President Donald Trump has nominated Anthony Tata, whose bid for a top Pentagon post in the president’s first term was undermined by his inflammatory comments, for a leading role at the Defense Department.
Trump abandoned Tata’s nomination for a high-level policy job at the time amid Senate resistance. He was later named to the position in an acting capacity.
The president quietly nominated Tata to serve as Pentagon personnel chief on Monday, along with several other loyalists and veterans of his first administration. The role would make Tata instrumental in fulfilling Trump’s plans to ban transgender troops and dismantle diversity programs.
Tata — a retired Army brigadier general, former state government official and Fox News regular — courted controversy for tweets that called former President Barack Obama a “terrorist leader,” among other remarks.
He referred to Obama as an antisemite during a 2018 radio appearance and attacked Democratic politicians such as Nancy Pelosi and Maxine Waters. Tata also made a series of Islamophobic tweets, including “Islam fuels more terror than any other religion or ideology.”
His hearing for the Pentagon’s number three job was abruptly canceled in 2020 after senators said the White House didn’t provide enough information about Tata to assuage their concerns.
Tata’s nomination will prove another test for Senate Republicans, most of whom backed Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s confirmation despite allegations of sexual misconduct and alcohol abuse, as well as concerns about his qualifications.
Tata was installed as the Pentagon’s top policy official in an acting role after Trump purged the agency’s top ranks at the end of his first term.
Trump also continued to fill out the ranks of the Defense Department, sending eight total nominees to the Senate. He tapped Bradley Hansell, a Navy and Army Special Forces veteran who served on the National Security Council from 2017 to 2019, as undersecretary of Defense for intelligence and security. He also picked Robert Kaldec, a career Air Force officer who helped spearhead the program to develop a Covid vaccine during the first Trump administration, as an assistant secretary of Defense for nuclear, chemical, and biological Defense programs.
Matthew Lohmeier was also formally nominated to be the Air Force’s undersecretary. Trump had previously announced Lohmeier, a former Space Force officer removed for comments he made on a conservative podcast that argued Marxism was spreading in the military, as his pick.
