Hegseth must go.
Every era has its great conundrums that great minds struggle with. Centuries ago, there was serious debate about how many angels could fit on the head of a pin. In America, a heated discussion has gone on for decades about whether or not a hot dog is a sandwich.
But in this moment, there are few questions more certain to break the brains of even the most worthy intellectuals than this: Who is the worst member of Trump’s cabinet?
It may, indeed, be impossible to answer. Is it the former heroin addict HHS Secretary who snorted cocaine off of toilet seats, collects raccoon penises and opposes modern science? Is it the anti-environment Interior Secretary who seems as though he will not be happy until every American has an endangered species for breakfast each morning? Is it the deputy White House Chief of Staff who sleeps hanging upside down from barn rafters and subsists on a diet of the blood of small rodents? The invertebrate Secretary of State? The soon-to-be-official Attorney General who sees his job as mob lawyer to the capo di tutti capi in the Oval Office?
Increasingly, however, it is becoming clear that in terms of the profundity of the damage they have done to the United States, the sheer scope and scale of their manifold failures, the degree to which they are despised by those they are supposed to be leading, and the urgency with which we should all demand their removal from office, that no one compares to our posturing, vapid, incompetencemaxxing Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth.
According to news reports, even Donald Trump, the architect of the chaos and corruption that defines this administration, has grown angry at Hegseth’s serial fuck-ups, with the Washington Post suggesting Trump blew up at Hegseth during the Cabinet’s summer excursion to Camp David. The fact that the Post’s report triggered fierce denials from the prevaricating hyenas in the White House press office and assertions by the president that the leaks that fed it amounted to nothing less than treason seems to confirm it is true.
That is because Hegseth, who has been a disaster since even before he was confirmed by the somnolent U.S. Senate, had committed the one sin for which there is no absolution in Trumplandia: he made the Jabba the President look bad.
Experts in the military and veterans of the Department of Defense with whom I have spoken consider Hegseth to be not only the worst SecDef in our history—by a mile. They also consider his record to be the most egregious example of defense management malpractice in our history. And that’s saying something since this is the country that gave us the Vietnam War, the Iraq War, the Afghanistan War, blank check support for Israeli genocide in Gaza, and drunken sailor levels of defense spending that have actually weakened us while, in so doing, strengthening our rivals worldwide.
(For an example of expert perspectives, download my latest Deep State Radio podcast featuring former Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall and former DoD policy planning official Rosa Brooks.)
No senior U.S. official has ever done so much for aiding our enemies and militaries other than our own than Hegseth (except perhaps Trump).
The case against Hegseth is so extensive that it is difficult to keep track of all of his missteps, dumpster fires, and catastrophic omnishambolic cluster-goat rodeos of fiascos. The study of his time in office will be taught for years in graduate-level classes in FUBARology.
Any single act of his s–tshow of a tenure would have been enough for any president committed to national security to demand his resignation or any Congress actually cognizant of their Constitutional responsibility to impeach him. One can only hope a change in the control of Congress leads to the kinds of investigations and consequences his redolent record demands.
Most recently, it has come to light that in the course of the disastrous war with Iran, the United States has recklessly depleted the stockpiles of many of its most vital munitions, including Patriot and THAAD air defense systems, Tomahawk cruise missiles and vitally important precision-guided weapons like ATACMS and PrSMs. Indeed, reports suggest that, according to Reuters, “the U.S. has used up “virtually all” of these latter two types of weapons systems.
The consequences of such reckless mismanagement are massive. They leave the U.S. and our allies vulnerable to foreign attack. They make it almost impossible for Trump to continue to wage the Iran war as he has been. (Which may not be a bad thing.) They will stifle our ability to provide critical systems to Ukraine to defend it from Russia. (Which Trump may embrace given his sympathies in that war.) General Alexus Grynkewich, head of U.S. European Command, indicated that the depletion of resources associated with the Iran war will make it difficult for the U.S. “to continue protecting Israel from incoming ballistic missiles.” (Which may be seen as poetic justice given the Israeli government’s role in goading Trump and Hegseth into the war in the first place.)
While the Trump administration says that the shortfalls will be made up soon, that is, according to experts, a lie. The stockpiles will take years and cost hundreds of billions to restore. Throughout that time, the U.S. and American interests will be vulnerable as we have not been in many decades. Further, our adversaries know what has happened and, because geopolitics, like nature, abhors a vacuum, will step in to take advantage of this massive U.S. self-inflicted wound.
What has happened should be a massive scandal. It should put to rest once and for all the idea that somehow the GOP has any kind of competence when it comes to national security. It also does not reflect well on the military top brass who went along with the decisions that put us in this position.
But, of course, it is hardly the only current scandal associated with Hegseth’s benighted tenure.
There is, in addition, the Iran War itself. Hegseth, along with foreign policy hobbyists Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, reportedly urged Trump to enter the conflict despite masses of intelligence and military planning that guaranteed it would turn out just as it has. The U.S. has depleted our strength, wrought mayhem, sacrificed the men and women of our military, generated enormous civilian casualties, destabilized the region, and rocked the global economy in an illegal conflict that should never have been undertaken, has benefitted the United States in precisely zero ways, and is likely to leave our adversaries stronger and our allies at greater risk and alienated from us. The total costs from the war, that will be demanded by its rebuilding, to restore our military and to consumers and businesses worldwide are certain to be many hundreds of billions of dollars.
But again, neither the mismanagement of the war nor the folly of entering into it fully capture the devastating consequences of Hegseth’s tenure. We have also seen the Defense Department cover up the casualties associated with the war—an administration-ending violation of the trust of the American people at any other time in our history. That lack of transparency has carried over into a systemic effort by Hegseth to end vital press access within the Pentagon. His is the least transparent Department of Defense in our history. Which, given past efforts by DoD to obfuscate their errors and worse, is saying something.
We have recently also learned that the illegal attacks conducted on speedboats in our own hemisphere were not only illegal (as we knew they were) but almost certainly resulted in death and destruction being inflicted on individuals and vessels that had absolutely nothing to do with illegal trafficking of drugs or weapons or people.
Even as the Defense Department seeks a massive $1.5 trillion budget, which is 50 percent higher than any of the recent past’s already excessive defense budgets, there have also been serial revelations about massive waste, fraud and abuse in Defense spending. This includes pursuing militarily useless vanity projects like the Trump class of battleships (obsolete since the 1940s), the massive Golden Dome air defense system (a technological impossibility that will devour hundreds of billions before it is declared a failure), and even billions spent on Trump pet projects like a new $7 billion fleet of icebreakers. It also includes awarding big contracts to companies controlled by the president’s children and allies.
Beyond all this, we have Hegseth’s gutting of the military’s top leadership as a consequence of his uncontrolled sexism and racism, systematic discrimination that has cost the U.S. massive amounts of vital experience in top jobs. We have his similarly rooted campaign to bury the teaching of the role of women and people of color in our military history and his promotion of his own, extreme religious views. We have the turmoil on his top staff. We even have, if you can remember back that far, his role in the Signalgate controversy in which he provided sensitive information to a reporter in a way that was an egregious violation of the most basic kinds of operational security considerations any past Pentagon would have respected.
Indeed, Hegseth’s tenure has been (and continues to be) such a screaming tragedy of a calamity of a debacle that it has generated deep unrest, discontent, and low morale throughout the military. We feel its costs daily and will continue to do so for many, many years to come. Each additional minute he serves will be measurable in dollars wasted, strength depleted, lives lost, and vital American institutions diminished.
The only question is whether Donald Trump is, as Hegseth might describe it, high T enough to actually fire his fair-haired Fox News boy. Thus far Trump has only been able to summon the will to fire women in his Cabinet. Admittedly, they deserved to go. But Hegseth is the Kristi Noem of Tulsi Gabbards of Pam Bondis. The fact that he could keep his job while they lost theirs—and highly respected top military brass did too—could well be the most egregious example of white male privilege in U.S. history. Which is saying something since, contrary to what Trump and Hegseth think, U.S. history is, at its core, a story of white male privilege.
Nonetheless, there are no examples in that history of anyone other than Donald Trump doing a job so important to U.S. national security so badly or at such high cost. Which is why, even though firing Hegseth is definitely the single most important thing Trump could do to improve U.S. national security other than resigning himself, he still might do it.
