If Senate Democrats’ uncoordinated performance at Secretary of Defense nominee Pete Hegseth’s confirmation hearing on Tuesday is a sign of things to come, Donald Trump’s Cabinet picks can breathe easy.
Hegseth breezed through the bulk of the four-hour hearing, most of which he spent talking over Democrats who quietly waited for the “Fox and Friends” host to finish his monologues. Only a few lawmakers tried pushing back on Hegseth’s motor-mouthing, among them Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), Tim Kaine (D-Va.), Maizie Hirono (D-Hawaii) and Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.). But Hegseth, a veteran broadcaster accustomed to combative interviews, knew better than to take the bait.
If Hegseth’s goal was to be uneventful, he largely succeeded. But if Hegseth’s text was flat by design, his subtext was anything but. Time and again, Hegseth revealed himself to be a hard-line Republican partisan with big ideas and little practical understanding of America’s most important government department.
Luckily for Hegseth, today’s Republican Party doesn’t view incompetence as a disqualifying factor.
Hegseth’s years at Fox News have evidently resulted in his mastery of the language of right-wing grievance. He ranted about the dangers of “electric tanks” and peppered his responses with condemnations of the “woke military.” He pledged to “tear out DEI and CRT initiatives root and branch” from the Defense Department and rattled a verbal saber at “Communist China.”
Hegseth’s responses brought all the energy of his Fox News segments — and were clearly intended for an audience of one watching from Mar-a-Lago.
But drill down past the superficial outrage, and Hegseth has nothing. Given three chances by Duckworth to name a country involved in ASEAN, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, Hegseth couldn’t name one. That’s especially concerning given that Hegseth had just finished a canned response about how supporting ASEAN will be critical for countering China’s growing influence in the Pacific. Whoops!
It wasn’t just Democrats who tripped Hegseth up, either. Sen. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.) asked Hegseth a straightforward question about whether America could fight a multi-front war against “near-peer adversaries” like Russia and China. That’s the kind of technical question a Secretary of Defense will face on a regular basis. Yet Hegseth had no answer. Instead of engaging any part of Rounds’s question, Hegseth instead offered another round of praise for Trump’s strength as a leader.
How Hegseth prepared for his hearing offers valuable insight into how the political dynamic has changed under a restored Trump. Despite pledging to serve “both Republicans and Democrats” if confirmed, Hegseth’s team refused to meet with a single Democratic lawmaker in the run-up to Tuesday’s hearing. When Sen. Gary Peters (D-Mich.) asked why Hegseth had refused his multiple requests to meet, Hegseth dismissively replied that “schedules fill up.”
It didn’t take Hegseth long to dispense with his poetic commitment to bipartisanship. In his first response, he blamed shadowy forces on the left for a string of media stories about his workplace misconduct and alleged sexual assault. “Our left wing media … doesn’t care about the truth,” Hegseth said. “They want to destroy me because I’m a change agent and a threat to them.”
Gone also is the tradition of nominees racing to the center in an effort to appear palatable to both sides. In a pointed back-and-forth with Sen. Angus King (I-Maine), Hegseth refused to offer his unequivocal support for the Geneva Conventions, specifically their restrictions on torture. In one of his few direct responses of the day, Hegseth asserted that the Geneva Conventions and other laws written by people in “air-conditioned offices” hinder America’s ability to prosecute warfare.
Hegseth also took a stab at explaining his having sought pardons for convicted American war criminals — something that might have aroused skepticism from Republicans in another political reality. Arguing that in cases of war crimes he always “defaults to the warfighter,” Hegseth made no excuses for seeking pardons for those convicted by the military of human rights abuses. That outrageous answer didn’t even merit a follow-up from Democrats.
Despite his claim early in the day that politics should play “no role” in the military, Hegseth’s fixation on rooting out DEI, CRT and other “progressive” politics from the Pentagon tells a different story. Like many of his MAGA kin, Hegseth sees liberal demons behind every door and feels a moral obligation to root them out. That those demons are entirely imaginary doesn’t seem to matter.
Hegseth is resolutely unqualified to be secretary of Defense, but Democrats’ uninspiring questioning did a dreadful job of showcasing that fact for the public. Hegseth is now on track for a Senate confirmation that would have seemed outlandish even a month ago. If that happens, America’s fighting men and women will be in for a wild ride.
Max Burns is a veteran Democratic strategist and founder of Third Degree Strategies.
