Don’t look now, but Donald Trump just named a Fox & Friends host to head the Defense Department.
Not even Republican senators could hide their surprise when learning that Trump had nominated Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense. “Wow,” said Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK). She recovered quickly, saying, “I’m just surprised, because the names that I’ve heard for Secretary of Defense have not included him.”
”Really?” asked Sen. Tommy Tuberville. “I’d have to think about it.”
Putting aside the laughable idea of Tuberville actually thinking about anything, Hegseth’s nomination is sending shockwaves through Washington on the very day that Republicans will be voting in a new Senate Majority Leader.
While Hegseth is a veteran, he has no relevant government experience. He’s best known as a weekend host on Fox & Friends, and for nearly killing a drummer after throwing an axe at a target.
It’s hard to miss the symbolism of handing an inexperienced dude a dangerous weapon and watching him immediately nearly slaughter an innocent bystander with it.
It would be easy to scoff at the notion of putting a TV personality in charge of the world’s most powerful military. The very idea is preposterous, particularly with Hegseth because he’s already a weird and unserious person. For example, here is him claiming he hasn’t washed his hands in 10 years because germs aren’t real if he can’t see them.
Perhaps he was joking, but as a precaution do not shake this man’s hands.
He’s also known as a serial adulterer, which is likely why Trump identifies with him. Hegseth even sired a love child with a Fox producer while cheating on his second wife.
Buffoonery aside, there is a far darker agenda at play, and this is what I really want to talk about today. I’ll focus on how Hegseth, who is a political extremist, wants to carry his right-wing politics over to the military. I will also highlight how Trump and his allies hope to use someone like Hegseth to accomplish their goals.
And that’s no laughing matter at all.
Hegseth the extremist
Our military is supposed to remain free from political influence. Putting Pete Hegseth in charge of the Defense Department would be a jarring about face on that core principle.
For starters, Hegseth is a dangerous election denialist. Even as a reporter, he helped stoke the attack on the Capitol back in January 2021. As Matthew Gertz of Media Matters points out, on the morning of January 6, as his fellow hosts at Fox & Friends were emphasizing Vice President Mike Pence’s purely ceremonial role, Hegseth was reporting from the grounds of the rally as the first attendees began to gather. He amplified and gave credence and equivalence to the false electoral fraud claims of many Republicans while hyping the “tinderbox” situation and the possibility of “contention” later.
“The chants that are coming time and time again are, ‘Stop the steal, stop the steal!’ And we saw it coming out of Georgia, that 70 percent of Republicans who believe that the election in November was not legitimate, that it was stolen, that may have had an effect on Georgia, but no doubt it has an effect on the hearts of this city right now, of Americans.
“I have friends who’ve texted me, who are not very political, saying, ‘I’m coming to Washington D.C. today because I can’t handle what’s happening to my country.’ I think it’s not an understatement to say we’re in a Constitutional tinderbox right now with people on both sides believing there’s legitimacy and illegitimacy based on things they feel in their heart and love of their country.
“Donald Trump will articulate a lot of that today from the stage. And he’ll have thousands of supporters here. And dozens of senators and Congressmen on the House of Representatives objecting with that long debate that will go on and on. Will the rally go on longer and longer? We’ll see. There were arrests last night. Will there be contention tonight? That’s a possibility as well.”
Hegseth is also a cultural warrior, opposing any programs that would give women combat roles in the U.S. military, effectively limiting their upward mobility in the armed services. Earlier this month, he gave an interview to CNN, saying, “I’m straight up just saying we should not have women in combat roles.” He explained,
“It hasn’t made us more effective, hasn’t made us more lethal, has made fighting more complicated…. We’ve all served with women, and they’re great. Our institutions don’t have to incentivize that in places where, traditionally—not traditionally, over human history—men in those positions are more capable.”
He also has railed against the “woke” policies of the Pentagon, which really is code for promotion of Black servicemembers. He even went so far as to say that Putin’s invasion of Ukraine “pales in comparison” to “wokeness in America.”
Hegseth has taken direct public aim at the nation’s highest ranking military officer, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General C.Q. Brown, who has command experience in both the Pacific and the Middle East. Hegseth accused Brown of “pursuing the radical positions of left-wing politicians.” He even insinuated Brown got the position because he is Black.
“Was it because of his skin color? Or his skill? We’ll never know, but always doubt—which on its face seems unfair to CQ. But since he has made the race card one of his biggest calling cards, it doesn’t really much matter,” Hegseth wrote in his book, War on Warriors. This is now quite an ironic claim, given that Hegseth, who is white, is now nominated for a position he is demonstrably unqualified to hold.
As author Jeff Sharlet points out, the “openly fascist and anti-vax” nominee Hegseth actually laid out a lot of his wild views on the military in that book, but the mainstream media so far is missing it entirely. Here are some excerpts, where Hegseth alleges that “diverse” recruits (meaning Black and urban) are “pumped full of vaccines and even more poisonous ideologies”:
Hegseth even appears to threaten a civil war, saying that leftists “stole a lot from us” but “we won’t let them take this.” He adds, “Time for round two—we won’t miss this war.”
If there was any doubt about his extremist bona fides, Hegseth was once the executive director of Concerned Veterans for America, a Koch network organization advocating privatization of the Veterans Administration. On the subject of veterans’ benefits, he has claimed that veterans groups often advise veterans to obtain more benefits than they should be getting, insinuating that they are cheating the system out of billions of dollars rather than simply obtaining the benefits to which they are legally entitled.
Hegseth even inserted himself in 2019 into the highly charged cases of three U.S. servicemembers accused of war crimes. As the Washington Post reported,
Hegseth was a key player, for instance, in convincing the then-president to intervene in the war crimes cases of three U.S. service members in 2019. That effort led to pardons for two Army officers, Mathew L. Golsteyn and Clint Lorance, in separate murder cases, and a redemption of sorts for Navy SEAL Edward Gallagher, who had seen his rank reduced after a military jury acquitted him of murder charges but found him guilty of posing for a photograph with a corpse.
Hegseth lobbied the president directly from his perch at Fox News, featuring the cases frequently and casting them as the malicious prosecution of war heroes. Trump called Hegseth numerous times about the issue, officials familiar with the discussion said at the time. While some Trump administration officials celebrated the decisions, others worried they would set a bad precedent and damage U.S. relationships abroad.
Hegseth, useful tool for Trump and MAGA Trumpism
It is hard to overstate how dangerous it would be to place someone so inexperienced and politically extreme as head of the Defense Department. The Senate has an opportunity to push back on this nomination in January if there are at least four GOP senators with serious misgivings. I know it’s a lot to hope for, but there are good reasons even for the GOP to stop this nomination cold.
For starters, let’s not forget that Hegseth would be the only other person besides Trump holding the nuclear codes. That is a solemn responsibility and should rest with someone who understands the gravity of the role and has a deep understanding of military policy, deterrence and geopolitical stakes. Hegseth, though highly educated and a veteran, has no relevant background in military policy and international relations.
Trump chose Hegseth for a simple reason: He wants to shake up the top brass at the Pentagon. Trump is still smarting from having many of his top former generals and his former Defense Secretary come out publicly against a second Trump term. Trump admires Hegseth as a fellow disrupter who has called openly for “woke” commanders such as General C.Q. Brown to lose their jobs. Indeed, Hegseth has said that any previous commander who was in favor of “DEI” or “any of that woke shit” needs to be fired.
The nomination of Hegseth coincides with a disturbing report in the Wall Street Journal that Trump is considering an Executive Order to set up a panel, made up of retired military leaders, to review current military leaders and make recommendations on who to keep and who to let go. This would be tantamount to inserting a political review committee over the military. It would create a chilling effect upon open communication and internal disagreement over policies while handing Trump a way to get rid of military brass he doesn’t like.
As historian of modern fascism Prof. Ruth Ben-Ghiat warns, Trump wants a Defense Secretary who will not only look great on television while rolling out the military’s new “role” but who will also uplift and recognize de facto paramilitaries as legitimate armed forces.
As I wrote about earlier, Trump also very much wants to invoke the Insurrection Act in order to deploy the U.S. military against any civilian protesters in the United States or against his political “enemies from within.” To do that, he needs a Defense Secretary who will go along with him this time, not one who will publicly oppose him as then Defense Secretary Mark Esper did the last time Trump wanted to do this in the summer of 2020.
That’s why we can’t sleep on Hegseth’s nomination or view it with mere amusement or eyerolls. As Kamala Harris said of Trump, Hegseth is an unserious man, but the consequences of putting him in charge could be extremely serious.
This is not farce. It is a targeted attack on the command structure of the military. Our democracy, such as it is, ow depends on the good behavior of the military, and Trump understands that.
This is not farce. It is a targeted attack on the command structure of the military. Our democracy, such as it is, ow depends on the good behavior of the military, and Trump understands that.
Why do I keep thinking trump thinks he is playing with GI Joe toys??