What The Hell America!

Pete Hegseth was never qualified to be the secretary of defense. Donald Trump should never have nominated him, Hegseth should never have accepted the nomination, and the Senate should never have confirmed him. Alas, qualifications, self-knowledge, and the courage of Senate Republicans are all things of the past, and for three months now, Hegseth has been a proven failure as a secretary of defense. If the president still refuses to fire him, he should resign.

Hegseth was supposed to be an energetic reformer, rooting out the left-wing influences that were, in his view, watering down the “lethality” of the “warfighters.” (These largely meaningless Pentagon terms predated Hegseth; they’ve been around so long that I had to work with them in my previous career as a military educator.) Hegseth was going to tighten up the ship, roust the unproductive bureaucrats, and fire anyone associated with DEI training.

Instead, Hegseth, a former Army major and talk-show host, has bungled one issue after another. His anti-wokeness campaign has removed I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings from the Naval Academy’s library while leaving Mein Kampf on its shelves. (The MAGA base might not have a problem with that choice, but the book-banning has been an embarrassment to the Navy even in the eyes of some Annapolis alumni. Both, along with many other now-removed books, should remain on the shelves.) He stumbled through an uproar about a planned Pentagon briefing to Elon Musk concerning possible war plans with China, an event for which conflict of interest isn’t a big-enough term. (Musk never got the classified presentation; according to Axios, Trump himself asking “What the fuck is Elon doing there?” had Musk’s access rescinded.)

And of course, Hegseth was at the center of the Signalgate scandal—or, I should say, the first Signalgate scandal, the one instigated by Mike Waltz, the president’s national security adviser. Waltz convened a highly sensitive meeting about an imminent U.S. military strike on Houthi terrorists using an insecure chat app, and then accidentally included The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, in the proceedings. Waltz made a major mistake, but Hegseth managed to eclipse even Waltz’s forehead-smacking poor judgment: Hours before U.S. missiles were due to launch and American pilots were about to take to the skies against Houthi defenses, Hegseth sent along detailed attack plans for the strike to the group chat, a needless bit of showing off that could have gotten U.S. military personnel killed.

Tom Nichols: The Senate exists for a reason

The administration, in full-damage control mode, tried to present Signalgate as a one-off, a meeting of convenience that revealed no classified information. (The Atlantic subsequently published the full record, minus the identity of a CIA officer.)

Unfortunately for both Hegseth and America, the story didn’t end there. On Sunday, The New York Times revealed that Hegseth sent details of the strikes in Yemen to another Signal chat that included his wife, his brother, and his lawyer, at roughly the same time he was in the gathering that included the senior officials (and Goldberg). This time, Mike Waltz can’t take the blame: Hegseth created the chat—he reportedly called it “Defense | Team Huddle”—and brought in about a dozen other people, who had no reason to be getting such materials. Once again, the administration has tried the Jedi hand-wave: “The truth is that there is an informal group chat that started before confirmation of his closest advisers,” an unnamed U.S. official told the Times. “Nothing classified was ever discussed on that chat.” (As Aerosmith might say: Same old song and dance.)

Where has Hegseth’s staff been while the secretary is stepping on one rake after another? Cabinet officers, like other powerful people in Washington, have assistants whose job is to protect their bosses, often from themselves. But Hegseth’s aides have been busy: They’ve been either leaking, accusing one another of leaking, or trying to get one another fired.

The political body count is climbing: Last week, three of Hegseth’s senior Pentagon advisers were fired, with two of them actually escorted out of the building. They joined another, John Ullyot, a Trump loyalist who apparently took the hit for some of the blowback over the anti-DEI nonsense. Reports suggest that these three aides, who have now banded together to protest their dismissals, had conflicts with Hegseth’s chief of staff, Joe Kasper.

Read: Why Trump is standing by Hegseth, for now

But Kasper did not win the day. He’s been reassigned to “special projects” at the Pentagon, meaning that he’s been removed from the secretary’s office and stashed somewhere in the bureaucracy. And Ullyot has now suggested that Trump fire Hegseth, citing the “mishegoss,” “total chaos,” and “dysfunction” at the top echelons of the DOD.

The Trump administration—again, with utter predictability—is trying to cast Hegseth as the victim. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said on Fox News: “This is what happens when the entire Pentagon is working against you and working against the monumental change you are trying to implement.” Hegseth himself said yesterday: “What a big surprise that a few leakers get fired and a bunch of hit pieces come out.”

I worked with the U.S. military for a long time, and I can attest that American military officers are not usually impressed with leaders who dodge responsibility for their troubles. More to the point, if Leavitt is right and the entire Pentagon is fighting against Hegseth, that says more about the secretary’s poor leadership skills than about the men and women of the Defense Department. After all, every leader can encounter staff problems. But when one adviser after another has to be shown the door, the problem is likely not the staff, but the boss.

During all of these dramas, Hegseth has comported himself not like the confident leader of the world’s most powerful military, but as an overwhelmed and whiny political appointee. During an impromptu comment to the media during a trip to Hawaii, Hegseth tried to depict the whole Signal fiasco as a nothingburger, at times plaintively looking into the cameras as though he were hoping that the intensity of his denials would jump through the lenses, up to the satellites, and then back down to the president himself. He has, from the moment of his nomination, been a miserable example of a leader, deflecting blame, accusing others, and smirking and snarking his way through his Senate confirmation hearings and almost every other public appearance since taking his post.

Jeffrey Goldberg: The Trump administration accidentally texted me its war plans

Trump’s aides, according to NPR, are now searching for someone who can replace Hegseth. As night follows day, the White House has denied that any such thing is happening and said that Hegseth has President Trump’s full confidence. The official denials, however, mean nothing; as John Bolton, Rex Tillerson, and others from Trump’s first term can attest, Trump routinely praises people just before firing them anyway.

But if someone in the administration is telling the media that they’re looking to move Hegseth out, such a leak might mean several things. One is that Hegseth is for now secure, but has enemies behind the scenes who feel comfortable lobbing a flash-bang into the media environment to see if it shakes the White House’s support. Another possibility is that Trump aides are worried about the corrosive effect that Hegseth’s repeated blunders are having on the president’s fortunes, and they are trying to grease the slide that leads to his exit.

The third, and most obvious, possibility is that Hegseth is soon to be fired. This would be the best outcome for the Defense Department and the nation. If Hegseth is the patriot he claims to be, he should think about doing what’s best for America’s military and getting ahead of that process. He could preserve some of his dwindling dignity, and spare the president he serves from having to fire him in public, by making the honorable choice and resigning—today.