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If President Donald Trump is looking for an excuse to get rid of Pete Hegseth, his storm-ridden secretary of defense, now would be a good time to do it.

This week, the Pentagon’s inspector general received evidence that the military’s plans to shell Yemen, an operation Hegseth famously shared in a group chat on his Signal account this past March, did indeed come from a U.S. Central Command document that was marked “Secret Noforn,” meaning that it was not to be shared with foreigners. Hegseth insisted at the time, first, that he had not texted any battle plans and, after the facts proved otherwise, that the document he shared wasn’t classified.

The watchdogs’ finding comes amid widespread reports of “disarray” in the upper echelons of Hegseth’s Pentagon. These include the firings or resignations of six senior aides, including his chief of staff, who has not been replaced.

Politically appointed officials have said the aides were fired for leaking secrets, but one of those who quit—John Ullyot, the Pentagon’s chief spokesman, who worked in various national security jobs during Trump’s first term and who publicly defended Hegseth during his torrential confirmation process—wrote in Politico that the allegations against the fired aides aren’t true and are rather “smears” to distract attention from the mistakes and failures at the top. Ullyot blamed Hegseth for the “full-blown meltdown at the Pentagon,” an occurrence that “is becoming a real problem for the administration.”

Soon after “Signalgate,” as some have termed the scandal, came reports that Hegseth had brought his wife, a former Fox News producer, to attend two meetings with foreign officials at which sensitive material was discussed. Hegseth was also involved in ordering the Joint Chiefs of Staff to give Elon Musk a top-secret briefing on China—a session that Trump shut down before it happened. This preceded the falling-out between the world’s richest man and its most powerful man; even Trump, back then, recognized that the briefing would pose a security risk and a grave conflict of interest, given Musk’s many business projects in China.

More than that, and fundamental to the problem, Hegseth—a former Fox News weekend host and retired Army National Guard major who commanded a 40-man platoon, which is very, very different from leading an $850 billion bureaucracy with global reach and more than 3 million personnel—is way underqualified for his job.

Hegseth talks a lot about “warrior ethos” and “lethality” and how everything the Defense Department does should be gauged, boosted, or eliminated according to whether it advances those objectives. Really, he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Those terms—which basically boil down to “Kill the enemy”—are tactical in nature, an approach that may be appropriate for a platoon commander. But the secretary of defense—the military’s civilian overseer and a leading member of the president’s Cabinet—has to think strategically and, even then, not just about military strategy but about how the entire range of the Pentagon’s activities align with American foreign policy and even with American values at home.

Hegseth has no experience with any of the above and has shown no signs of gleaning it during his six months in office.

The question is, does Trump care about any of this? Hard to say. Recall that Trump nearly withdrew Hegseth’s nomination after allegations of drunkenness and sexual assault came to light. (Hegseth denied these claims and dismissed them as a “smear campaign.”) Trump, whose brother died of alcoholism, doesn’t drink at all and seems to have little regard for those who do so in excess. But he stuck with Hegseth anyway, presumably to avoid appearing weak, and managed to get him confirmed by the narrowest of margins, with Vice President J.D. Vance breaking a tie vote in the Senate.

Since then, Hegseth has been playing to an audience of one: Trump himself, who seems to be enjoying the show. At two press conferences following the bombing of Iran’s nuclear sites last month, Hegseth spent most of his time bashing the press corps, demeaning past presidents, and extolling Trump. (The useful information at the briefings came from the co-presenter, Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, who avoided any political tone.)

Hegseth’s press spokesmen have followed his lead, as they tend to do, for better or worse. After Hegseth barred Defense Department personnel from attending this month’s Aspen Security Forum, Pentagon press spokesperson Kingsley Wilson explained that the department “will no longer be participating in an event that promotes the evil of globalism, disdain for our great country, and hatred for the president of the United States.”

It is worth noting that Wilson, a woman in her mid-20s, honed a reputation, while working on Trump’s presidential campaign, as a conspiracy theorist, Vladimir Putin admirer, Volodymyr Zelensky hater, and expostulator of various bizarre views (for instance, that trans people should not be allowed to have gun permits). She was given this job because of those views. Or, rather, she was given a senior job because of her views—and, hey, why not something as prestigious but ultimately harmless as chief press spokesperson for the largest federal department and the largest defense organization in the world?

In other words, Wilson is just putting on a show for her bosses. In a follow-up to her rant about Aspen, she posted on X that the Pentagon is “focused on WARFIGHTING. WE ARE NOT A THINK TANK.” Well, actually, some corners of the Pentagon are supposed to operate like a think tank: the undersecretary of defense for policy, the Army Futures Command, the Training and Doctrine Command, the Office of Net Assessment, various directorates of the Joint Staff, to name a few. Still, Hegseth—who has eliminated some of these outfits and reorganized others—isn’t interested in thinking.

Another Pentagon spokesman, Sean Parnell, no doubt won brownie points on Wednesday for saying, when asked about the inspector general’s finding on Hegseth’s security violation, “This Signal narrative is so old and worn out it’s starting to resemble Joe Biden’s mental state.” Snap! He not only defended the boss but mimicked the president’s compulsion to attack his Oval Office predecessor in nearly every public appearance he makes.

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That is the key. A fish rots from the head down, as an ancient proverb has it, and in this case, the head—the only head that Cabinet secretaries and their subordinates turn their own heads toward—is Trump himself. Which is why Hegseth—who would have by now been fired by any other president who’d made the mistake of hiring him to begin with—may not have to worry about his future, at least for the next three years, after all.

As Trump has demonstrated over and again, as long as his minions are loyal and respectful, as long as they parrot his prejudices and don’t challenge his views, they win high marks in the only book that matters.

On wider issues, the president doesn’t seem to care. Even when he seems to care, it turns out he doesn’t so much. For instance, China ranks high on his list of foreign priorities—as a threat, a rival, an investment opportunity, a potential trading partner. Yet as part of a sweeping reorganization that could have been ordered only with Trump’s consent, the State Department this month fired its top experts on the South China Sea—all of them civil servants with many years of experience—and shut down the office that handled Indo-Pacific security.


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Trump may genuinely believe that he doesn’t need experts, that he’s his own best expert and wisest purveyor of advice. He has fired thousands of officials and shut down dozens of offices, all in the name of dismantling the “deep state” or, to translate that loaded phrase, concentrating all power in the White House. In a few instances, he’s backpedaled, when—just in time—even he realizes he needs the people he’s recently fired. For instance, around the time of his bombing raids on Iran, he hired back Farsi-speaking staffers at Voice of America. He also rethought his plans to demolish the Federal Emergency Management Agency just after the destructive floods in Texas.

But one of these days, a crisis might erupt, the sort of crisis that requires expertise to assess and address—maybe a showdown with China, a pandemic requiring multinational cooperation, a battle that demands rapid innovation in the planning centers of the Pentagon—and it might be too late to call the long-dismissed and -dispersed experts back to their stations. Trump would be left on his own, with no advisers except those who’d learned to survive by copying or anticipating the president’s preferences. Then we will all be in trouble.