{"id":191927,"date":"2026-09-01T23:51:24","date_gmt":"2026-09-01T23:51:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/191927\/"},"modified":"2026-09-01T23:51:24","modified_gmt":"2026-09-01T23:51:24","slug":"pete-hegseth-proves-himself-unworthy-of-his-job-again-this-time-at-canadas-expense","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/191927\/","title":{"rendered":"Pete Hegseth proves himself unworthy of his job again \u2013 this time, at Canada\u2019s expense"},"content":{"rendered":"

Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n

U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth listens as U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during a meeting about military families in the Oval Office on Aug. 3.Alex Brandon\/The Associated Press<\/p>\n

Pete Hegseth, the former Fox News guy who\u2019s now in charge of the U.S. military, has a rocky \u2013 to say the least \u2013 pre-Pentagon employment history<\/a> of poor leadership, financial mismanagement, alleged sexist behaviour and substance abuse on the job. He has a well-documented problem with women: He has declared<\/a> in the past that women have no place in combat roles in the military, and his own mother wrote<\/a> that he \u201cbelittles, lies, cheats, sleeps around and uses women for his own power and ego\u201d in an e-mail that she then retracted<\/a>. He also settled with a woman who alleged he sexually assaulted her, although he denied wrongdoing; he had been, according to his attorney, \u201cvisibly intoxicated.\u201d<\/p>\n

Yet Mr. Hegseth\u2019s nomination was approved in early 2025. Today, he runs the most powerful military in the world.<\/p>\n

As bad as his behaviour has been all along \u2013 for instance, having to be restrained while drunk from joining dancers onstage at a Louisiana strip club while he was president of Concerned Veterans for America, according to a whistleblower\u2019s report \u2013 the guy has now outdone himself.<\/p>\n

This painfully sycophantic lackey to the cognitively deficient and very mean Donald Trump has leapt in on the President\u2019s big battle with Canada, with a tweet so stupid and crass that it is a perfect illustration of the absurdity of this moment.<\/p>\n

Pentagon defends Hegseth\u2019s controversial post about Canadian cadet program<\/a><\/p>\n

Mr. Hegseth \u2013 or one of his own lackeys \u2013 screenshotted a happy photo shared last week on Instagram by the Cadet Training Centre (CTC) in Vernon, B.C. The CTC\u2019s post showcased award recipients at the end of its summer training camp: proud young Canadians receiving medals from their beaming mentors.<\/p>\n

\u201cCongratulations and well done to all recipients who received awards on the final day of Vernon CTC 2026!\u201d wrote the CTC in its post. \u201cThis is recognition of the amazing effort you have all put in as course cadets and staff.\u201d<\/p>\n

In his post, along with a screenshot of one of these happy CTC photos, Mr. Hegseth added a Canadian flag and the words \u201c(this is real).\u201d<\/p>\n

I can\u2019t claim to be inside Mr. Hegseth\u2019s head \u2013 heaven forbid \u2013 but this has been universally understood to be a body-shaming comment targeting the instructor in the photo. The Daily Beast called it<\/a> a \u201cvile social media post apparently mocking a Canadian youth cadet instructor for being overweight.\u201d <\/p>\n

I suppose this is Mr. Hegseth\u2019s way of trolling Canadians in this fragile moment of trade war. He has decided to fire up his troops at the expense of a person spending their summer training youth cadets \u2013 in Vernon, no less, a part of Canada that has dealt with catastrophic wildfires this summer<\/a> owing in large part to the global warming catastrophe his government denies. <\/p>\n

The Vernon Cadets, according to their website, offer programs for youth aged 12-to-18 in subjects such as leadership, fitness, sports and band. Mr. Hegseth, who has repeatedly displayed his lack of moral fitness and unsportsmanlike behaviour, could use some of that training himself. In fact, leadership is probably too much of a stretch for this guy. Maybe begin with manners and decency; start him off with kindergarten (with apologies to the kindergartners). This is the behaviour of a mean manchild, not worthy of a member of any government. <\/p>\n

Oh \u2013 and there is currently an actual crisis at the Pentagon, with Army Secretary Dan Driscoll stepping down<\/a> from his post, amid widely reported tensions with Mr. Hegseth. The Atlantic reports<\/a> that Mr. Driscoll took his concerns directly to the President last week, and that Mr. Trump was \u201csurprised\u201d to hear \u201chow many generals and other top officers had been fired, pushed out, or passed over for promotion\u201d under Mr. Hegseth. Also, isn\u2019t there a war he needs to be running?<\/p>\n

Amid all this, Mr. Hegseth chose to pick this schoolyard fight and punch way, way down.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s even more awful, if this is possible, is that his ugly post had more than 43,000 likes on Tuesday morning. This is somehow still shocking, even as society has degenerated into a morass of petty nastiness. And why wouldn\u2019t it? This is a top-down problem. What do you expect when people like this are in charge? You get sideshows like mocking cadet instructors and renaming lakes while the world burns \u2013 and not just metaphorically.<\/p>\n

This small man has decided to use his great power to poke fun at a person who is doing good work, to comment on their looks in order to make them look bad. Or so he thinks. Only one person looks bad here: the shameless and shameful Pete Hegseth. A man who has no business running the U.S. military. Or an X account. Or anything else.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Open this photo in gallery: U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth listens as U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":191928,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[17,3118,135,13111,13110,3119],"class_list":["post-191927","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-canada","tag-canada","tag-column","tag-dei","tag-lederman","tag-marsha-lederman","tag-opinion"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/191927","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=191927"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/191927\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/191928"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=191927"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=191927"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=191927"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}