Pete Hegseth: The made for TV sec def
As an actual secretary of defense, he's ridiculous. But as the MAGA sec def on a Netflix series, he makes total sense.
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On Sunday, the New York Times revealed that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth was chitchatting away in yet another Signal group text about sensitive attack plans in Yemen.
This time participants did not include the editor in chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, who was inadvertently added to the “Houthi PC Small Group” chat by National Security Advisor Mike Waltz. Instead, Hegseth deliberately set up a group labeled “Defense | Team Huddle” to kibbitz with a dozen of his confidantes, including his wife Jennifer, his brother Phil, and his personal attorney Tim Parlatore. And while the latter two recently got jobs at the Pentagon — what an amazing coincidence! — they certainly have no need for operational details prior to an attack.
“What was shared over Signal, then and now, however you characterize it, was informal, unclassified coordinations for media coordination, other things,” Hegseth protested on Fox & Friends to his former colleague Brian Kilmeade yesterday morning. “That’s what I’ve said from the beginning.”
Hegseth has indeed said that from the beginning, despite widespread scorn from former national security officials who rubbish the suggestion that the location of US warplanes is somehow not national security information.
But NBC reports that Hegseth got the information about those planes from Army Gen. Michael Erik Kurilla, the head of US Central Command, who sent it to his boss through a secured government channel for conveying sensitive and classified data. Within minutes Hegseth turned around and disseminated it on his personal phone, via a commercial app, to third parties who had no right or reason to see it.
It’s a massive screwup by someone who spent years braying that Hillary Clinton should go to email jail for her use of a homebrew server. And Hegseth has exuded an unmistakeable reek of flopsweat as he tries to pin blame for this debacle on the fake news media and “disgruntled former employees.”
By “disgruntled former employees” Hegseth means four of his own top advisors, who were pushed out in the past three weeks during a highly publicized leak investigation.
Those frogmarched off the premises include Dan Caldwell and Darin Selnick, two of Hegseth’s pals dating back to his disastrous stint leading the non-profit Concerned Veterans for America. Caldwell and Selnick, who insist that “unnamed Pentagon officials have slandered our character with baseless attacks,” were both participants on the “Defense | Team Huddle” group chat. And, well … if they weren’t leakers before, publicly humiliating them would certainly give them a good reason to start.
Another defenestrated DoD staffer, John Ullyot, took to Politico to describe "total chaos at the Pentagon.”
“The building is in disarray under Hegseth’s leadership,” he wrote, adding, “President Donald Trump has a strong record of holding his top officials to account. Given that, it’s hard to see Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth remaining in his role for much longer.”
Multiple media outlets confirm that the Pentagon is in turmoil. Axios says Hegseth is “locked in open warfare with his own Pentagon, a hotbed of distrust and dysfunction that commands the most powerful military on the face of the Earth.” And while the secretary has succeeded in scaring the Naval Academy into removing 400 “DEI” books, the New York Times reports that he’s often too busy with leg day to follow through on White House priorities.
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Hegseth’s aides are also given to discursive meetings that devolve into “bawdy” discussions, including one where his chief of staff Joe Kasper reminisced about going to a strip club with a veterans group. (Politico says that Kasper will soon be sent to “a new position at the agency,” possibly one on a farm upstate with lots of room to run around.)
Hegseth’s chaotic leadership and undisciplined smacktalk are actually hampering his avowed priorities. The military is currently litigating the anti-trans policy President Trump decreed in one of his first executive orders, with the policy on hold after multiple trial courts issued injunctions blocking it. Just this week, counsel for the military had to explain to a federal court that Hegseth’s public celebration about removing trans service members did not mean that trans service members were actually being removed in violation of a judicial order. And yet, Secretary Whiskeytweets still couldn’t stop himself.
Over at the Washington Post, columnist Max Boot argues convincingly that Hegseth’s leadership challenges are the result of his inexperience. The obsession with “lethality” and the “warrior ethos” makes sense when you’re commanding a few dozen fighters on the ground. But Hegseth’s service as a major in the Army National Guard could not possibly prepare him to lead a bureaucracy with 3.4 million employees, much less make strategic military decisions for the entire armed forces.
Of course this guy is blasting out war plans in the group chat. He’s as surprised as anyone else to find himself there! And so, after yet another embarrassing blunder, Nebraska Rep. Don Bacon, himself a former Air Force general who sits on the House Armed Services Committee, became the first Republican to point out that the secretary needs to go.
“I wouldn’t tolerate it if I was in charge,” he said on Monday, adding “Russia and China are all over his phone, and for him to be putting secret stuff on his phone is not right. He’s acting like he’s above the law — and that shows an amateur person.”
NPR reports that the White House is already searching for Hegseth’s replacement, although no other outlet has matched that reporting yet. And for what it’s worth, the president says he still backs Hegseth.
"Here we go again. Just a waste of time. He is doing a great job,” he told reporters on Monday, scoffing, “ask the Houthis how he's doing."
Of course Trump turns on everyone eventually — it’s a questions of when, not if. He had five secretaries of defense (and six attorneys general, and six national security advisors …) in his first term alone. But for now, he appears to be digging in on Hegseth.
“This is what happens when the entire Pentagon is working against you,” spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt snarked Monday in the administration’s safe space — Fox News.
Trashing Deep State bureaucrats, including the ones Hegseth himself hired, is extremely on brand for Team Trump. But it also highlights the flaw in Boot’s analysis. No one hires a media loudmouth with a well-publicized history of alcohol problems, credible allegations of sexual assault, and negligible managerial experience to run the military. No one who actually gave a damn about the military would ever entrust it to someone so deeply flawed and unqualified!
Hegseth was hired to do for the Defense Department exactly what he did on Fox. He is essentially playing the role of secretary of defense on TV for a president who wants a vapid figurehead rather than someone competent. Hegseth’s job is to serve as a square-jawed caricature of MAGA masculinity, trolling the libs by turning every policy question into a proxy culture war. By that measure, he is doing exactly what he was hired to do: beating his chest theatrically while proclaiming that America is so back!
It’s the one thing he’s competent to do, and he’s doing it fine.
That’s it for today
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Secretary of Defense is not an entry level position
"No one hires a media loudmouth with a well-publicized history of alcohol problems, credible allegations of sexual assault, and negligible managerial experience to run the military".............except another media loudmouth, with Adderall problems, a litigated history of sexual assault, and poor managerial experience handling a pandemic.