Politics
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April 22, 2025
A brand new Sign scandal. Personnel nightmares. A torrent of leaks and condemnations. It’s nearly as if he was a horrible selection for this gig.
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Protection Secretary Pete Hegseth attends the White Home Easter Egg Roll on Monday, April 21, 2025.
(Tom Williams / CQ-Roll Name, Inc by way of Getty Photographs)
Pete Hegseth, we knew ye too effectively. The Trump administration’s secretary of protection endured a bruising Senate affirmation, together with reviews of a police investigation for sexual assault and communications from his personal mom impugning his character. However Hegseth, like many different openly unqualified Trump cupboard nominees, weathered the storm, and appeared to be on target to be a main exemplar of the Trump management mannequin: Shout down and dismiss assault costs after paying off your accuser; run companies into the bottom; place your self as a martyr to a faithless political institution and a biased pack of press jackals, regardless of being deeply networked in each worlds; and be rewarded with large energy and privilege. Lather, rinse, repeat—and in Hegseth’s case, order up one other spherical.
Hegseth withstood his affirmation barrage thanks in no small half to the calendar: Trump named him to run the Pentagon simply after he was pressured to scuttle his really deranged nomination of Matt Gaetz as legal professional basic. Quickly tossing Hegseth apart would have meant that Trump’s long-mythologized govt savvy could be uncovered for the media-confected lie it has all the time been; what’s extra, Trump likes to see his apparatchiks pantomime an excellent struggle, which is arguably the one management talent Hegseth possesses (so lengthy, that’s, as stated pantomiming doesn’t contain precise axe-throwing.)
However that was way back—all the way in which again in January. Now Hegesth is as soon as extra sputtering towards skilled oblivion, and reviews point out that the White Home could also be scouting out his potential substitute. (The White Home is denying that it’s doing any such factor—a minimum of for now.)
The proximate explanation for this new Hegseth demise watch is a New York Occasions report that, after collaborating within the infamous Sign chat that wound up dropping key operational particulars of a deadly Houthi bombing assault into the smartphone of The Atlantic’s editor, Jeffrey Goldberg, Hegseth promptly adjourned to share the identical delicate knowledge on a second Sign chat that included his brother and his spouse, a former Fox Information producer. (Earlier this month, The Wall Avenue Journal had additionally reported that Hegseth had introduced his spouse alongside to 2 conferences with international army counterparts that once more concerned the trade of delicate army data.)
That’s damning—and stupefying—sufficient. However Hegseth’s shaky maintain on his core job duties was giving method effectively earlier than this newest revelation. In an essay for PoliticoHegseth’s former—sure, that’s former as in “didn’t even final 100 days”—communications director, John Ullyot, described a full-blown meltdown within the Pentagon’s senior management, and forecast better squalor forward.
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Final week culminated in a Friday evening bloodbath on the DOD, with Hegseth cashiering his most loyal coterie of aides, senior adviser Dan Caldwell, deputy chief of workers Darin Selnick, and Colin Carroll, the deputy secretary of Protection’s chief of workers. The trio was then subjected to nameless smears from different Pentagon sources claiming they had been chargeable for a battery of damaging leaks. The leaks involved an unhinged scheme to rearrange a DOD briefing for Elon Musk, who has huge enterprise pursuits in China, on the army established order there; plans to droop intelligence gathering in Ukraine; to deploy a second plane service to the Purple Sea; and to recreation out a possible army offensive within the Panama Canal. (As with the unique Signalgate scandal, the place the assault in query claimed the lives of greater than 50 Houthi civilians, the Beltway furor over the procedural conduct of the leaks has crowded out the really demented abuses of energy on the coronary heart of them.)
It’s by no means an excellent signal within the scrum for DC energy when your communications director abruptly bails out amid a torrent of scandals—and it’s a far worse signal when he goes public with predictions of worse revelations to come back. After recounting all of the leaks and clumsy inner retribution campaigns now whipsawing the Pentagon, Ullyot warned, “There are very probably extra sneakers to drop briefly order, with even larger bombshell tales coming this week, key Pentagon reporters have been telling sources privately.” In Hegseth’s case, it’s troublesome to image what worse bombshells might be within the offing. Will his spouse be captaining a Bay of Pigs–model raid on Greenland or Canada? Will he give Mark Zuckerberg his personal airbase within the Philippines? Did he set extra Houthi bombing plans to music on a TikTok video? Will he scrub Jackie Robinson’s army service from DOoD web sites, and a slew of anodyne historic works from Pentagon-run archives and libraries? (Oh, wait—that truly occurred already.)
It may effectively be that Hegseth in some way emerges from the roaring din of self-inflicted fiascos along with his job intact. In any case, the Pentagon has shielded all kinds of incompetent scoundrels, from Robert McNamara to Caspar Weinberger to Donald Rumsfeld, from the lethal penalties of their misconduct and incompetence; the morally pliable mandate of managing the freebooting nationwide safety state each conceals and stokes a mess of sins. What’s extra, if Hegseth’s head rolls, it may set an unlovely precedent for an administration overstuffed with unqualified and on-the-make former Fox Information personalities. If a soulless and predatory hack like Pete Hegseth isn’t secure, whither dipshit “counterterrorism czar” Sebastian Gorka or vengeance-minded Deputy FBI Director and Bongino?
It was largely Hegseth’s swerve into full-impunity, never-apologize mode that gained him Trump’s loyalty throughout his affirmation struggle, and that would effectively carry him by way of the skilled trials forward. Simply ask Brett Kavanaugh, Pete Navarro, Steve Bannon, Paul Manafort, Roger Stone, or 1,500-plus January 6 felons.
The chaos and cruelty of the Trump administration reaches new lows every week.
Trump’s catastrophic “Liberation Day” has wreaked havoc on the world financial system and arrange one more constitutional disaster at residence. Plainclothes officers proceed to abduct college college students off the streets. So-called “enemy aliens” are flown overseas to a mega jail in opposition to the orders of the courts. And Signalgate guarantees to be the primary of many incompetence scandals that expose the brutal violence on the core of the American empire.
At a time when elite universities, highly effective legislation corporations, and influential media retailers are capitulating to Trump’s intimidation, The Nation is extra decided than ever earlier than to carry the highly effective to account.
In simply the final month, we’ve printed reporting on how Trump outsources his mass deportation agenda to different nations, uncovered the administration’s enchantment to obscure legal guidelines to hold out its repressive agenda, and amplified the voices of courageous pupil activists focused by universities.
We additionally proceed to inform the tales of those that struggle again in opposition to Trump and Musk, whether or not on the streets in rising protest actions, on the town halls throughout the nation, or in crucial state elections—like Wisconsin’s current state Supreme Courtroom race—that present a mannequin for resisting Trumpism and show that Musk can’t purchase our democracy.
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In solidarity,
The Editors
The Nation
Chris Lehmann
Chris Lehmann is the DC Bureau chief for The Nation and a contributing editor at The Baffler. He was previously editor of The Baffler and The New Republic, and is the writer, most just lately, of The Cash Cult: Capitalism, Christianity, and the Unmaking of the American Dream (Melville Home, 2016).
