Here we go again. The White supremacist that convicted felon president Donald Trump put in his administration as defense secretary, in an out-of-control rant before junior officers at the Pentagon, used gender insults, racist diatribes and vulgar cliches to claim that he wants “warriors, not wimps.”
Pete Hegseth, who also claims to be America’s “Secretary of War,” is said, by former senior officers of our nation’s military, to be “a dangerous moron” and a “clown.”
MS Now reports:
Those of us who have served in wars consider Hegseth a danger to our military and the security of our nation.
Even lock-step Republicans say Hegseth needs to go.
As Greg Jaffe writes in The New York Times:
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has survived in office by projecting an image of strength.
His combative style has won praise from President Trump and support from the Republican base. “He loves war,” Mr. Trump said earlier this year, slapping Mr. Hegseth on the biceps.
By many measures, though, Mr. Hegseth has never been weaker. He is leading the military through an unpopular war. Republicans in Congress complain privately — and increasingly in public — that he and his staff are dismissive of their questions and frequently unprepared for briefings.
If Democrats win a majority in the House, Mr. Hegseth will likely face new calls for his impeachment.
Mr. Hegseth’s firing and sidelining of senior military officers, often with no explanation, has fed mistrust and led many in the top ranks to question his leadership.
How Mr. Hegseth manages the contradiction between his tough guy image and his growing vulnerabilities in Washington and around the world could determine whether Mr. Trump — the person Mr. Hegseth must ultimately please — keeps him in the job.
Mr. Hegseth’s most immediate problems are in Iran, where the U.S. war shows no signs of ending, and on Capitol Hill. In the aftermath of the midterm elections, Mr. Hegseth will have to persuade a skeptical Congress to pass a $1.5 trillion defense budget and confirm nominees for key Pentagon posts. Several of his choices are being blocked by Republicans in the Senate.
He will also have to convince Congress to keep paying for the war, which the American people broadly oppose.
On Wednesday, Mr. Hegseth focused on the part of the job that plays to his strengths. Onstage at a military base outside Washington, with a giant American flag behind him, he attacked the media and promoted his victories in the culture wars.
“The complainers, the ideologues and the poor performers are no longer in the driver’s seat. No more silly PowerPoint trainings or drag queen shows,” Mr. Hegseth said. “No more gender pronouns. No more identity months. Only the warrior ethos.”
He also laid out an ambitious agenda that included building a massive military base and establishing a major new command focused on preparing the military for wars dominated by robots and artificial intelligence.
Most of those initiatives will require support from lawmakers who view him with unease, if not disdain.
A year ago, Mr. Hegseth stood on the same stage outside Washington and delivered a similar speech to a room full of more than 800 generals. He blamed them for acceding to overly restrictive rules of engagement intended to protect civilian lives. He bashed them for allowing liberal ideas, which he called “toxic ideological garbage,” to infect the force. And he accused them, without evidence, of lowering standards to accommodate women in the ranks.
The senior officers sat stone faced. Many said privately that they found Mr. Hegseth’s speech insulting.
This time Mr. Hegseth’s audience included about 600 junior officers and enlisted leaders.
Since taking office last year, Mr. Hegseth has overseen a purge of generals and admirals unlike anything the military has experienced in decades. He has fired or blocked the promotions of more than 80 generals and admirals.
“The war in Iran needs to end, and end quickly,” says Mike Rogers, Republican Senate nominee in Michigan and an early supporter of the war.
“It’s not the right way to treat people,” says Rep. Don Bacon, Air Force veteran and Republican of Nebraska. “It’s not decent.”
Mr. Hegseth’s clashes with lawmakers extend beyond the firings. Republicans in Congress have complained that he and his staff have misled or lied to them about recent decisions to pull Army brigades out of Poland and Romania.
“We didn’t think we were treated honestly,” Mr. Bacon said.
And lawmakers from both parties have said that they cannot get answers to basic questions about the conduct of the war in Iran, or about the Pentagon’s budget requests.
“You want to sell people on your needs,” said Senator Thom Tillis, Republican of North Carolina and a key vote in confirming Mr. Hegseth as defense secretary. “You want to sell people on your priorities. Then you have to engage.”
He added: “I don’t think Hegseth has developed any productive relationships, even with Republican members.”
The Pentagon’s recent $67 billion request to pay for operations in Iran was only seven pages, compared to the Iraq and Afghanistan spending bills, which typically ran more than 100 pages and included detailed accounting of the department’s needs.
In his speech to the troops on Wednesday, Mr. Hegseth answered some of his critics by suggesting, as he had previously, that the war against Iran had already been won.
“Allow me to lay it out simply for the anti-American losers in our media,” he said. “These Americans, right here, and their peers, these have destroyed Iran’s navy, destroyed Iran’s air force, destroyed their air-defense systems, their leadership and their military industrial capacity, their entire defense base.”
His analysis did not account for Iran’s large stockpile of missiles, which it continues to fire at its neighbors and oil tankers transiting the Strait of Hormuz. Nor is it likely to satisfy skeptics in Congress.
Hegseth’s mismanagement at the Pentagon will be long lasting, even if he is fired now. The question is if and when it might be too late.
At The Washington Post, Theodore R. Johnson writes:
When Republican presidents take a beating in the midterms, Cabinet changes can come the next day.
In 2006, as Americans tired of President George W. Bush and a miscalculated war, Democrats swept control of Congress. The morning after the election, Bush forced out Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld: “The timing is right for new leadership at the Pentagon,” Bush said, adding, “Iraq is not working well enough, fast enough.” Twelve years later, Democrats flipped the U.S. House on the night of President Donald Trump’s first midterm. By morning, he forced Attorney General Jeff Sessions to resign for being insufficiently loyal, later saying the appointment was his “greatest mistake.
This year, signs point to another potential blue wave, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth seems the prime candidate for a pink slip. At the Pentagon, senior military and civilian officials have resigned or retired rather than continue working for him. On Capitol Hill, lawmakers from both parties have introduced impeachment resolutions this year, and Democrats have promised a flood of public hearings and investigations should they retake the House. A recent Economist-YouGov poll found that a majority of registered voters — and nearly one-quarter of Trump voters — support impeaching him.
When the midterm dust settles, Hegseth’s low approval ratings, drumbeat of negative press and status as a bipartisan liability could give the White House reason to cut its losses. But while letting Hegseth go may rid Trump of a political headache, it would not erase the consequences of the defense secretary’s tenure that will outlast him: the mismanagement of the Iran war, the politicization of the military, the culture war inside the Pentagon and the purge of senior leaders. For Trump, changing defense secretaries could be a useful political reset ahead of his lame-duck years. For the military, though, the morning after would be the first day on a long road to normalcy — or confirmation of new norms in an institution with a long memory.
Midterm elections are often treated as a referendum on the incumbent president, so changes to the Cabinet aren’t unusual. Such moves are usually undertaken to shift blame or accountability, signal a course correction or reassert executive authority. But Trump’s turnover of Cabinet officials occurs faster and more often than any president in a century. His rationale for doing so has rarely been consistent — sometimes it’s a matter of loyalty, sometimes personal conduct or poor performance, and sometimes because the official had become an unwelcome distraction. These firings further insulate Trump from congressional oversight. And they help clear his immediate political problem while the departments that the ousted officials leave behind are forced to endure the fallout.
Whenever Hegseth leaves the Pentagon, the military will have to address three institutional crises of his making. First and most immediate will be rectifying wartime missteps and restoring readiness. Military leaders have warned that prolonged war with Iran, depleted weapons stockpiles, and a lack of focus on innovation and transformation have created a “window of vulnerability,” placing other security priorities at risk. Fixing these issues will require strategic reassessments of the military’s global posture and force structure — and lots of funding for a Pentagon running low on cash.
The second is the urgent need to rebalance civil-military relations. Hegseth has overseen an era in which meritocracy at the highest levels of leadership has been supplanted by favoritism and ideological loyalty. Senior officers lament the sidelining of military lawyers and inspectors general who ensure orders and operations are lawful. And while civilian control of the military is a bedrock constitutional principle, Hegseth’s micromanagement of promotions and grooming standards, restrictions on press access and lack of transparency have contributed to the public’s faltering confidence in the military.
The third crisis relates to the management of the talent gaps created by the forced leadership exodus. Senior officials and experts note the loss of expertise, institutional knowledge and years of investment that come with each dismissal. Those human capital deficits cannot be closed by simply giving the job to someone else.
Making a bold Cabinet move following the midterms would offer Trump some relief from a self-inflicted headache and make it someone else’s job to clean up the mess. But while he can move on by the afternoon, the morning after in the Pentagon will last a generation.
Hegseth’s reckless and dangerous actions should not satisfy anyone who wants to see America succeed and protect democracy. He is a liar, a White supremacist and a homophobe who cares only servicing the convicted felon and sexual predator in the White House. He was thrown out of this nation’s National Guard for having Nazi and hate tattoos all over his body and is considered, by some who claim to know him, an alcoholic in denial.
Which, of course, is exactly the kind of appointee Trump wants in his cabinet.
