Trump’s pick to head DEA withdraws after GOP criticism of his covid policies
Chad Chronister, the Florida sheriff tapped by President-elect Donald Trump to head the Drug Enforcement Administration, said Tuesday he would not seek the post, the second Trump pick to abandon his bid to serve in the Republican administration.
Chronister, a career law enforcement officer who has spent little time on the national stage, announced his withdrawal from consideration on social media early Tuesday evening, just three days after Trump’s selection. Chronister said he planned to continue serving as the sheriff in Hillsborough County.
“Over the past several days, as the gravity of this very important responsibility set in, I’ve concluded that I must respectfully withdraw from consideration,” he wrote. “There is more work to be done for the citizens of Hillsborough County and a lot of initiatives I am committed to fulfilling.”
Some conservatives had opposed Trump’s choice of Chronister, citing the sheriff’s enforcement of public health orders during the covid pandemic. The right-wing opposition crystallized around Chronister’s arrest of a pastor who was charged with ignoring state and local public health orders by holding large church services in March 2020 – the same month the World Health Organization declared covid-19 a pandemic and Trump declared a national emergency.
The criticism unfolded swiftly after Trump’s announcement on Saturday that he would tap Chronister for the role of leading the nation’s top drug enforcement agency. Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Kentucky) was among the critics, saying on X on Sunday that Chronister should be “disqualified” over the pastor’s arrest. The Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association said in a statement that it was “shocked and dismayed” by the selection, citing Chronister’s enforcement of covid mandates.
Chronister did not refer to the opposition in his withdrawal announcement. Sen. Rick Scott (R-Florida) said as governor he appointed Chronister as sheriff and said he did not know why Chronister withdrew. Scott said he had spoken to Chronister throughout the process.
“He’s actually a good personal friend of mine,” Scott said. “He’s a very good sheriff, he’s been re-elected twice since I appointed him. He’s a great community leader.”
The backlash to Chronister was quieter, and its apparent effects swifter, than the opposition has been to some of Trump’s other picks who have been accused of sexual assault or have few qualifications for their posts. Whether Republicans will confirm Trump’s selections is an early test of how much the GOP will bend to the president’s will. Senators have been weighing whether to support Pete Hegseth for defense secretary, who has faced allegations of sexual misconduct, excessive drinking and mismanagement.
Chronister is the second of Trump’s planned administration nominees or appointees to withdraw in the month since the election; the first was former Florida congressman Matt Gaetz, whom Trump had planned to nominate for attorney general. Gaetz, who has been accused of engaging in sexual misconduct with a minor, withdrew after it became clear Senate Republicans would not support his nomination. (Hegseth and Gaetz have denied the accusations against them.)
Neither Trump nor his transition team had an immediate comment on Chronister’s decision to withdraw.
The Chronister development demonstrated the strong influence right-wing figures could have on Trump’s decision-making as president. The right has made a rallying cry out of opposition to covid-era health measures that public health experts believed were necessary when the virus began spreading unchecked in 2020.
The pastor’s arrest made headlines a few weeks into the pandemic. Trump was president and the federal government, along with state and local entities, were rushing to try to limit the spread of the virus. The sheriff’s office later dropped the charges against the pastor.
A link on the sheriff’s office website to a press release about the pastor’s arrest appeared to have been disabled Tuesday.
Rodney Howard-Browne, the evangelical pastor of Revival Ministries International, said on Tuesday night that after his arrest in 2020, he became friends with Chronister and the two worked well on anti-crime initiatives in Tampa. “I wish he would have stuck it out,” Howard-Browne said in an interview. “Obviously, the pressure must have been huge.”
Howard-Browne said he had spoken with Chronister daily since the nomination and urged the sheriff to publicly repudiate the arrest because the incident would hurt his nomination. He added that he is glad the DEA nomination has spotlighted what he called the unconstitutional lockdowns during covid. “The whole thing was a violation of the U.S. Constitution anyway,” he said.
Howard-Browne has said he received backlash for supporting Chronister.
Chronister’s Nov. 30 nomination surprised many in law enforcement and political circles.
He was another Florida nominee who worked alongside former Florida attorney general Pam Bondi, now Trump’s pick to lead the Justice Department. She was a former prosecutor in Hillsborough County.
Chronister is also the son-in-law of Edward DeBartolo Jr., the former owner of the San Francisco 49ers who has donated to Trump. In 2020, the former president pardoned DeBartolo for a decades-old conviction.
The DEA position will play a key role in Trump’s pledges to crack down on fentanyl trafficking and drug cartels. The agency is tasked with dismantling domestic and international drug trafficking organizations and ridding the streets of the synthetic opioid that is primarily manufactured in clandestine labs in Mexico and smuggled into the United States.
The opioid, which can be up to 50 times stronger than heroin, is fueling a public health epidemic that has killed more than 100,000 people in the United States in the past three years. The fentanyl crisis has become a political flash point, with Republicans tying the proliferation of the opioid to President Joe Biden’s border policies, even though law enforcement officials say the drug is mostly smuggled into the United States through legal points of entry, often by U.S. citizens.
Biden’s DEA Administrator Anne Milgram has touted federal law enforcement efforts – including the arrest of high-level Mexican cartel members, record drug seizures and crackdowns on Chinese companies that provide chemicals used to manufacture the drug – as helping drastically reduce overdoses in 2024.
The job of leading the DEA could become even more complex under Trump, who has vowed to impose stiff tariffs on Mexico and China if they do not curb the flow of drugs to the United States.