Hegseth’s critics have been increasingly marginalized by getting to his left.
Hegseth’s critics have been increasingly marginalized by getting to his left.
F rom the outset of his selection by Donald Trump to be secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth’s nomination has been on the bubble. Trump’s choices fall along a spectrum as far as their odds of getting confirmed. At one end of that spectrum is Marco Rubio: a sitting third-term senator, well-liked by colleagues, respected for his depth of engagement in his area, vetted by a prior high-profile presidential campaign without scandal, and on good terms these days with every major faction of the party. Despite being thin on executive experience, Rubio will likely be confirmed within 24 to 48 hours of Trump’s swearing-in. At the opposite end was Matt Gaetz: conspicuously unqualified for the post, drenched in personal scandal, and with truckloads of personal enemies on Capitol Hill. Even if his withdrawal happened faster than predicted, nobody was surprised that Gaetz failed to make it through the Senate.
Hegseth has been the biggest question mark, a nomination that clearly could go either way. In his favor, he’s an impressive guy: tours of duty in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Guantanamo Bay; two Bronze Stars; two Ivy League degrees and a Wall Street background; long engagement in veterans’ issues, including running veterans’ advocacy groups; the communications skills to do national TV on a regular basis; and a lot of good and interesting ideas about the proper direction of the armed services. On the downside, Hegseth has never held elected or appointed public office, having sputtered out in the primary in a brief campaign for the Senate in Minnesota in 2012; his minimal executive experience includes charities that seem not to have been run terribly well, suggesting real reasons for skepticism about his capacity to impose his plans on a hostile Pentagon bureaucracy; he hardly seems irreplaceable, and Trump could doubtless find better people to carry out the same mission (including floating Ron DeSantis as a possible replacement); and he has been dogged by a lot of ugly baggage in his personal life.
A Compromised Nominee
On that last score, even setting aside allegations that are unsourced or of dubious credibility, as we should, it appears beyond dispute that Hegseth cheated repeatedly on at least his first two wives. He’s currently on his third wife following two divorces in the past 15 years. He had three children with his second wife, and one out of wedlock with his current wife while married to his second. His second divorce was so acrimonious that his own mother wrote him an email scolding him, “You are an abuser of women — that is the ugly truth and I have no respect for any man that belittles, lies, cheats, sleeps around, and uses women for his own power and ego. You are that man (and have been for years) and as your mother it pains me and embarrasses me to say that, but it is the sad, sad truth. . . . It’s time for a someone (I wish it was a strong man) to stand up to your abusive behavior and call it out, especially against women.” As appalled as I and many others were to see that email aired in public by the New York Times, it should give us pause to entrust great responsibility to a man whose own mother would describe him in those terms to his own face.
Hegseth’s defense against a rape complaint was that he and a married woman got really drunk at a conference and slept together, then she regretted it, lied to her husband, and went to the cops. I’m inclined to think that the available evidence supports that defense, but it is a very far cry from the Brett Kavanaugh case. Kavanaugh is a settled family man, and nobody ever brought forward credible evidence that he had ever done anything as sexually immoral as a dozen things Pete Hegseth has admittedly done. Outside of Christine Blasey Ford’s own words, there was never a shred of evidence (including the word of the friend she said would back her up) that she had ever even met Kavanaugh. Blasey Ford only surfaced as an accuser when Kavanaugh was nominated for the Supreme Court — years after he was Senate-confirmed to the D.C. Circuit — and couldn’t even say what year the alleged assault happened. Hegseth, by contrast, was accused contemporaneously and admitted to a sexual encounter, but said it was consensual.
While it is true that great things have been done in public life by men with deeply immoral personal lives (think of Rudy Giuliani running New York City), we conservatives were right in the 1990s that character matters, and a man of this sort of character should raise serious concerns.
In and Out of Hot Water
In light of all that, Hegseth’s has been a deeply embattled nomination, reminiscent of the last nominee voted down by the Senate: John Tower, who was defeated as secretary of defense in 1989 amidst public concerns about his drinking and womanizing. Nine days ago, Jeff Blehar rounded up the reasons to ask, “Is Pete Hegseth’s Position Crumbling?” The following day, Alexander Bolton of The Hill wrote, “Senate GOP sees Hegseth nomination as likely doomed”:
Pete Hegseth’s nomination to serve as secretary of Defense appears doomed despite his fiery declaration that he’s “not going anywhere,” Republicans on Capitol Hill told The Hill on Thursday. “I think most people do not expect Hegseth to make it,” one Republican senator said. “There’s seven or eight [Republican] votes against him. It’s a matter of time.” “It’s on the death watch,” the senator added.
GOP senators say President-elect Trump is letting Hegseth twist in the wind and even appeared to undermine his nomination by floating Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) as a possible replacement nominee to head the Pentagon.
Things have turned around dramatically since then. The pressure to fall in line behind Hegseth, orchestrated by MAGA media voices, has been especially intense upon Iowa senator Joni Ernst. Ernst, herself a combat veteran of the Iraq War, is typically a solid party-line vote, but she has talked about her experiences with sexual harassment in the Army Reserve and spent years bucking her party by pressing to remove sexual assault investigations from the military chain of command. That, and her perch on the Senate Armed Services Committee, make her a key vote in this debate, and she’s obviously been concerned about Hegseth’s record with women. But she also needs to look ahead to 2026, when she’s up for reelection.
Ernst has lately signaled that she’s more favorable toward Hegseth, and whatever sentiment may be behind the scenes, other Republican senators aren’t stepping forward thus far to oppose him as they did to Gaetz. It’s a kind of reverse prisoner’s dilemma that we’ve seen before, where nobody wants to be the one to go first against Trump unless there is safety in numbers.
If you believe Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman of the New York Times — and their reporting seems consistent with what is publicly visible — Trump and his circle have decided to make Hegseth a test case:
Mr. Trump was getting sick of hearing about it all, and he told confidants he was serious about picking Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida to replace him. But within 48 hours, Mr. Trump had changed his mind. He was going to see if Mr. Hegseth could survive.
People close to the president-elect had been telling him that this was a moment that would test his power as he prepared to return to Washington. It would be catastrophic, they argued, if he allowed Republican senators, like Joni Ernst of Iowa, to obstruct his mandate. This was about something more than Mr. Hegseth, they said.
The sequence that followed — resuscitating Mr. Hegseth in less than a week from dead man walking to a man with a real shot of being confirmed by the Senate — was a test case of power and intimidation in the Trump era.
Trump’s turn on this is the effect, however. It’s not the cause. What seems apparent is that Hegseth’s defenders succeeded in framing this as an attack from the left, rather than a question of Hegseth’s own character, competence, and ability to get the job done.
That’s critical. Gaetz had so much baggage and so many enemies that it scarcely mattered, but typically — even before Trump, and especially in the Trump era — the way to defeat a Republican nominee with Republican votes is to attack from the right, or at least to avoid what looks like a tribal or ideological drawing of lines. Even Tower had a lot of enemies in the Senate who thought he had betrayed conservatives too often. Harriet Miers’s Supreme Court nomination collapsed when so much of the criticism of Miers came from conservatives, who were then rewarded when she was replaced by Samuel Alito. Kavanaugh’s nomination survived in large part because the extremity of the left-wing and partisan-Democrat assault on him convinced so many Republicans that it was essential to circle the wagons around him.
Hegseth’s defenders may at first have seemed desperate in comparing him to Kavanaugh, but they have received a series of gifts, as attacks on Hegseth from the left have greatly strengthened his case. One is a sustained effort by journalists such as Mike Baker and Ruth Graham of the New York Times and Jasper Craven of Politico to paint Hegseth as an emblem of “Christian nationalism,” including attacks on his Jerusalem cross and “Deus Vult” tattoos that reporters can’t seem to discuss without sounding ridiculously ignorant. There have been over-the-top stories about Hegseth’s drinking that contain no named sources and have been rebutted on the record by colleagues who put their names to the denials. And in the latest fiasco, ProPublica tried to run a story claiming falsely that Hegseth had lied about being accepted to West Point, and they appear to have had help from the academy in doing so.
All of this has raised the clamor of character assassination and institutional resistance in a way that feels to most Republicans like a thing that ought to be resisted with the same reflexes that came into play in the Kavanaugh fight, never mind that Hegseth is a much less qualified and less personally reputable character. Ernst has been pressured with her own prior statements from last summer favoring transgender troops and women in the military, which has enabled Hegseth’s defenders to paint her as some sort of tool of the woke brass — even though Hegseth himself has been swiftly backtracking on his own prior statements on gay and female troops.
It remains to be seen if Hegseth survives. Given the volume of dirt in his personal life, senators are prudent to wait for the hearings to see what other shoes may yet drop, and how credible they are. But if he makes it through this process, it will be because the campaign to confirm him was able to polarize his nomination among Republicans as being attacked from the left — and that campaign got a lot of help from liberal and progressive media.