There’s little in Elbridge A. Colby’s past to suggest that President Trump’s most loyal and fierce allies would embrace him.
Mr. Colby, 45, has deep roots in the foreign policy establishment that Mr. Trump is trying to destroy. He is the grandson of the former C.I.A. director William Colby; a product of Groton, Harvard and Yale Law School; someone who has spent much of his career working across party lines on some of the most complex national security issues: nuclear weapons strategy, China’s military buildup, the commercialization of space.
Yet when Mr. Trump nominated Mr. Colby to a top Pentagon job, the opposition came not from the president’s base but from the dwindling band of traditional Republican foreign policy hard-liners who are often at odds with the president’s more nationalistic, inward-looking views.
And it was the Trump faithful, seeing Mr. Colby’s confirmation as a chance to establish dominance over their ideological foes in the party, who sprang to his defense.
“This is the next deep state plot against Trump,” Charlie Kirk, a right-wing provocateur and Trump enforcer, wrote in a post on social media.
“Any Republican opposing @ElbridgeColby is opposing the Trump agenda,” opined Donald Trump Jr., the president’s eldest son.