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Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth suffered a significant defeat last week as one of his signature policy initiatives was quietly shelved. Details are sketchy, but for whatever reason, the Pentagon has pulled back on Hegseth’s effort to make the United States military the most testosterone-blasted, masculinity-maxxed fighting force in the world.
In July, Hegseth announced in a bizarre video that service members were going to be screened to see if they needed to add some man-juice to their supplement stack in order to achieve maximum lethality, “ensuring you have the right testosterone levels to operate at your absolute best.” But Reuters now reports that “the Pentagon is temporarily rescinding recently published clinical guidance for a new, mandatory testosterone deficiency screening policy for service members aged 30 and older.” Cue the sad trombone.
In a cabinet full of grifters and nincompoops, Hegseth stands out for his combination of belligerent buffoonishness and rampaging incompetence. As ill-advised as it is to make predictions in politics, we’ll offer this one: Hegseth will be the next Trump cabinet secretary to be fired or forced to resign, and it won’t be long.
Unfortunately, it also won’t be for the right reasons. Hegseth, formerly a weekend co-host on Fox & Friends, was the most unqualified defense secretary in history by a country mile, and he has surprised no one by becoming perhaps the most disastrous one we’ve ever seen.
But being bad at your job won’t get you the boot in Donald Trump’s government; for that, you have to become enough of a public embarrassment that he decides you’re reflecting poorly on him. And Hegseth is just about there.
How many ways can you screw up the military?
Just three months into his tenure as secretary, things had gotten bad enough that the New York Times ran a story headlined, “Under Hegseth, Chaos Prevails at the Pentagon.”
They weren’t the only ones noticing; a former Trump Pentagon aide wrote in Politico that “the building is in disarray under Hegseth’s leadership.” If anything, the madness has only increased since then.
Here’s a roundup of some stories coming out of the Pentagon just in the last few weeks:
After a long-running feud with Hegseth, Army Secretary Dan Driscoll resigned last week, but not before warning President Trump that Hegseth is “hurting the force and shrinking the pool of officers available for future senior commands,” as ABC News reported. Many fear that Driscoll will be replaced with Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell, a Hegseth ally and MAGA warrior who has never run an organization, let alone one with hundreds of thousands of employees.
When Hegseth got the job, he set about to purge women and minorities from top positions, firing some and denying promotion to others. In the time since, the firings have become a regular occurrence. As The Economist noted, Hegseth “has ousted at least 24 flag or general officers. Many appear to have been dismissed for no reason beyond their race, sex or associations with officers Mr Hegseth disliked.” Most recently, Hegseth fired Army Chief of Staff Randy George and two other generals, and forced out other potential successors to George. The result, as the New York Times reports, is that the Army has half the number of four-star generals it did two years ago, “the fewest in decades,” and Hegseth’s feuds and firings have “left the Army essentially rudderless.”
After Hegseth ordered deployments extended for units in the Middle East, a group of top leaders communicated their objections via a “non-concur” in a regular classified report to the secretary, “meaning they disagree with the secretary’s order to extend their forces but will execute it nevertheless.” In response to that story being made public by the Washington Post, “the Pentagon has pulled decades of classified documents from a secret computer system commonly used by defense officials and US troops.” In other words, the problem was apparently the leak.
Hegseth’s paranoia about leaks has reached the point that the Department is subjecting dozens of members of the Joint Staff to polygraph tests to see if they’ve been talking to the media, the kind of move that always raises morale.
Last month, Trump reportedly got angry with Hegseth at a Camp David meeting for not keeping him informed about the military’s depleted stockpile of munitions; Hegseth blamed his deputy.
Democrats on the House Appropriations Committee charge that because the war has cost so much, the Pentagon is attempting to seize money appropriated to the National Institutes of Health for medical research, which would be illegal.
A new battalion intended to improve the military’s ability to fight with drones and robots is being phased out, because hey, it’s not like that’s important to the future of warfare.
Hegseth has installed a group of far-right social media influencers in civilian roles in the Pentagon.
He set out to destroy Stars and Stripes, the venerable news outlet focused on service members, firing its top leadership and eliminating its editorial independence in order to make it more of a propaganda mouthpiece.
To repeat, those are only the stories that have come out over the last few weeks.
That’s on top of the likely war crimes, the purging of official acknowledgement of the heroism of Black troops, the time he made the flu vaccine optional and then had to retreat in the face of a flu outbreak, the ridiculous feud with Anthropic, the pathetic workout videos, the imposition of Christian nationalism on the armed forces, that time he summoned every general and flag officer to Quantico so he could lecture them about looking fat, the closing of the office charged with finding ways to limit civilian casualties, his loosening of rules of engagement, his banning officers from studying at top universities because they have “wicked ideologies,” or his attempt to demote and reduce the retirement pay of Navy veteran and astronaut Mark Kelly for telling troops they have no obligation to obey illegal orders, which they don’t.
Things have gotten so bad that even some Republicans are no longer willing to defend Hegseth. Sen. Thom Tillis, who is not running for reelection, has called on Trump to fire him, and some MAGA loyalists in Congress are calling out his never-ending purges.
“I’m tired of all the churn,” says Rep. Mike Rogers of Alabama, the chair of the House Armed Services Committee. “I want to see some stability over there.” Sen. Mike Rounds of South Dakota added, “We’ve had some very good generals that are no longer there that we respected.”
But Hegseth’s fate is in President Trump’s hands. And apart from the argument about whose fault it is that the military is running out of ammunition, there’s no reason to believe Trump is displeased with almost anything Hegseth has done.
But that doesn’t mean Hegseth is safe.
Why Trump will give him the boot
Just look at the cabinet officials Trump has fired or forced to resign in the last year, including Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, Attorney General Pam Bondi, Secretary of Labor Lori Chavez-DeRemer, and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard.
All were terrible at their jobs, but that was hardly a surprise since none of them were particularly qualified in the first place. The only possible exception was Bondi, who had been attorney general in Florida, but she was a partisan hack who eagerly did Trump’s bidding to utterly corrupt the DOJ. What got her shown the door was her bungling of the Jeffrey Epstein scandal, though in her defense, she was given the almost impossible task of protecting Trump from scrutiny over his long association with Epstein. But in the end, she became an embarrassment. In Trump’s eyes, her key failure was one of public relations.
The same was true of Noem, Chavez-DeRemer, and Gabbard — all were cast off when their ineptitude and scandals got too much attention and began to hurt the administration’s image. The lesson is clear: Trump doesn’t care if you screw up your job, as long as you do it quietly; it’s when you make him look bad that your days are numbered.
Remember, Trump conceives of his presidency as a TV show. He wants people who are “right out of Central Casting” — the highest compliment he can pay, meaning they have the physical look he is after to play a particular part. But he is the protagonist, and everyone else is a supporting character. And not just supporting characters, but ones without their own goals, opinions, or impulses. If a supporting character threatens to take over the story, it had better be in a way that makes Trump look better, not worse.
How many more embarrassing stories will come out about Hegseth before Trump decides to cut him loose? There’s no way to know for sure, but if Trump is looking for a scapegoat on whom to blame the disaster of the Iran war, Hegseth will be the most convenient one. He was a strong advocate of the war from the beginning, and in all his public comments has insisted that it has been an enormous success in every way (the fact that Trump says the same thing is hardly relevant). If the midterm elections prove to be as much of a Republican defeat as most everyone expects, firing Hegseth could be just the kind of highly visible change members of his own party (and the news media) will be demanding to see.
For his part, the man known as “Whiskey Pete” may have his sights set higher. He recently traveled to Iowa to campaign for Republicans in his “personal capacity,” and is reportedly considering a run for president in 2028. In the meantime, he’ll keep running the Pentagon into the ground, until Trump decides enough is enough.
That’s it for today
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Thanks for reading.
He’s maybe the worst right now, rigorously contending with RFK, Jr., for that perch.
The entire regime is a complete and utter disaster. Until we get the mainstream media out of the hands of his sycophants, the general public has no idea what a fool this President is. Arguing with Trumpers is like banging your head against a brick wall. The midterms need to be a big BLUE blowout!