Donald Trump greets Marco Rubio during a campaign rally in North Carolina on November 4, 2024. Evan Vucci/AP

A few weeks ago, Vice President JD Vance called Donald Trump “the candidate for peace” during a series of appearances on Sunday morning.

Vance talked about a man who during his last term reportedly expressed interest in firing missiles at Mexico, and worried about destroying both North Korea and hurricanes.

And less than a week after Trump’s election victory, the president-elect’s idea of ​​being anti-war, a common theme for Vance, has been seriously undermined by Trump’s selection of a series of national security hawks — people who advocate use of military force. to solve international problems – for important administrative jobs.

During his campaign, Trump has had some success positioning himself in an anti-war direction. He immediately promised to impose a peace deal on Ukraine and urged (extremely vaguely) an end to the war in Gaza. He also falsely boasted that there were no wars during his reign. (Trump was helped by Vice President Kamala Harris’ reluctance to distance himself from President Joe Biden’s establishment-oriented foreign policy.)

Since Trump’s election last week, a scramble has emerged among supporters close to him to enact these anti-war changes and push the former president to make appointments that reject the neoconservative leanings of many Republicans. Tucker Carlson and Donald Trump Jr. were reportedly among the insiders pushing the president-elect not to pick former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who has hawkish views on Ukraine, China and Iran. Trump gave these supporters some hope with his announcement last week that he would not invite Pompeo or former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley “to join the Trump administration.”

But those small victories are being overshadowed as Trump appoints a series of aggressive figures to key positions.

Earlier this week, Trump decided to nominate Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) as secretary of state, according to the New York Timesand to appoint Rep. Mike Waltz (R-Fla.) as his national security adviser. (Sources say Trump figures are still hoping to prevent Rubio, whose selection Trump has yet to announce, from actually receiving the nomination for secretary of state.)

This news was followed by Trump’s announcement that he would appoint Representative Elise Stefanik (RN.Y.) Ambassador to the United Nations and former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee as US Ambassador to Israel. On Wednesday, Trump said he would appoint Steven Witkoff, a real estate investor and campaign donor as well as a trusted Netanyahu booster, as special envoy to the Middle East. And he chose John Ratcliffe — a loyalist who in 2020 used his job as Trump’s director of national intelligence to selectively release information aimed at amplifying Trump’s false claims about the origins of the Russia scandal — as director of the Central Intelligence Agency.

Trump “is trying to appeal to at least two sides of the party that are diametrically opposed to each other,” said Justin Logan, director of defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute, which has advocated cutting defense spending and U.S. commitments abroad. “If these appointments are as advertised, it appears to be a call to arms for the unreconstructed Liz Cheney caucus. It is an open question whether that is offset by more than JD Vance.”

Although Cheney endorsed Harris this year, she and her father, former Vice President Dick Cheney, are identified with the Republican Party’s long-dominant, non-conservative approach to national security policy.

Trump may not have the likes of Pompeo and Haley and former national security adviser John Bolton in the White House this time, but “many of the people he mentioned represent the same views,” said Triti Parsi, the executive vice president of the Quincy Institute. .

Although both Rubio and Waltz have followed Trump’s lead in expressing skepticism about NATO and the level of U.S. support for Ukraine, they are known as foreign policy hawks. Stefanik, who has espoused similar views, will likely follow Haley’s lead in using the UN job as a stage to performatively support the policies of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Israel’s far-right government.

Former Democratic Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, a Trump backer who herself hopes to land a national security job in the new administration, urged Trump in July to avoid Rubio, who she said “represents the neoconservative, warmongering establishment.”

Huckabee has been an aggressive supporter of Netanyahu’s expansion of Israeli settlements in the West Bank, and has even adopted the talking points of Israel’s openly racist far right, which rejects the idea that Palestinians have any right to live in the West Bank. “There is no such thing as a West Bank,” Huckbee said during a visit to Israel in 2017. “It’s Judea and Samaria. There is no such thing as a profession.”

Trump has blamed Biden for the president’s limited efforts to stop Netanyahu from continuing his war in Gaza and Lebanon. Together with this suggestion of carte blanche, Trump’s appointments appear to further enable Israeli warfare, critics say.

Trump “appoints people based on their loyalty and not their ideology,” Parsi said Mother Jones. “This doesn’t look particularly encouraging from a foreign policy perspective, at least when it comes to the Middle East.”

Despite Trump’s appointments thus far, those hoping the newly elected president fills the role, as Vance claims, are still working to push him away from pro-war advocates (including Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), who is reportedly in the running for the position of Secretary of Defense.

“The hour is still young,” Logan said. “I am careful not to be pessimistic.”