President Trump, speaking to reporters Wednesday:
Q: Are you considering replacing Secretary Hegseth?
Donald Trump: No, I think he’s doing a very good job.
Q: So, you don’t want him to fill Marsha Blackburn’s Senate seat to be appointed to be Senator?
Trump: Well, I think he — I think he’s doing a very good job. And I actually think he’d be very popular if he did that, but I haven’t heard that at all.
Tennessee GOP senator Marsha Blackburn has just been elected governor of Tennessee. (In another indicator of the scale of the blue wave, Blackburn won by about 2.5 percentage points. Four years ago, Bill Lee won reelection by 32 percentage points.) She will resign her U.S. Senate seat and be sworn in as governor, and then as governor she will appoint her replacement, who will serve until a special election is held in November 2028.
Appointing Hegseth to the Senate seat strikes me as an unwise move, unless Blackburn wants someone who will not run in the special election. Whether or not you think Hegseth is doing, as Trump put it, “a very good job,” nationally just 32 percent of voters approve of the way Pete Hegseth is handling his job as Secretary of Defense. Maybe that number is a little higher in Tennessee, but I wouldn’t count on it being dramatically higher. An appointed Hegseth could well be a deeply flawed incumbent senator come 2028. And if you say, “hey, it’s Tennessee, the Republicans always win…” well, a lot of people were saying things like that about Texas and South Carolina and Kansas up until this week.
Plus, the state of Tennessee does not have a dearth of elected Republican officials who would probably do a good job representing the state for at least two years. Heading into this election, Tennessee had 27 Republican state senators, 75 Republican state legislators, eight Republican congressmen, current and former state officials, mayors… a slew of options. Yes, Hegseth has a home in Goodlettsville, Tennessee, but he obviously has not been able to spend much time there in the past two years.
No matter how much Trump and Blackburn said otherwise, appointing Hegseth to the senator position would be seen as a move to get him out of the Pentagon and to allow the administration to change its defense policies without conceding that Hegseth has not, in fact, done “a very good job.”