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

A few weeks behind, Vice President-Elect JD Vance doubled Donald Trump “the candidate of peace” during a blitz of appearances on the Sunday morning shows.

Vance was talking about a guy who, during his last term, apparently expressed interest in firing missiles into Mexico and shock about nuking both North Korea and hurricanes.

And less than a week after Trump’s election victory, the notion of a president-elect as anti-war, a common theme for Vance, it was severely undermined by Trump’s selection of a series of national security hawks — people who support the use of military force to solve international problems — to key administration jobs.

During the campaign, Trump found some success in positioning himself on an anti-war path. He undertook to do immediately impose a peace agreement for Ukraine and PUSHED (extremely vague) for ending the war in Gaza. He also boasted, wrongly, that there were no wars during his administration. (Trump was helped (Vice President Kamala Harris’ reluctance to distance herself from President Joe Biden’s establishment-oriented foreign policy.)

Since Trump’s election last week, there has been a scramble among close supporters to enact these anti-war changes and push the former president toward appointments that buck the neoconservative leanings of many Republicans. Tucker Carlson and Donald Trump Jr. according to reports were among those pushing the president-elect not to pick former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who has aggressive views on Ukraine, China and Iran, for the job. Trump gave those supporters some hope by announcing last week that he “will not invite” Pompeo or former UN ambassador Nikki Haley “to join the Trump Administration.”

But those small victories are being overshadowed as Trump appoints a number of demanding figures to key posts.

Earlier this week, Trump decided to nominate Senator Marco Rubio(R-Fla.) as Secretary of State, according to New York Timesand to name Rep. Mike Waltz (R-Fla.) as national security adviser. (The sources said Trump figures in the world still hope to prevent Rubio, whose selection Trump has not announced, from actually receiving the nomination for secretary of state.)

That news was followed by Trump’s announcement that he would make Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) ambassador to the United Nations and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee U.S. ambassador to Israel. Wednesday, Trump said he would appoint Steven Witkoff, a real estate investor and campaign donor who is also a trusted Netanyahu booster, to be sent specifically 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 declassify information intended to support 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 parts of the party that are diametrically opposed,” said Justin Logan, director of defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute, which has advocated for cuts in defense spending and US commitments abroad . “If these appointments are as advertised, it appears to be a call to the unreconstituted Liz Cheney group. Whether this is offset by anything more than JD Vance is an open question.”

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

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

While both Rubio and Waltz have followed Trump’s lead by expressing skepticism about NATO and the level of US support for Ukraine, they are known as foreign policy hawks. Stefanik, who has held similar views, is most likely to follow Haley’s usage example the UN function 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 supporter who hopes to win a national security job in the incoming administration, in July incentive Trump to avoid Rubio, who she said “represents the neo-con, war-mongering establishment.”

Huckabee has been an aggressive supporter of Netanyahu’s expansion of Israeli settlements in the West Bank, even adopting 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’s no such thing as the West Bank,” Huckbee said during a visit to Israel in 2017. “I am Judea and Samaria. There is no such thing as an occupation.”

Trump has guilty Biden for president limited efforts to deter Netanyahu from continuing his war in Gaza and Lebanon. Along with this suggestion of carte blanche, Trump’s appointments appear to further enable Israeli war, critics said.

Trump “appoints people based on their loyalty rather than 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 so far, people who hope the president-elect fills the role, saying Vance is still working to distance him from war supporters (including Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), who would run for secretary of defense.

“The hour is still young,” Logan said. “Caution, I’m not pessimistic.”