Thoughts on the Hegseth Nomination for Secretary of Defense

Pete Hegseth appeared before the Senate Armed Services Committee yesterday as Donald Trump’s nominee for Secretary of Defense. He has proved to be one of Trump’s more controversial choices.

Last night, Chris Hayes called Hegseth manifestly unqualified. Were his résumé in a stack of potential candidates, Hayes suggested, it would immediately be consigned to the no-need-to-call-in-for-an-interview pile. It is unclear whether Trump had such a stack of résumés or whether he did anything like due diligence in picking Hegseth.

Although Hayes’s view is widely shared by Democrats (and, one suspects, most HR professionals), Republican members of the Armed Services Committee clearly think otherwise (or are too afraid to go against the Trump tide).

Republicans seem to believe that previous secretaries were incompetent, and what is needed now is a “change agent” to fix what’s wrong with the Department of Defense. The problem with the DoD, in their view, is an obsession with DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion), a concept, remarkably, they find incompatible with democracy (or, in any case, with Donald Trump).

Majority committee members believe that we have been picking defense secretaries all wrong. The ideal candidate is a well-dressed, glib, hard-drinking former soldier disdainful of international rules of warfare. The candidate should be an adulterous misogynist with a history of sexual predation and track record of mismanagement of modest-size organizations. Such a person clearly is the ideal leader for one of the largest and most complicated organizations on the planet. Pete Hegset is the perfect candidate!

Trump’s choice of Hegseth is a harbinger of the quality of government we may expect from a second Trump administration.

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Republicans have worked hard to secure the Hegseth nomination. Senators have been lobbied by Trump partisans, and TV spots urging voters to lobby their Senators to vote for him have appeared in at least one state. The candidate refused to meet with any committee Democrats except the ranking member. Little documentation of the candidate’s background has been provided, and committee members were allotted only one round of questioning, contrary to customary practice. It is unclear why the FBI background check on Hegseth was, at best, perfunctory, but it was.

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Hegseth has made much of his war record. (He is hardly another Eisenhower, however.) He wants to see a “warrior ethos” in the DoD and looks forward to “leading this Pentagon on behalf of the war fighters.” This aggressive attitude, combined with his disdain for established rules of war, is worrisome. One of the most important tasks of the defense secretary is working with other nations to avoid war. When asked about some of our military alliances, however, Hegseth appeared clueless. Whereas it is laudable that a defense secretary is concerned about the welfare of our fighting forces, Hegseth seems not to recognize that, as secretary, he represents the American people and the civilian control of the military. Significantly, we no longer have a “War Department.”

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In the time-honored fashion of nominees with skeletons in the closet, Hegseth deflected  criticism, claiming that he has been a victim of a “coordinated smear campaign orchestrated in the media.” (One cannot help but be reminded of the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing for Clarence Thomas. We see where that led!) Hegseth admitted that he is not a “perfect person,” but he claims to be a reformed person, a transformation apparently brought about through Jesus Christ. Mark Kelly has observed that Hegseth cannot have it both ways; he cannot be both a changed man and a victim of a smear campaign.

Republicans are not going to tell us much about this thoroughly inappropriate candidate, but readers wanting to know more should read Jane Mayer’s December 1 piece in The New Yorker about Hegseth.