Pete Hegseth is now a problem Trump can’t bring himself to solve - The Independent
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When asked about Pete Hegseth's increasingly precarious position at the Pentagon on Thursday morning, Donald Trump told ABC News' Jonathan Karl that he had “every intention” of keeping him. He then volunteered that he had received calls from people unhappy with Hegseth, before claiming: “I don't understand why.”
Call me a stickler, but I feel like if I had had to restrain one of my friends from organizing a live-streamed execution of a killer in a wheelchair, then I’d at least understand why people had some problems with the guy. But of course, Hegseth is now tied up with another issue: whether or not the Iran war was a very, very bad idea.
As the results of the midterms confirmed Republicans’ worst fears, JD Vance put out a tweet on Wednesday picking apart the polling data and telling the electorate directly that he understood why they were “pissed.” Vance put it unequivocally: “The reason we lost is the war.”
Trump appeared in public for the first time since the results a couple of hours later, standing in the half-finished ballroom at the White House and rambling on about concrete and metal beams. He was there to sign a beam and to show people the construction work and the nearby helipad, he said. As reporters jostled to get in questions, he showed vague irritation and eventually stated that yes, he knew how JD felt, and no, he didn’t regret going to war and yes, he thought it was all worth it.
Pete Hegseth is “doing a great job,” he added, when asked, although when someone asked about whether Hegseth might actually be moved out of the Cabinet and into governor-elect Marsha Blackburn’s soon-to-be-open Senate seat in Tennessee, he said he thought Pete would be “very popular” there if he did.
And so, although War Daddy’s head didn’t roll right after the blue wave, Trump created an opening. On Thursday, he acknowledged that it would be considerably easier to confirm a replacement for Hegseth before Democrats take control of the Senate in January.
There are two months to go until those newly elected Democrats take control of both chambers of Congress, and they’ll certainly have their fun with Mr. “No Beardos, No Weirdos” if they can. Denying them the ability to haul Pete up to the Hill would be smart, because Hegseth doesn’t tend to do well in front of a crowd: possessing the demeanor of an adolescent boy who just bought peptides on the dark web can be a bit of a liability in serious settings.
And now there is yet another awkward question hanging over the Department of Defense-sorry-I-mean-War. Politico reported on Wednesday that Pete's wife, Jennifer Hegseth, had been paid for consulting work by Watchtower Strategy, a Trump-connected Washington firm whose clients have included defense giant Lockheed Martin. Needless to say, the optics of the Defense Sec’s spouse having financial connections to a firm that works with one of the world's largest military contractors are hardly ideal. After all, there’s nothing better for a military contractor than a big, expensive, ongoing war, is there?
Hegseth was among the administration's most enthusiastic advocates for Iran. Like Trump once said about Lindsey Graham, he “never saw a war he didn’t like.” It seems pretty clear that he sold the president on a video-game fantasy rather than a real war. And it’s also clear — both from those old Signal chat leaks and from Wednesday’s excoriating tweet — that JD Vance saw this coming from the start and was heavily against it. Indeed, DC insiders have been talking for weeks about how ol’ Pete rubs everyone the wrong way; how he’s made few friends among even his own party. There’s no Pete Hegseth fanbase waiting to protect him from painful questioning if those impeachment articles start up in the House and then move into the Senate.
Because, of course, there are impeachment articles. Republican Rep. Thomas Massie introduced eight articles of impeachment against Hegseth in September, accusing him of, among other things, abusing his office by conducting military operations against Iran without congressional authorization. Massie has promised to force a vote during the first week of the House's return on Nov. 9, provided Hegseth is still in the job.
That does seem to imply that perhaps Trump should get a move on and boot Pete out before the end of the weekend, to avoid any further embarrassment. But if he fires him, then it looks like admission of wrongdoing in Iran, or at least a tacit admission that the war was a mistake.
The best-case scenario is that Peacocking Pete resigns quietly from the Cabinet and takes up Blackburn’s seat in Tennessee. But would he?
It would, in many respects, be an elegant escape route. Hegseth could leave the Pentagon with his dignity nominally intact, Trump could appoint a replacement while Republicans still control the Senate, and the defense secretary would no longer be in office when Democrats are seated at the beginning of 2027. As a senator, Hegseth would not be subject to impeachment as a cabinet official. He could also avoid becoming the central character in a highly publicized fight over the war.
There is another possibility: that Trump decides to let the impeachment process run. He has always enjoyed a political fight, particularly one in which he can portray himself and his allies as victims of Democratic persecution. Allowing Hegseth to become the subject of an impeachment campaign could give the White House a useful new grievance, while allowing the president to demonstrate that he is standing by a loyalist in the face of what he would inevitably describe as partisan attacks. It would also give Trump time to work out whether Hegseth is more useful to him as a sacrificial offering or as a continuing defender of the Iran war.
The danger is that a congressional investigation could expose even more about the decision-making behind the war. And I think most of us who saw the flag, fist and bomb emojis proliferating on that Signal chat can believe that the decision-making was more “grade-schoolers get handed the PlayStation controls” than “mature and restrained debate”.
Trump is determined to defend the decision to go to war, even if that means defending the people who helped persuade him to do it. Vance is already positioning himself as someone who recognized the danger, counseled restraint and was ultimately proved right. It is difficult not to notice how quickly the two men are beginning to tell different stories about the same administration's biggest foreign policy failure.
War Daddy Pete is caught in the middle of all of this, the bewildered kid at the center of the world’s weirdest custody battle, and it remains unclear whether he gets to stay at Dad’s house in his old bedroom or gets cast off to Mom’s new place in Tennessee. Either way, he should probably remember that Dad gets mean.
