For a dead man walking, Pete Hegseth sure seems healthy. Any one of the several scandals he’s weathered recently would have instantly ended the career of a lesser man, but this avatar of masculinity whose fighting spirit so perfectly embodies our “pre-woke” military simply cannot die. Hegseth’s penchant for sharing classified information on Signal and his use of an unsecured office phone line add up to more than just a bad look. These things, along with his purges of women and people of color from the top brass, and the marginalization and/or termination of his principal advisers, are actively hollowing out the Pentagon’s ability to perform its basic administrative functions. In the case of geopolitical catastrophe, the question isn’t whether America will respond in a helpful or harmful way, but whether America can mount a coherent response at all.
Hegseth is a liability in every possible sense. So why is he still here? The leading explanation – that Trump doesn’t want to appear acquiescent to liberal demands – carried a lot more weight before the administration canned national security adviser and fellow Signal enthusiast Mike Waltz.
Pete Hegseth is a liability in every possible sense.
Trump clearly did not pick Hegseth for his leadership skills, or his experience, or his ability to keep track of classified information. Trump picked Hegseth because both men believe the military is a threat to the regime’s authoritarian ambitions and must be neutralized and remade in Trump’s own image.
Like Trump, Hegseth believes the military has been compromised by the left-wing “enemy within.” He understands that if the commander in chief were to, say, invoke the Insurrection Act and order the military to round up immigrants on American soil, the Pentagon might say no. His idea of Making America Great Again involves changing that “no” into a “yes,” and he’s working hard to make that happen.
When I enlisted in the Army, I took the same oath all service members take: to uphold not the government, or the president, but the Constitution of the United States – “against all enemies, foreign and domestic.”
The kind of massive military deployment on domestic soil Trump has been publicly fantasizing about for years would violate both tradition and the Constitution itself. A refusal by top brass to follow presidential orders has never been the most likely outcome, but it is a very possible one. Hegseth has few qualms about breaking with such norms. It appears that Trump chose the Fox News host because of his flaws, not despite them.
If you want your armed forces ready and able to defend the country against all enemies, foreign and domestic, it’s hard to imagine someone worse for the job than Pete Hegseth. If, however, you want to transform it into a personal army of uniformed thugs more than happy to execute the president’s political orders on American ground, it’s hard to imagine anyone better.
LAURA JEDEED is a freelance journalist based in New York City whose work has appeared in places like Politico, Rolling Stone, The New Republic and The Nation, where this story was originally published.