Let’s Can Hegseth. A Murderous Monster.
We can’t afford to have this man in leadership.
Donald Trump has assembled a cabinet of horrors, a gallery of the unqualified and the unfit, and Pete Hegseth may be the worst of them. Picture him: the Fox & Friends weekend tan, the flag-pin sincerity, the prose-poem tattoos, striding the Pentagon’s E-Ring as though it were a green room with better security. He came to the building promising to scrape the rot of “wokeness” off the American officer corps. What he has delivered instead is the most florid display of unfitness the place has seen in living memory, performed with the serene confidence of a man who has never once been told no by anyone who mattered.
Consider his latest curatorial flourish. The Navy sent up twenty-two names for one-star admiral, the survivors of the most pitiless selection process in American life. Not one of them a woman. And still that was insufficiently pure for our secretary, who reached into the list and plucked out at least seven officers he found surplus to requirements. Two women. Two Black men. The regulations permit him to strike a name only for some genuine failing, and they require him to say which. He has said nothing, beyond a vaporous complaint about “gender and demographic engineering,” which is the kind of phrase that sounds muscular until you notice it means nothing and indicts no one. The board chose on merit. He overruled it and called the overruling merit. I admires, in a clinical way, the nerve.
But the promotion list is the dinner-party anecdote, the amuse-bouche. The main course was served at sea.
On the second of September last year, the military put a missile into a boat in the Caribbean. Two men survived the first strike and clung to the wreckage in the water, which is the moment that separates a war from a killing. A second strike finished them. The Washington Post reported that Hegseth himself had ordered no survivors. The White House confirmed he had authorized the operation. He waved the whole thing away as fake news, the eternal incantation, and posted the footage like a man sharing vacation reels. Members of his own party have used the term “war crime.” It was, lest anyone think it an aberration, one of more than twenty such strikes, more than eighty dead, none of it troubled by so much as a congressional permission slip.
Then, because a man of his appetites does not stop at a boat, there is the war. On the twenty-eighth of February the administration went to war with Iran and simply forgot to ask. The sixty-day clock the law provides ticked down and expired while Hegseth maintained, with the airy entitlement of a maître d’ seating a regular, that the president requires no one’s authorization for anything. Twenty-five billion dollars later, with an American missile having found a girls’ school in Minab, he sat before Congress and announced that the true enemy of the mission was not Tehran but the legislators asking him about it. It is a remarkable thing to watch a man treat oversight as lèse-majesté.
And all of this, remember, was the sequel. The pilot episode aired at his confirmation, which he survived 51 to 50 only because the vice president materialized to break the tie, the Senate having decided to wave through a dossier that would sink a school-board candidate. He was accused of sexually assaulting a woman in a Monterey hotel in 2017, an accusation he denies, and paid her fifty thousand dollars to make it quiet. He has been dogged by allegations of heavy drinking, which he denies, and of conduct that left his second wife afraid, which he also denies. He has admitted to infidelities plural. The denials are his. The settlement, the tie-breaking vote, the admissions: those are simply true.
The piety, at least, is consistent in its hollowness. Hegseth has taken to convening Christian worship services inside the Pentagon, the better to drape the warrior brand in scripture, and in April he rose at one of them to deliver what he presented to the assembled faithful as the word of God. It was the word of Quentin Tarantino. The verse he intoned as Ezekiel 25:17 was the fictional one Samuel L. Jackson recites in Pulp Fiction in the seconds before he executes a man on a kitchen floor, a passage Tarantino himself lifted from a 1970s Japanese revenge picture. Our crusader could not tell the Old Testament from a hitman’s kiss-off, and when he was caught, his spokesman announced that anyone who noticed was peddling fake news. A man who quotes the gospel of Pulp Fiction at his own prayer meeting and dares you to say otherwise is not devout. He is a costume.
What unites the whole gaudy procession is the same conviction, glittering and total, that the rules are decorations hung for lesser men. The board’s rules, the war-powers law, the regulations on who lives in the water and which schoolchildren do not, the ordinary expectation that a man entrusted with the largest military on earth might first have ordered his own house. He has confused command with impunity, and Washington, charmed by the jaw, has indulged the confusion long enough.
There is a constitutional remedy for officers who are unfit, and it does not require that they be charming or uncharming, only that they be unfit. Pete Hegseth has supplied the evidence with a generosity bordering on exhibitionism. Congress should bring the charges. Some men give you no choice but to read them their reviews.
