By admin 
On Wednesday, Pete Hegseth convened hundreds of the U.S. military’s junior officers and enlisted service members in a cavernous auditorium on a military base in Virginia to hear what he called the first of a new annual tradition—a “State of the Force” report to the troops from their self-styled “Secretary of War.” The key moment came when Hegseth, strutting across an American flag-swathed stage in one of his trademark too-tight TV-man’s suits, announced victory over the enemies whose defeat has been the signature focus of his tenure. “We are no longer the ‘woke’ department, or the ‘weak’ department,” he declared. “Simple translation of that? No fatties, no trannies, no beardos, no weirdos. No wimps, no radicals. Just warriors.”
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Listening to the address, you might be forgiven for thinking it was a live-action rerun of one of Hegseth’s old Fox News shows, complete with the vilification of bad guys you didn’t even really know were a problem. (Since when was the U.S. military ever the home of wimps and radicals?) But if the antagonists were a bit opaque, the message came through clearly: the only war that this secretary wants to prosecute is the one at home—against the forces of political correctness, against the military’s own generals, some ten per cent of whom Hegseth has already fired, with plans to dismiss ten per cent more, and, above all, against the “fake news,” which he accused of “treason” for accurately reporting the challenges imposed on U.S. forces by an actual war in the Middle East that went all but unmentioned in his nearly hourlong speech.
Hegseth’s main nod to the ongoing conflict with Iran, in fact, came when he asserted that the war, which the Trump Administration is currently asking Congress to provide tens of billions of emergency funding for, was both over and a roaring success “that every red-blooded American is proud of.”
His speech, it should also be noted, came on a day when the Pentagon announced that it had closed the last major U.S. military base in Iraq, thus ending the twenty-three-year, $1.7-trillion American presence there that began with George W. Bush’s ill-fated invasion in 2003—the last time a Republican President embarked on an unpopular war of choice in the region. This also was not mentioned. It wasn’t just the Middle East that Hegseth omitted, though. The entire rest of the world was also left out. As in, no China, no Russia, no Europe or Africa. In Donald Trump’s Pentagon, there are no geopolitics; only the divisive domestic politics of us versus them.
In theory, this should come as no surprise. Both Hegseth and Trump said explicitly at the start of the President’s second term that their plan for the Defense Department was to focus on what Trump called “the enemy from within.” But, then again, Trump also said—again and again and again—that he would never embroil the U.S. military in a costly open-ended war in the Middle East. His jarring evolution has come so swiftly and unexpectedly that Hegseth, and many others in what was formerly Trump’s “America First” coalition, have had a hard time adjusting to the new imperialist stylings of their leader. Even the propagandists have not fully rewritten their scripts, as was pointed out in advance of Hegseth’s address, when his staff handed out a new hundred-and-forty-four-page “field manual” to the troops that consisted of four Hegseth speeches and a foreword from the President announcing, “As your Commander-in-Chief, I will not ask you to fight dumb Wars.”
But he has, and it is not going well. Since the conflict began, in February, Iran has humiliated the United States by asserting control over the Strait of Hormuz, the global economy has been thrown into turmoil, billions of dollars in damage has been caused to U.S. military bases across the Middle East, and critical American stocks of air-defense weapons and other munitions have been depleted at alarming rates.
At such a moment, with barely a month until midterm elections in which the deep unpopularity of the war and growing alarm over its economic and national-security consequences have led to a strong backlash against Republican candidates, there has rarely been worse timing for such a speech. It seemed about as politically ill-advised as Trump’s decision to travel to a truck-manufacturing plant in Texas, on Thursday, which inevitably invited voters to remember that the price of diesel fuel to drive those trucks just hit the highest level ever recorded—$6.53 per gallon, on September 21st—as a result of the war with Iran that Trump’s Secretary of Defense insists is not happening.
A few weeks ago, Senator Thom Tillis, the North Carolina Republican who had delivered a key vote for Hegseth’s confirmation last year, despite qualms about his fitness for office, urged Trump to fire Hegseth. “I have never witnessed more inept management of the brave men and women who serve our country,” Tillis posted on X, after Hegseth forced out the Secretary of the Army. “He is intimidated by competence and retreats to ginning up culture wars instead of soberly attending to the vital work of our national defense and the health and well-being of our fighting force.”
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Soon after, another Republican, the Kentucky congressman Thomas Massie, filed formal articles of impeachment against Hegseth in the House of Representatives. The chamber’s rules would have required a vote to be held within forty-eight hours of the resolution’s filing, but the G.O.P. leadership seemed worried enough about the vote count that Speaker Mike Johnson abruptly cancelled the House’s remaining business before the midterm elections and sent members into recess early instead. Writing in The American Conservative on “Why a Hegseth Impeachment Terrifies the G.O.P.,” a former aide to the Republican senator Josh Hawley compared Johnson’s maneuver to King Charles I dissolving the English Parliament in 1626 rather than have it vote to impeach his favored courtier, the much-hated Duke of Buckingham. (It didn’t go over so well for Charles, whose disputes with Parliament ultimately ended with the English Civil War and his beheading for treason.)
Massie may not have had the votes (yet) to force Hegseth’s removal, but these high-profile breaches are indicative of a broad and notably bipartisan disgust on Capitol Hill with Trump’s Pentagon chief. “That a Republican member of Congress was the one who filed the impeachment is, I think, illustrative of how much concern there is and how much Republicans in the Senate who consented to the ratification of somebody obviously unqualified of the job are looking to repent of that choice,” Kori Schake, a former senior official in Bush’s Pentagon who now serves as director of foreign- and defense-policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, told me.
The strong betting in Washington is that Hegseth will be the first target of newly empowered Democrats after the elections, though I’ve heard lively debates in recent days over whether it’s impeachment he will face or merely aggressive accountability in the form of investigations, subpoenas, and embarrassing public hearings. One thing that’s certain is it won’t just be Hegseth’s poor handling of the war with Iran that will be scrutinized. There is a long bill of other particulars—from the arbitrary firings of general officers and blocking promotions in a way that disproportionately targeted women and people of color to a months-long campaign of deadly strikes on alleged drug boats in the Caribbean despite questions about its legality and purpose. Assuming, that is, that Trump does not decide to take a page from Bush, who announced he was getting rid of his Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, the day after the G.O.P. suffered an embarrassing defeat in the 2006 midterms.
Even before the impeachment resolution, the otherwise timid Republican-controlled Congress had begun pushing back on Hegseth in ways that have gotten surprisingly little attention, refusing to approve the emergency spending request for the Iran war that Trump sent to the Hill at the beginning of the summer and not moving forward with nominations for key Pentagon posts. “A big reason why the $67 billion Presidential request for supplemental spending on the Iran war is dead in the water is because people don’t trust the seriousness or the judgment of the civilian leadership of the Defense Department,” Schake observed.
The Trump Administration’s request for a record $1.5-trillion defense budget has also been stalled, and few expect it to go anywhere so long as Hegseth remains the department’s leader. Already there’s a strong hint of the Washington feeding frenzy to come. On Wednesday, the Times wrote that “Hegseth has never been weaker”; the Washington Post had a column by a retired Navy officer announcing that the Defense Secretary was “the prime candidate for a pink slip” after the election.
Which brings us back to Hegseth’s stagy theatrics this week, which were not so much a distraction from his woes as confirmation of why he has got himself in such a disastrous situation in the first place. Listening to this former anchor who won his job by preening for Trump on TV announce that “ideological clowns are out” and “patriotic cowboys are in, with testosterone testing on top” at his Pentagon, I’m surely not the only one who caught a whiff of desperation. And yet I’m not entirely convinced that Trump will get rid of him, either. With his vanity, indifference to the facts, preference for lethality over strategy, and reckless commitment to tearing down an institution that has served as a nonpartisan bulwark in a polarized nation, isn’t Pete Hegseth the very definition of a Trumpist in the Pentagon? ♦
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