Soon after the 2020 election, as President Donald Trump was gearing up his efforts to retain power despite his loss, Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper was dismissed from his position.
Wednesday Reads: The Sad Spectacle of the Hegseth Confirmation Hearing
Posted: January 15, 2025 Filed under: Republican politics, U.S. Politics 5 CommentsGood Morning!!
Pete Hegseth
As usual lately, I hardly know how to begin discussing what’s happening in politics news. It’s all insane.
The Senate is now holding confirmation hearings for Trump’s cabinet picks, most of whom are utterly unsuited for their prospective positions.
Yesterday we heard from Pete Hegseth, nominee for defense secretary. Hegseth is an active alcoholic, a notorious abuser of women, and has zero qualifications for the job. And he was only questioned for four hours! He avoided answering most questions, and the ones he did try to answer, he got wrong. Yesterday, his most prominent adversary, Jody Ernst of Iowa, gave up the ghost and agreed to vote for him because of Trump’s threats to primary her. That means Hegseth will most likely be confirmed.
Right now, the hearing for Pam Bondi, who is nominated for Attorney General is under way. NBC News is running live updates. Other upcoming hearings:
What to expect in the Senate
— Several of President-elect Donald Trump’s Cabinet picks are facing questions today from senators during confirmation hearings, including former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi, his pick to lead the Justice Department.
— Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., Trump’s choice for secretary of state, will appear in front of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Rubio, a three-term senator with foreign policy experience, is likely to get a friendly reception from his Senate colleagues.
— The other hearings today are for former National Intelligence Director John Ratcliffe (for CIA director); Russell Vought (for Office of Management and Budget director); former Rep. Sean Duffy, R-Wis., (for transportation secretary); and oil executive Chris Wright (for energy secretary).
— Today’s proceedings follow yesterday’s tense confirmation hearing for Pete Hegseth, Trump’s embattled defense secretary pick.
Josh Marshall notes that it’s important to understand that Democrats have absolutely no control over the results of the confirmation hearings: Thinking About the Confirmations.
There are a few things that are critical to understanding the Trump Cabinet nominations and how Senate Democrats should approach them. The first and most important is that in the case of every nomination the question is entirely up to Republicans. Republicans have a three-seat majority. They have the vote of the Vice President in a tie. What happens or doesn’t happen is entirely a matter decided within the Republican caucus. It is totally out of Democrats’ control. What follows from that is that everything Democrats do, inside the hearing room or outside, is simply and solely a matter of raising the stakes of decisions Republicans make and raising those stakes for the next election. The aim isn’t for any Democratic senator to try to claw their way through the steel wall of Republican loyalty to Donald Trump. It’s to do everything they can to illustrate that Donald Trump staffs his administration with unqualified and/or dangerous toadies and that Senate Republicans are fine with this because they put loyalty to Trump over loyalty to country.
Despite press criticisms of the Democrats, they simply cannot prevent these horrible people from being confirmed. All they can do is put their concerns on the record.
On the Hegseth hearing, I hope you’ll watch this excellent rant by Tim Miller of The Bulwark, who rips Hegseth and the Republicans to shreds.
More commentary on Hegseth:
The New York Times: Joni Ernst Says She Will Vote to Confirm Pete Hegseth
Her decision dramatically increases the likelihood that Mr. Hegseth will have enough votes to be confirmed by the Senate. Because Democrats are expected to oppose him en masse, Mr. Hegseth can afford to lose no more than three Republican votes. After Ms. Ernst’s announcement, only a handful of G.O.P. senators’ votes may be in play; Senators Susan Collins of Maine, John Curtis of Utah, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Todd Young of Indiana have not yet said how they will vote.
Ms. Ernst was seen as a potentially pivotal swing vote for Mr. Hegseth, whose candidacy has been complicated by allegations of sexual assault, public drunkenness and corporate mismanagement. Ms. Ernst, a survivor of sexual assault and the Senate’s first female combat veteran, has actively campaigned for expanding opportunities for female service members and was a leading G.O.P. voice agitating for changes to how the military handles sexual assault cases….
When Mr. Trump announced Mr. Hegseth as his choice, Ms. Ernst initially appeared hostile to the selection, telling reporters that he would “have his work cut out for him.” After a private meeting with Mr. Hegseth, she said on Fox News that she was not yet a “yes” on his confirmation.
Her confession prompted an immediate backlash from outside groups affiliated with Mr. Trump, who targeted her with ads and social media posts, while prominent Iowa Republicans threatened to mount primary challenges against her in 2026.
Within days, Ms. Ernst met with Mr. Hegseth again, and announced that she had been heartened by his promises to audit the Pentagon and appoint a senior official to deter sexual assaults in the military and ensure that female service members would be considered for combat roles if they could meet the requirements.
Benjamin Wittes at Lawfare: The Cult of Unqualified Authenticity. On Pete Hegseth and the first hearing for a Trump nominee for a major cabinet position.
No, you didn’t miss an inauguration. But the Senate Armed Services Committee held the first hearing for a Trump nominee for a major cabinet position. And that hearing made clear that the Trump era has begun anew.
Fox News host Pete Hegseth appeared before the committee to answer questions about his nomination to run the Department of Defense. And with his appearance, a not-so-subtle change took place in the terms of reference of America’s national security discussion.
The words “Russia” and “Ukraine” barely came up today. The words “China” and “Taiwan” made only marginally more conspicuous an appearance. The defense of Europe? One would hardly know such a place as Europe even existed.
By contrast, the words “lethality,” “woke,” and “DEI” came up repeatedly. The nominee sparred with members of the committee over the difference between “equality” and “equity.” And he made clear that he aspires to lead the strongest most effective fighting force in the world—with all the macho bluster such a thing might imply—but gave only the most limited sense of where and when he thinks such a military might actually have a role to play.
Hegseth basically admitted that he’s unqualified.
Hegseth is not a stupid man. He is well-spoken, articulate, knowledgeable about a certain range of issues. And I don’t mean at all to disparage his background as a soldier and officer. There is no doubt he is qualified for some sort of defense policy position. Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) at one point suggested that he would support Hegseth as a spokesperson for the Pentagon, stating, “I don’t dispute your communication skills.”
But Hegseth also conceded up front that his background is far from a conventional one for a secretary of defense. He has never held a policy role, for example. He has never run anything larger than a company of 200 soldiers. He has never been elected to anything.
So the first question his nomination raises is whether the normal criteria our system has traditionally used to evaluate what an institution like the Pentagon needs in its management has been not just off, but wildly so.
That was the position Hegseth took in his opening statement and that some of the Republican senators took up. “It is true that I don’t have a similar biography to Defense Secretaries of the last 30 years,” the nominee said. “But, as President Trump also told me, we’ve repeatedly placed people atop the Pentagon with supposedly ‘the right credentials’ . . . and where has it gotten us? He believes, and I humbly agree, that it’s time to give someone with dust on his boots the helm.”
This is actually a radical position—and very Trumpy. The closest analogy to it I can drum up is that it’s like an extreme version of saying that because the leadership of a giant worldwide corporation like Toyota or Samsung or Amazon has under-performed, the board should appoint someone to run the whole organization who had once managed a small corner of a single factory.
If, that is, that person also had an alleged history of showing up drunk to work, sexually assaulting women and mistreating female colleagues, and didn’t believe women should be allowed to work on the factory floor at all.
Read the rest at Lawfare.
Jennifer Rubin at The Contrarian: The Greatest DEI Disaster Ever.
Watching Secretary of Defense nominee Pete Hegseth demonstrate his appalling lack of credentials, knowledge, and character for the job for which he was nominated I am compelled to ask: Is the Trump administration running a DEI program for incompetent, unqualified, and/or ethically compromised Whites?
Considering Hegseth, election denier Attorney General Pam Bondi, WWE exec Linda McMahon for secretary of education, and vaccine denier, brain-worm victim Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. for Health and Human Services, one must conclude Republicans are not sending us their best. (Or, the more alarming alternative…they are sending their best.)
If it were not so deadly serious and discouraging, the Hegseth hearing would have been a form of high comedy. Consider this exchange with Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.):
Or this, with Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.):
Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s entire line of questioning was devastating:
Moreover, “Senate Democrats on Monday said that an F.B.I. background check on Pete Hegseth, President-elect Donald J. Trump’s pick to lead the Pentagon, omitted key details on major allegations against him, in part because it did not include interviews with critical witnesses,” the New York Times reported. “One missed opportunity came when the bureau did not interview one of Mr. Hegseth’s ex-wives before its findings were presented to senators last week, according to people familiar with the bureau’s investigation.” Missed? Or intentionally skipped? It’s unfathomable that such a critical witness would have simply been overlooked.
It is no coincidence that these Democratic women on the committee, including Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii), Sen. Jacky Rosen (D-Nev.), and of course Tammy Duckworth (D-Illinois) showed themselves infinitely more qualified to head the Pentagon. And yet, a man with a history of drinking, a list of financial and sexual scandals (which he denies or claims were merely “anonymous smears”), who possesses absolutely no strategic or diplomatic expertise is president-elect Donald Trump’s choice. While MAGA Republicans (including Hegseth) have genuflected at the altar of “meritocracy”—casting aspersions on women and non-Whites in positions of authority in the military, the Los Angeles fire department, and the Supreme Court—they suspend all critical evaluation of TV hosts, tech bros, and billionaires. The latter they presume qualified.
Philip Bump at The Washington Post: Pete Hegseth seems open to ordering soldiers to shoot protesters.
The timing was generally understood to be a reflection of Trump’s disinterest in upending his Cabinet before the election took place. But his frustrations with Esper were already well-established, centering on Esper’s response to racial justice protests that unfolded earlier in the year.
Esper had publicly rejected the idea of dispatching active-duty troops to tamp down on violence and vandalism that occasionally spun out from the protests. He would later reveal that Trump had asked whether law enforcement or the National Guard confronting protesters could “shoot them in the legs or something.” [….]
When Trump returns to the White House next week, he will obviously not be joined by Esper. Instead, should the Senate choose to confirm, he will be joined by former Fox News host Pete Hegseth. Which means that he may be bringing with him a defense secretary who has declined to rule out ordering members of the military to shoot American protesters.
Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii) introduced the subject during her time questioning the potential secretary.
“In June of 2020, then-President Trump directed former secretary of defense Mark Esper to shoot protesters in the legs in downtown D.C., an order Secretary Esper refused to comply with,” Hirono said. “Would you carry out such an order from President Trump?”
“Senator, I was in the Washington, D.C., National Guard unit that was in Lafayette Square during those events,” Hegseth replied, “carrying a riot shield on behalf of my country.”
Here, Hegseth is referring to a period in mid-2020 when protesters were occupying Lafayette Square just north of the White House. At one point, the president’s security detail was sufficiently worried about the protesters that he was removed to a high-security bunker within the executive mansion. Hegseth was a member of the National Guard in 2020, though he resigned after he was identified as a potential “insider threat” and barred from serving during Joe Biden’s inauguration.
As Hegseth was describing his experience, Hirono pressed the point: “Would you carry out an order to shoot protesters in the legs as directed to Secretary Esper?”
“I saw 50 Secret Service agents get injured by rioters trying to jump over the fence,” Hegseth continued, “set a church on fire and destroy a statue. Chaos.”
“That sounds to me that you will comply with such an order,” Hirono concluded. “You will shoot protesters in the leg.”
Hegseth didn’t reject her conclusion.
Pete Hegseth’s inability to answer basic geopolitical questions left Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-IL) “flabbergasted,” she told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer on Tuesday evening.
This came after a tense confirmation hearing on Capitol Hill before the Senate Armed Services Committee, where Hegseth, the embattled nominee for President-elect Donald Trump’s secretary of Defense, was asked by Duckworth to name how many countries are in the Alliance of Southeast Asian Nations, or ASEAN. He proceeded to name three countries that aren’t in the alliance.
“All right,” said Blitzer. “So we just heard that exchange. You had that little exchange you had with Hegseth. Were you surprised he wasn’t able to answer your question?”
“I’m flabbergasted that he was not able to answer a very simple question, and that especially since he actually mentioned the importance of the Indo-Pacific in his opening statement,” said Duckworth, herself a disabled veteran and the only senator of southeast Asian descent.
“But, you know, he also couldn’t tell me what are some of the ways that a secretary of Defense would lead international negotiations with our allies, either,” she added. “So, I mean, some very basic things that anybody who wants to be Secretary of Defense should be able to answer. And for him to not even know a single nation out of the 10 in ASEAN speaks very loudly to his lack of qualifications for the job.”
Tammy Duckworth interrogates Hegseth.
Garrett Graff at Doomsday Scenario: The FBI background check on Pete Hegseth is a whitewash—and that’s on purpose!
As defense secretary nominee Pete Hegseth faces questioning today in for his confirmation hearing — the first of the high-profile Trump nominees to do so — he already promised senators this morning, “I sit before you an open book.” That appears to be decidedly untrue. In fact, to the contrary, there’s controversy about how the FBI background check prepared for the US Senate failed to interview Hegseth’s ex-wives or the woman who filed a police report alleging he sexually assaulted here in 2017.
On the surface, that’s insane.
This is a nominee to one of the most important roles in the entire US government who not only faces credible sexual assault allegations, but who apparently also mismanaged, misled, and left ignominiously the only (very low-stakes and small) organization he’s ever actually led. His drinking is such a problem that it worried his colleague at a morning TV show, a far less sensitive and responsible position than he’s currently being considered for, and he’s already had to promise he’d stop consuming alcohol to lead the Pentagon to reassure senators.
His already-thin credentials around the military raise worrying questions too: He’s defended war criminals and been reported for extremism by his peers in the National Guard because he has a tattoo usually associated with white nationalists. This is a man that the National Guard apparently didn’t trust to be one of thousands defending the US Capitol after January 6th who may, in a matter of days or weeks, be in charge of the entire military. This is someone whose own ties to Christian white nationalists places him outside the mainstream of even that already-extreme movement. And that’s before you even get to his apparently long-standing beliefs about how women and minorities don’t have a place in today’s military.
You’d think this is precisely the type of person the FBI should do the most thorough background check on ever imagined. And you’d be right.
The fact that the so-called “FBI background check” for the man slated to head the Pentagon, the $800 billion defense budget, and the nation’s three-million-personnel military failed to talk to the very people you’d expect an investigator to be most interested in speaking with is not a mistake.
But it’s actually not the FBI’s fault.
In fact, that willful ignorance by design — and it bodes ill for how the incoming Trump administration is looking at the biggest threats to its nominees.
Read more about FBI background checks at the link. Garrett Graff is an expert on the FBI.
One more very honest opinion on Pete Hegseth from Rick Wilson: The America Psycho and the Pentagon.
Imagine a country perched on the edge of a political cliff, trembling in the shadow of an authoritarian leader. Elected officials, business elites, and even everyday citizens know they’re dealing with a dangerous man who does not respect democratic norms, the rule of law, or basic human decency.
He wants others like him by his side—deficient, broken people—the cruel, sadistic, ugly, and jealous. He wants this broken soul reflected in the distorted, dirty glass of the mirrors held aloft by his minions. He wants men whose character is a slurry of greed, lust, avarice, and weaknesses.
Christian Bale in American Psycho
Donald Trump is that authoritarian, and Pete Hegseth is the modern-day American Psycho Trump wants in charge of the Defense Department.
Hegseth sat there Tuesday like an oleaginous and smarmy Patrick Bateman cosplayer. His 1980s American Psycho affect reeked of insincerity, abundant hair product, and the smug satisfaction that Republicans work for Trump, not for their constituents or, God forbid, the nation.
In the end, Tuesday’s hearings weren’t about Pete Hegseth, at least to the Republican Majority in the Senate.
No, these hearings into the deficient character, low intellect, and abusive nature of Pete Hegseth were overshadowed by the rancid stench of fear, the raw terror at defying Trump — even if it means protecting the nation from incompetence and intemperance — means a drunk, serial adulterer, a fraud and a failure at managing tiny organizations will be placed at the helm of the largest operation in the world. It will mean a man who paid off a victim of sexual assault to silence her is treated as if he’s a serious and qualified candidate to run the Department of Defense.
It means a man who thinks “working out with the troops” is a substitute for knowledge, experience, and judgment. It means they’re blindly placing the lives of 3 million men and women in uniform and out who serve the Department of Defense — and a considerable amount of our national treasure and reputation — in the hands of an obsessively groomed talk show host.
It means placing a man who will run out any general officer who fails to kowtow to Trump, and who believes the talismanic utterance of “woke” is the root solution to the meaningful problems we face around the globe. His few “substantive” answers were a gossamer scrim of “I read the headlines in Defense Daily this morning, but I skipped the hard words” superficiality.
I wish I could tell you they don’t know what they’re doing.
They most certainly do.
They see the warning signs, the flashing red lights of Hegseth’s coming failures and the enormous costs it will impose on our nation.
And yet, their response is chilling in its predictability: they freeze, they cower, and most damningly, they comply with Trump. In their fear, they pave the very road to disaster. A few think they’re playing the monster when it’s just the monster waiting to devour them last.
It’s going to be really awful, folks.
That’s my report on the Hegseth hearing. I guess I’ll see what’s happening with Pam Bondi. Take care everyone.
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Guest Essay at The New York Times by Kim Lane Scheppele and Norman Eisen: Are We Sleepwalking Into Autocracy?
Since Donald Trump’s election victory, we have witnessed striking accommodations to his narrow win and mandate, what has been called “anticipatory obedience.”
Are we sleepwalking into an autocracy? We hope not, and would be glad if the threat does not materialize. But as close observers of people and places where democracy has come under pressure and occasionally buckled, we see creeping autocracy as a distinct and under-discussed possibility. We know well other nations, including Hungary and Poland, where leaders have steered policies that lead to a backsliding of democracy. We see eerie similarities between what transpired in those countries and what Mr. Trump and his transition team have already done and promise to do.
Fortunately, we also have examples of countries that have pushed back on threats to democracy, and we can learn from them.
The Trump transition has featured the rapid-fire appointments of several cabinet officials who are both unqualified and potentially dangerous to the security and health of the American people. The transition has also included a flurry of actual and threatened libel actions against critics, followed by several media executives and owners caving in.
Business leaders with economic interests dependent on the federal government have also made nice with the president-elect, who has threatened to use his regulatory power to pick favorites.
In a second term, Mr. Trump’s actions may be even more dangerous because he is now following the playbook created by Viktor Orbán, the prime minister of Hungary, who after losing and then regaining office moved his country from a democracy into an “illiberal state,” as he put it. It was one of the faster collapses of a robust democracy on record.
As we have seen in others democracies, autocracy is not built out of the whims of a leader but only becomes entrenched when it has been certified by legalism — exploiting legal means to serve autocratic ends. After Mr. Orbán paid his third visit of 2024 to Mar-a-Lago in early December, and after revelations that Mr. Orbán’s people were involved in influencing policy in Mr. Trump’s second term, Mr. Trump’s affinity for the Orbán playbook should not be surprising.
The above link is a gift link in case you want to read the whole piece.
I didn’t watch it so this is really helpful to me. I cannot understand how any one could think this person was acceptable. I was glad the women Senators didn’t take his shit because he sure tried to mansplain. And the repetitive use of the phrase anonymous smears even after Tim McCain was trying to tell him they weren’t anonymous was surreal. He’s basically everything I hate about Cis White Christian men. He’s a walking ball of misogyny with a superiority complex. I was think about that theory I discovered yesterday about Main Character Syndrome. He thinks it’s all about him and how wonderful he is when he’s a rip roaring drunk and woman abuser. This appointment is insane. I wonder what they did to Senator Ernest? She sure lost her self-respect yesterday.
He made Brent Kavanaugh look mature. Anonymous smears is the new weasel phrase.
Thank you for finding all the stuff I need to read but wasn’t wanting to doom scroll for. It’s a stellar post and the hard work shows.
Thank you very much.
I can’t watch this stuff either, so I appreciate your post. Thank you.
I heard someone say she may have had threats to her family from trump. I wasn’t under the impression it was just normal riffraff threats. I think many of these republicans will be so grateful when this evil man is gone. It goes without saying that everyone else will be thrilled. It reminds me of when the wicked witch melted, although in that case, she was a much more sympathetic character.