A newspaper owned by conservative billionaire Rupert Murdoch has shredded Pete Hegseth for leading the Defense Department in a domestic crusade against MAGA’s political adversaries as America’s “real enemies” gather strength abroad.
“This episode reflects well on nobody, and it will further poison the chances of a national defense consensus the country needs,” The Wall Street Journal wrote in a Monday editorial on the Donald Trump administration’s punitive campaign against Democrat Mark Kelly.
An Arizona Senator and retired Navy captain, Kelly has found himself formally censured after he appeared in a video urging U.S. servicemembers to refuse unlawful orders.
The Pentagon has now launched proceedings that may well cost him a share of his military pension.
Trump and Hegseth labeled Kelly and other lawmakers who participated in the video “seditious,” with the president even suggesting their “treasonous” behavior was “punishable by death.”
Several U.S. military codes and international laws explicitly state service members have a duty to disobey unlawful orders.
“Telling officers not to obey illegal orders is a truism, not a ‘seditious’ statement,” as the WSJ put it in their Monday editorial.
The newspaper further suggested Kelly’s participation in the video was a “mistake,” asking if he thinks “so little of his fellow officers to suggest so casually that they might carry out illegal orders?”
Regardless of how Pentagon proceedings against the senator play out, the newspaper’s editors lamented that “the larger loss here is to the country.”
“The Trump Administration doesn’t want to hear this, but it needs allies across the aisle in Congress if it is serious about fixing U.S. shipbuilding or expanding weapons production,” the editorial read. “America’s real enemies are challenging U.S. interests across the world, and that’s who voters want the Trump Pentagon focused on, not Sen. Mark Kelly.”
The Daily Beast has reached out to the Defense Department for comment on this story.
