They didn’t just gut CP3—they handed it to a 22-year-old grocery clerk turned campaign loyalist and called it leadership.
Thomas Fugate, barely out of college, is now acting director of the Department of Homeland Security’s Center for Prevention Programs and Partnerships (CP3). His qualifications? A degree from UTSA, a landscaping business in high school, a stint at H-E-B, and a loyalty badge earned as a Trump campaign advance team member. That, apparently, was enough to put him in charge of what was once the nation’s flagship effort to prevent domestic terrorism.
This isn’t satire. It’s the federal government under Trump 2.0.
Let’s be clear: CP3 was never perfect. But under prior leadership, it was staffed with experts, funded to engage with schools, civic groups, and local law enforcement, and committed—at least nominally—to preventing radicalization and mass violence. Now, it’s a shell. Staff has dropped from 80 to fewer than 20. Grant programs are being quietly buried. And Fugate, who interned at the Heritage Foundation and parrots MAGA slogans on social media, is the placeholder standing over its grave.
The message isn’t subtle. This isn’t about qualifications. This is about obedience. About elevating symbols of loyalty to choke the institutions that once restrained Trumpism’s worst instincts. Fugate’s rise is not a fluke—it’s a tactic.
Trump’s second term is littered with these appointments. CP3 didn’t need an expert, it needed someone who wouldn’t object when the mission was redirected—away from white supremacist violence and toward “border threats” and “cartel activity.” Fugate is not leading a counterterrorism office. He’s overseeing its controlled demolition.
And yet DHS calls it a credit to his “work ethic.”
What they mean is: he won’t ask the wrong questions. Won’t leak. Won’t dissent.
What’s left of CP3 will either be repurposed or dissolved. In the meantime, threats of domestic terrorism—school shooters, militia cells, hate-driven violence—go understaffed, underfunded, and unmonitored. That’s the point.
The Trump administration doesn’t believe domestic extremism is the problem. It believes its critics are.
Appointing Fugate is more than nepotism—it’s a statement. It says this administration will hand national security to the least qualified person in the room if it means undermining what little institutional resistance still exists.
Fugate is just one more cog in the Trump Machine. And like every other piece, he wasn’t chosen to succeed.
He was chosen to obey.
