The Bunker: President Trump’s Pentagon Pick
This week in The Bunker: Pete Hegseth, President Trump’s candidate to serve as defense secretary, has so much baggage that he could be a luggage carousel at major U.S. airport; it’s up to the Senate to pull the plug; and more.
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This week in The Bunker: Pete Hegseth, President Trump’s candidate to serve as defense secretary, has so much baggage that he could be a luggage carousel at major U.S. airport; it’s up to the Senate to pull the plug; and more.
A DUBIOUS DECISION
Trump taps a Fox TV host to play defense secretary
President-elect Donald Trump wants Army National Guard and Fox TV veteran Pete Hegseth running the Pentagon. In fact, he’s told the soon-to-be-GOP Senate to let him appoint him and other Cabinet officers through a seldom-used “recess appointments” loophole without the confirmation hearings required by the Constitution. Beyond defense-secretary nominee Hegseth, that includes former Democratic-lawmaker-turned-GOP-gadfly Tulsi Gabbard for director of national intelligence and South Dakota Republican Governor Kristi Noem as homeland security chief (not to mention congressional frat boy Matt Gaetz for attorney general, and snake oil salesman Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., as health and human services chief). None is remotely qualified for those posts, regardless of whether one uses a common yardstick or common sense.
The Bunker would gladly help lead the charge to remake the Pentagon, but competence and character count. Trump’s national security nods are neither. “They’re polemicists and ideologues — wreckers, to be blunt, rather than builders,” veteran Washington Post foreign-affairs scribe David Ignatius wrote. “If confirmed, they would do more to doom Trump’s presidency than Democrats ever could.”
Yet Trump sees them as precisely the opposite: a vanguard to vanquish “the enemy from within,” wringing his opponents from sinecures inside the “deep state” and undocumented immigrants from the state, period. “All the scum that we have to deal with that hate our country,” he said last month. “That’s a bigger enemy than China and Russia.”
U.S. national security is devolving into World Wrestling Entertainment right before our eyes. As Daniel Patrick Moynihan said in a different context, Trump is defining deviancy down. You can hardly blame a president for the dubious choices that voters seem to have asked for on November 5. It turns out that a government, just like a fish, rots from the head.
Trump not only seeks recess appointments for his cut-rate Cabinet, but radical tools to protect them once there:
-- He wants to re-instate so-called Schedule F, a 2020 executive order that would let him fire thousands of nonpartisan federal employees. “The objective is to create space to put loyalists in what were, what are still, career civil service positions,” said ex-Trump appointee Ronald Sanders.
-- There’s concern that Trump 2.0 will oust inspectors general who cross swords with the White House. That’s what he did in 2020, when he removed the Pentagon IG, who, like all inspectors general, runs an office independent of the agency with a charter to ferret out wrongdoing. “People,” one former IG official told Politico, “are preparing for a massacre.” Two intelligence IGs aren’t waiting around — they’ve already quit, Nick Schwellenbach of the Project On Government Oversight reports.
-- A Trump Pentagon is considering creating a “warrior board” to whisk “woke” admirals and generals committed to diversity in the ranks into premature retirement. There’s already a list. “This is a dangerous idea that violates the very essence of the most stable, respected and nonpolitical military in the world,” former defense secretary Chuck Hagel argues. What’s amazing is that the battle over “wokeness” is happening inside the U.S. military, a trailblazer when it comes to integration.
Shortly before Trump picked him to run the Pentagon, Hegseth denounced diversity in the Department of Defense. “First of all, you got to fire the chairman [of the] Joint Chiefs,” he said, referring to Air Force General Charles Brown, the second Black person to serve as the nation’s top military officer. Hegseth also argues that female and transgender troops in the U.S. military hurt national security.
Based on informal Bunker soundings within the force, such issues don’t upset most of those in uniform. This culture war inside the U.S. military boils down to a fringe shouting louder than the rest of the carpet to derail efforts that, at the end of the day, would have little impact. The Bunker has waded through decades of battles over uniformed racial minorities, women, and gay people. Some troops believed they would erode unit cohesion or military effectiveness. It. Never. Happened.
Even the stiffly starched editorial page of Rupert Murdoch’s conservative Wall Street Journal has raised its eyebrows. “Mr. Trump seems to want Mr. Hegseth to wage a culture war against the military brass,” it intoned. “The military isn’t Mr. Trump’s enemy, and a purge mentality will court political trouble and demoralize the ranks.”
Beyond Hegseth’s minimal experience when it comes to spending close to $1 trillion annually on more than 3 million troops and civilians, he carries additional baggage. He drove many in uniform nuts when he convinced Trump during his first term to pardon U.S. troops charged with war crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq. “F*** Biden” and “woke s***” are part of his everyday vocabulary, the first in his latest book and the latter during a recent podcast (The Bunker’s no prude, but such language only highlights ignorance). He’s anti-Islam. Hegseth has a white extremist-linked tattoo that led a military superior to bar him from the Biden inauguration’s security detail. He paid off a woman who charged him with sexual assault in 2017 (Hegseth was “visibly intoxicated” at the time, his lawyer says, and any resulting sex was consensual). Hegseth’s first wife cited his “infidelity” in their divorce, and his second wife divorced him after he fathered a child with a Fox News producer, who is now his third wife.
Trump’s cabinet choices make the Senate’s duty to “advise and consent” more critical than ever. In 1788, Alexander Hamilton said such scrubbing would help “prevent the appointment of unfit characters from State prejudice, from family connection, from personal attachment, or from a view to popularity.”
Hegseth’s shortcomings recall President-elect George H.W. Bush’s 1988 nomination of John Tower (R-TX), a one-time Navy sailor who had served as chairman of the armed services committee during his 24 years in the Senate.
The Bunker covered that story for weeks, but allegations of womanizing, sexual harassment, and drinking (PDF) doomed his chances. “Is character assassination a legitimate and acceptable means of the exercise of political power?” Tower wondered as he watched his nomination swirl down the drain. It was the first time in history the Senate had rejected a Cabinet nominee of a newly elected president.
More than 35 years later, the choice is even starker. But this time around, assuming the Senate does its job, it won’t be character assassination. It’ll be character justifiable homicide.
WHAT WE’RE READING
Here’s what has caught The Bunker’s eye recently
Russia’s Vladimir Putin has lowered the threshold for nuclear war following Washington’s decision to allow Ukraine to fire U.S. long-range missiles into Russia, CNN reported November 19.
The Defense Department is getting better at failing its annual financial audits (seven in a row now), Breaking Defense reported November 15.
Check out “Denial Without Disaster — Keeping a U.S.-China Conflict over Taiwan Under the Nuclear Threshold,” released November 15 by the Rand Corp.
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Pulitzer Prize-winner Mark Thompson has been covering the Pentagon for more than 45 years.
