Michael Wynne

WASHINGTON: A top candidate for the Pentagon’s No. 2 position is Mike Wynne, the former Air Force Secretary who has been an advisor to Donald Trump for some time. We only have one source on this and can’t identify the source in any way, so put this one in the good rumor basket.

Wynne was famously fired eight years ago by former Defense Secretary Bob Gates, along with then-Chief of Staff Gen. Mike Moseley, after the Air Force lost track of some nuclear weapons for a while. Wynne and Moseley had also opposed Gates’ decision to cap the number of F-22s bought at 187. Wynne is providing the Trump transition team with recommendations about promising candidates for Defense Department jobs.

The last time Wynne underwent confirmation, Sen. John McCain opposed him for months. Wynne, as I had predicted at the time, eventually won confirmation to lead the Air Force. How would McCain react this time? We’ll cross that bridge when all this firms up a bit.

Meanwhile, if you want proof of just how precarious are the relations between the “victorious” Republicans on Capitol Hill and the incoming Trump administration, just delve into who might become defense secretary. All of a sudden, we started hearing a few days ago that Sen. Kelly Ayotte, defeated in a true squeaker of an election after just one term in the Senate, was `suddenly under discussion as a possible defense secretary. The assumption since Trump won has been that Sen. Jeff Sessions was a shoo-in for the SecDef job.

Senators John McCain and Kelly Ayotte.

Given how Ayotte flip-flopped on supporting Trump during her election campaign, and her relatively short involvement in military matters — six years, if you’re generous — this seemed surprising. As best I can tell after talking with people closely involved with the Trump transition, Ayotte was floated by McCain and is not under serious consideration by the incoming administration.

“Ayotte is coming from McCain staff,” an experienced national security source who advises Trump said in an email. “Don’t take it seriously,” 

One of the surest signs that Ayotte did not come from inside the Trump transition? The DC bureau chief of the famously liberal Huffington Post tweeted this yesterday:

“Source says Jeff Sessions’ star is fading fast, unlikely to get Pentagon job, as Republicans make the case against him to @realDonaldTrump“

You can bet that was McCain or a staffer at work.

We checked with McCain’s office and they offered a resounding no-comment.

Sessions and McCain have been at loggerheads repeatedly over the last year as McCain railed against the United Launch Alliance’s EELV contracts and Sessions, a fellow member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, worked with Sen. Richard Shelby on the Senate Appropriations Committee to secure funding so ULA could buy Russian-made RD-180 rocket engines. McCain, who refused to recognize the realities of rocket science, ultimately lost this battle — and he does not like to lose. Also, McCain and Ayotte worked closely together on the fight to stop the Air Force from retiring the A-10, and he clearly thought highly of her.

Rep. Paul Ryan

Now, could Ayotte still be named Defense Secretary? It’s unlikely, but so was Donald Trump’s victory. The larger story here is how clear the divide remains between the Trump team and the representatives of the much-vaunted swamp known as Washington. Can “establishment” Republicans like McCain and Ryan really believe Trump, who campaigned relentlessly against them and Hillary Clinton, will suddenly value their suspect counsel? Remember some facts. The Senate is split 48-51, effectively. Democrats can stop Trump, the Senate and the House of Representatives from doing a great deal if they unite. That makes the position of moderate Republicans like McCain even more precarious than might seem likely if you actually buy the line that wow-the-Republicans-retained-the-Senate-and-the-House.

The GOP is bound in so many ways after this election. On the one hand, they must now actually govern. That restricts their options because of the basic fact that a government that governs least doesn’t matter much. So if you want to accomplish anything you must actually pass bills, and they’ve got to be ones that a President Trump will not veto and that you can get past a bunch of Senate Democrats. Getting the 60 Senate votes needed to overcome a filibuster will not be easy for the GOP.

On the other hand, a president can do things no one else in Washington can. He can fire generals, something Trump has sort of threatened to do. He can give about 2,000 federal government jobs to people who don’t need to go through the agony of the nomination process, which is a powerful incentive, especially for the roughly 300 jobs that pay more $100,000 and usually work in the White House. And a president who owes very few favors to anybody in Washington — Donald Trump — has latitude few other of his predecessors have had when they came to Washington.