Pete Hegseth feeling pretty cocky at his confirmation hearing. Photo: Kent Nishimura/Bloomberg/Getty Images
In many respects, the choice of Fox News personality Pete Hegseth to become secretary of Defense was Donald Trump’s most precedent-defying second-term Cabinet nomination given the enormous magnitude of the job, the nominee’s manifest lack of experience for it, and various concerns about his personal conduct, management capacities, and attitudes toward the diversification of the armed forces in the last few decades. As New York’s Rebecca Traister aptly predicted, his confirmation hearings represented the “first serious test of Donald Trump’s newly invigorated strongman model of governance and of whether he can continue to bend the Republican Party to his will,” and “a measure of just how strenuously Democrats are planning to fight back.”
For the most part, Democratic senators during his confirmation hearing, especially Tammy Duckworth, Tim Kaine, Elizabeth Warren, Mark Kelly, and Elissa Slotkin, “fought back” pretty compellingly against the imposition of this MAGA martinet on the world’s most complicated organization. But in the real test affecting the ultimate outcome of the nomination, Republicans on the Armed Services Committee were largely toothless, all but guaranteeing Hegseth’s confirmation by the full Senate. A rough calculation is that GOP interrogators spent half their time reinforcing the nominee’s flimsy answers to a variety of questions (his drinking, sexual misconduct, mismanagement of small nonprofit organizations, and hostility to full equality for women and LGBTQ+ folk and safeguards against war crimes) and the other half of the time flailing away at the Biden administration as a military-hating hotbed of “cultural Marxism” that had made the armed forces weak.
Pretty clearly Republican senators got the memo that Hegseth was in fact an ideal figure to “reform” a Department of Defense crippled by “woke ideology” and wasteful corruption precisely because his only qualifications were as a “war fighter” with “dust on his boots” who pledged allegiance to the supreme “disrupter” Trump. This disqualification of qualifications addressed most of Hegseth’s shortcomings. And in a stance that surely cheered a major element of the MAGA base, the nominee dismissed as no longer relevant the considerable evidence of his disreputable character by suggesting that he had been forgiven and healed through the love of his third wife and his “Lord and Savior Jesus Christ,” who got an extraordinary number of shout-outs from both Hegseth and Republican senators. So as much as Democrats tried to question him about his exceptionally problematic personal behavior, he retreated time and time again behind the anonymity of accusers and his newly redeemed soul. And not a single Republican seemed to have a problem with that evasive line of defense. It’s no wonder Hegseth seemed cocky, and a times almost insolent, during what was supposed to be a supreme test of his mettle.
It’s possible some new allegations involving Hegseth could arise before he wins confirmation and takes over the Pentagon. It’s hard to imagine, however, any Republican senator risking retaliation from Trump and MAGA by suddenly doubting credentials that have been notably lacking from the get-go. As for the broader implications, perhaps other questionable nominees like Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Kash Patel, and Tulsi Gabbard won’t be able to match Hegseth’s particular self-justifications. But so far there are few if any signs of resistance to the president-elect’s wishes in the Senate’s new majority party, leaving Democrats to appeal to the judgment of history.
Daily news about the politics, business, and technology shaping our world.
Vox Media, LLC Terms and Privacy Notice
By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Notice and to receive email correspondence from us.
