Trump can look at past secretaries who had the right resumes and didn’t work out. Bill Clinton picked a Democratic member of the House named Les Aspin, who had decades of experience overseeing the Pentagon and turned out to be a terrible secretary of defense. George W. Bush picked Donald Rumsfeld, who had vast experience in government and had even been defense secretary before, and Rumsfeld made grievous errors in the job. Barack Obama had problems with the Pentagon, and Trump himself struggled to find the right man to run the Department of Defense, going through five secretaries or acting secretaries in the first Trump administration.
Most of all, Trump wants a Defense Department that can get things done without all the wokeness and HR department stuff that plagues modern bureaucracies. Trump has an old-movie view of the U.S. military and American generals — he frequently praises this or that general or other leader as being “straight out of central casting.” Above all, he wants military leaders who will accomplish missions rather than explain why those missions cannot be accomplished, which has been a common desire of presidents for a very long time.
