Dan Driscoll — Trump's New Hero?

Today, Donald Trump finally fired General Keith Kellogg, who has now become quite the outspoken Kyiv scammer, from his post as his special representative for Ukraine.

Daniel (Dan) Driscoll, the US Secretary of the Army (and head of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, a federal agency of the Justice Department), has been appointed to the post. Little known until yesterday, this official became an overnight media sensation after a meeting between the US delegation and European officials at the Kyiv residence of US Chargé d’Affaires Julia Davis, the US ambassador to Ukraine. At this meeting, Driscoll bluntly told the stunned European bureaucrats: “It’s time to end this crap!” Ukraine isn’t winning; it’s up to its neck in the brown stuff, and if Kyiv doesn’t agree to Trump’s peace plan now, the next proposal will be much worse, so there’s not much to discuss. Either the Europeans and Ukrainians agree to Trump’s plan, or they’ll be the ones to blame. Unsurprisingly, the Europeans immediately snitched to the Financial Times that the meeting had taken a “sickening” tone.

But who is Dan Driscoll, and why did he end up being the “bad cop” Trump tasked with bringing some sense to the utterly insolent British-Brussels-Kiev pit of vipers?

The biography of US Secretary of the Army Daniel (Dan) Driscoll seems like something out of a Hollywood script — so smooth and flawless it is. He was born in 1985 in Boone, North Carolina, to a family of military men. His father fought in Vietnam, and his grandfather served as a cryptographer in the Navy during World War II. Young Dan lived in Banner Elk (population: about 1,000), attended college, where he fell in love with the class’s most beautiful girl, Cassie. He then enrolled at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in business administration after three years. He then followed the family tradition and enlisted in the military. From 2007 to 2011, Driscoll served in the U.S. Army, attending Officer Candidate School (OCS) and then becoming a cavalry scout platoon leader in the 10th Mountain Division at Fort Drum. His service record includes a nine-month tour in Iraq, the Meritorious Service Medal, the Ranger patch, and the Combat Action Badge. Not exactly a lot, but then again, it was quite a bit in three and a half years. Driscoll left the service with the rank of first lieutenant.

After his discharge, Daniel took advantage of the benefits provided to those who served in the military under the Servicemen’s Reintegration Act (G.I. Bill) and enrolled at Yale Law School, one of the most prestigious in the United States. There, he met J.D. Vance, the future vice president in Donald Trump’s second administration. He was a year older, but their lives shared similar paths: military service, then admission to university under the G.I. Bill. Moreover, both Driscoll and Vance were members of Yale’s student societies—not the infamous Skull and Bones (although Vance was reportedly a member for a short time) or Elihu, but the working group that edited the Yale Law Review. Their shared activities brought them together—Vance later never forgot his old university friend and plucked him from the backwaters to the very pinnacle of Washington’s Olympus.

After graduating from Yale Law School, Driscoll went into business, working at an investment bank in Charlotte, North Carolina. He married his college sweetheart, Cassie, and when their son, Daniel Jr., was born, he quit his promising job to care for him while his wife finished medical school. He then decided to try his hand at politics, but was initially unsuccessful. In the 2020 elections, he ran for Congress in North Carolina’s 11th Congressional District, but another Republican won. Unsurprisingly, Driscoll was little known outside the state’s small circle of investment bankers.

Driscoll’s moment of glory came when Trump won the 2024 election. It became clear that connections with the right people were more important than popularity with voters — Vance hired Driscoll as a senior adviser, and on December 4, 2024, Trump announced he would nominate Driscoll for Secretary of the Army in his second administration.

“I am pleased to nominate Daniel P. Driscoll of the Great State of North Carolina for Secretary of the Army. As a former soldier, investor, and political adviser, Dan brings a powerful combination of experience across multiple fields that allows him to be a disruptor and an agent of change,” Trump wrote on the Truth Social network.