of a shambles as it looks.

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→OK, but let’s look at the glass half-full for a minute: A U.S.-Israeli aid mechanism is still an improvement over the old United Nations-based system, which functioned as a de facto logistics arm of Hamas’ war effort. We suspect that’s why—despite the frantic statements from UN officials denying that Hamas steals or diverts aid—Hamas warned Gazans on Monday not to cooperate with GHF mechanism, which it said was an “intelligence operation for information gathering.” On Saturday, The Telegraph noted that a source from Hamas had told the London Arabic-language newspaper Asharq Al-Awsat that members of Hamas’ military wing had not been paid since February because Israeli aid restrictions eliminated one of the group’s primary sources of revenue.

→A wave of reports on Monday, originating in Arab media, indicated that Hamas had accepted a cease-fire deal proposed by Witkoff, only for Israel to reject it. Those reports were—surprise!—not true. The “proposal” accepted by Hamas called for the release of five living and five dead hostages, whereas the latest proposal submitted by Witkoff called for the release of 29 hostages—10 living and 19 dead. Witkoff himself quickly denied the report to Axios, telling the outlet that “what I have seen from Hamas is disappointing and completely unacceptable,” which tells us that the reports were simply a ploy from Hamas to attempt to ramp up international pressure on the Israelis. That said, what we’re hearing about the cease-fire talks isn’t exactly encouraging, either. For one thing, there’s the direct line between Hamas and the Trump administration via Bishara Bahbah, the leader of Arab Americans for Trump, which appears to have played a role in the Monday fiasco. And then there are reports like this one, from Ynet:

The U.S. is reportedly pressing Israel to accept a version of the deal in which Hamas receives American guarantees for an end to the war, which could bring the terror group closer to accepting Witkoff's original terms.

Hamas, which has lost all trust in Israel after the collapse of previous negotiations, now insists that any new agreement be signed by Witkoff himself—who would also be required to shake hands with senior Hamas official Khalil al-Hayya. This gesture, while symbolic, would in practice amount to American recognition of Hamas.

Who knows what will happen, but given that Israeli sources are already patting themselves on the back for using military pressure to “bring Hamas to accept the original Witkoff plan,” we might be looking at a U.S.-mediated capitulation fairly soon.

→In the early hours of Monday morning, Russia launched its largest-ever drone-and-missile attack on Ukrainian territory, a day after hitting Kyiv with major airstrikes in what Russian officials said was a retaliation for Ukrainian attacks on Russian territory. In response to the Sunday attacks, Trump—who appears to be tiring of Russian President Vladimir Putin and of the Russia file more generally—told reporters that he was considering new sanctions on Russia and expressed his exasperation at Putin’s behavior. “I don’t know what the hell happened to Putin,” Trump said. “I’ve known him a long time—always gotten along with him—but he’s sending rockets into cities and killing people, and I don’t like it at all.” Trump added in a Tuesday Truth Social post that Putin is “playing with fire!” The Russians, however, seem unimpressed. Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, said that Trump’s comments on Sunday were an “emotional reaction."

→A U.S.-German dual citizen was arrested in Israel last week for attempting to burn down the U.S. Embassy Branch Office in Tel Aviv. On May 19, Joseph Neumeyer, 28, posted the following message to his Facebook account: “Join me as I burn down the embassy in Tel Aviv. Death to America. Death to Americans and f—k the west.” He was detained outside the embassy branch office later that day with a backpack full of Molotov cocktails and deported to the United States over the weekend. Neumeyer has been charged with the attempted firebombing and for threatening on his Facebook page to assassinate Donald Trump (he also threatened at various points to kill Elon Musk and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott). While the atmosphere of nonstop anti-Israeli propaganda no doubt influenced Neumeyer’s choice of target, the young man appears to be a schizophrenic rather than a hardened ideologue; the New York Post notes that he had spent months posting “rambling conspiracy theories” on his Facebook page and that his political beliefs are an “incomprehensible grab-bag” of beliefs ranging from the extreme left to normie liberal Atlanticism.

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