As Senate confirmation fights go, the dispute over retired Gen. Anthony Tata didn’t generate a lot of national headlines, but it was a fight I’ve been watching because of what it tells us about contemporary Republican politics. The Military Times reported:
The Senate on Tuesday confirmed retired Army Brig. Gen. Anthony Tata as the next Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness, putting the controversial nominee in charge of a host of department programs supporting troops and their families. Tata was approved for the post by a partisan 52-46 vote, with all Republicans present in the chamber backing his nomination and all Democrats opposing it.
In a handful of instances, Trump nominees who struggled during the president’s first term have made successful comebacks in his second. But by any fair measure, Tata represents a special case.
It’s been a while since we last talked about Tata, so let’s revisit our earlier coverage and review how we arrived at this point.
In February 2020, as part of a post-impeachment loyalty purge, Trump ousted John Rood as the undersecretary of defense for policy. The president soon after settled on Tata, whom he’d seen on Fox News, as Rood’s successor. It wasn’t long, however, before Tata’s ugly record came into focus.
Two years earlier, for example, the retired brigadier general condemned Barack Obama as a “terrorist leader,” with “Islamic roots,” who helped negotiate an internal nuclear agreement to help “the greater Islamic state crush Israel.” Around the same time, Tata described Islam as the “most oppressive violent religion I know of.”
He also published a 2018 tweet pointing to “clues” that Obama “supported Russian meddling” in the 2016 race, adding that Islamic militants “really did have Manchurian Candidate in White House.” Tata also suggested that former CIA Director John Brennan sent a coded tweet ordering Trump’s assassination.
With this record in mind, a variety of former U.S. military leaders publicly opposed Tata’s nomination in 2020. Though the retired brigadier general tried to retract his earlier rhetoric — “I did misspeak in 2018 on Twitter in hyperbolic conversations,” he said in a letter to senators — it quickly became clear that there was significant skepticism about his nomination, even in the Republican-led Senate.
Before his confirmation hearing could even begin, Tata quietly withdrew from consideration.
It was, however, a temporary departure: In August 2020, Trump appointed Tata to a senior Pentagon position that did not require Senate approval. In November 2020, just a week after he lost his re-election bid, Trump, apparently indifferent to Tata’s record, did it again, making him the acting undersecretary for policy. In early 2021, the Biden administration showed the retired brigadier general the door, but Trump nevertheless chose him for a Pentagon leadership role — again. Five years ago, enough Senate Republicans were uncomfortable enough with Tata that his nomination couldn’t move forward. In 2025, however, he faced literally zero GOP resistance. Even the ostensible “moderates” — Maine’s Susan Collins and Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski, I’m looking in your direction — ignored Democratic concerns and voted with their party, elevating a conspiracy theorist who called Obama a “terrorist leader” to a senior Defense Department post. There’s been a lot of commentary of late about Trump ebbing worse in his second term than his first, but as the Tata confirmation vote reminds us, he’s not the only Republican who’s worse. This post updates our related earlier coverage.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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