Former national security adviser Jake Sullivan slammed President Trump in a new interview, calling the first 100 days of his second term an “unadulterated disaster.”
“And it’s not just about the policy. It’s that President Trump and his team have gone at the core American advantages in the world and systematically tried to dismantle them,” Sullivan, who served in the Biden administration, said during a Tuesday appearance on the MeidasTouch podcast.
The former White House official in his remarks targeted Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, who has directed firings, funding reductions and restructuring at the Pentagon.
“Now, I’m one who believed … that Secretary Hegseth should never have been nominated and should never have been confirmed in the first place. So all of this, in a way, wasn’t just predictable. It was predicted by a lot of people who said that putting a person like this into this role would result in disastrous leadership at the Pentagon, and that’s exactly what we’ve seen across the board,” Sullivan said.
“And we’ve seen other extraordinary statements from his former senior aides basically saying, we were fired for no good reason. We don’t get what’s going on, and if Secretary Hegseth can’t even run his front office, how can he possibly run the entire Pentagon?”
Sullivan also said that economic shifts, deportation efforts and attacks on research in the first months of the Trump administration have severely deflated the United States’ reputation internationally.
“Across all of the major dimensions of the things that have been America’s major advantages, in less than 100 days, President Trump has put them all at risk. And that’s not even speaking about Ukraine or China or Gaza or the other issues that we could get into,” Sullivan told host Ben Meiselas.
“This is about the core foundations of American power and purpose in the world and President Trump’s effort essentially to knock them out,” he added.
Sullivan said Trump’s remarks on the campaign trail about ending the war in Ukraine within 24 hours of returning to the White House were “ridiculous.”
“That is such a catastrophic misread of the situation, I don’t even know where to start. This war is Russia’s fault and it’s ultimately President Putin’s to end,” Sullivan said, referring to Russian President Vladimir Putin.
He added that Trump read the situation “a– backwards.”
Sullivan also warned U.S. allies may align with China in the face of uncertainty, noting a trade war with the U.S.’s largest partners and the president’s rhetoric about acquiring Greenland.
“Only the United States of America has this network of strong, capable, democratic allies, and now what President Trump is doing is China’s work for it,” Sullivan said.
“He is single-handedly taking away this huge asset, and I would say that there are a number of costs to that, but one of the biggest ones is that for us to compete effectively with China in the future, we need to be flanked by strong allies, capable allies, and going it alone in this trade war and the broader competition with China is a weaker way to approach things than with the strength of having a lot of people standing with us,” he added.
Sullivan added that Trump administration officials need to fix leadership at the Pentagon and treat traditionally non-partisan public servants with respect to strengthen national security.
“They’re just sending young guys who know nothing into various agencies and slashing and burning in ways that they then have to go fix, like firing the folks responsible for our nuclear program,” Sullivan noted.
“I find this absolutely unacceptable, cruel, and the kind of thing that should shock the conscience of Americans, who, yes, want to see more efficiency, but also want to see decent public servants treated the way they deserve to be treated.”