Pete Hegseth Is a Test
Inside
the Senate’s torturous debates over Donald Trump’s worst Cabinet nominee.
By Rebecca
Traister, writer-at-large for New York Magazine
and the Cut
Pete Hegseth is, by every measure, an
abysmal nominee to run the American military. The Army National Guard veteran
and former Fox News commentator has no experience managing enormous, complex
organizations like the Pentagon and would, as secretary of Defense, be in
charge of an $850 billion budget and 3 million active-duty and civilian
personnel. His spotty professional record includes having been asked to step
down from two nonprofit veterans’ groups whose budgets he reportedly ran into
the ground. Questions about his personal behavior abound: He has been accused
of rape (he reached a civil settlement with his accuser in 2017) and has
a reported habit of excessive drinking,
including while on the job and to the point of incapacitation in public. He
has defended waterboarding and torture, advocated on behalf of alleged war
criminals, and as recently as November he declared, “I’m straight up just saying that we
should not have women in combat roles.” Even Republicans haven’t been able to
find much good to say about him. “If it were a secret ballot,” one moderate
senator told me, “I don’t think he’d be confirmed.”
But the battle for his confirmation
will not be secret; it will be glaringly public, with televised hearings of the
Senate Armed Services Committee scheduled for Tuesday. It is the first serious
test of Donald Trump’s newly invigorated strongman model of governance and of
whether he can continue to bend the Republican Party to his will even as
Hegseth breaks procedural precedents, including skirting a vetting process
designed to protect national security. It is also a window into the influence
that Trump’s heavy, Elon Musk, is exerting across Washington by threatening to
bankroll primary challenges of anyone who defies Trump. And Hegseth’s
nomination is a measure of just how strenuously Democrats are planning to fight
back, at a moment when they are powerless to stop the Republicans in Congress
and are second-guessing past resistance efforts that have been retrospectively
cast as failures. Trump has singled out Hegseth as the figure he
cares most about pushing through, his next administration’s big opening number,
showcasing what he hopes will be his own party’s submission to his whims and
the Democrats’ humiliating impotence in the face of his authority.
The Armed Services Committee is not
one that has historically been the venue for explosive partisan warfare. “The
thing to understand about it,” said one staffer, “is that it’s designed to have
hearings about defense policy, draft the defense bill every year, and is sort
of bipartisan.” But Hegseth is all but certain to cleave the group into
partisan camps. His nomination has put an uncomfortable spotlight on Republican
senators who might be persuaded to vote against his nomination, especially on
Iowa’s Joni Ernst, a staunch Republican who is respected by her Democratic
colleagues for her commitment to the committee’s work.
A survivor of sexual assault and
domestic violence, Ernst has been an ally of Democrat Kirsten Gillibrand,
another committee member, in the ongoing fight to address sexual assault and
harassment in the military. She has worked with Elizabeth Warren, also on the
committee, on a law that directs the Department of Defense to protect
servicemembers from blast overpressure and traumatic brain injury. A combat
veteran whose daughter is a West Point graduate, she has been a fierce advocate
for women in the military. Ernst herself would have been a logical candidate
for Trump’s secretary of Defense. “She probably would have gotten 90 votes,”
one staffer to a senator on the committee speculated, noting that she “would
have been probably far more effective at the job, since she’d actually know how
to do it and people would actually listen to her.”
Instead, Trump has put her in an
excruciating position. A woman who was deployed as a commanding officer in
Kuwait during the Iraq War is caught between holding on to her seat and selling
out her own history of service on behalf of a nominee who has called men “more
capable.” As one senator told me, “Joni Ernst is going to be made to eat the
shit sandwich in public. She is going to be made to vote for somebody who
thinks what she did is dumb or wrong.”
After a first meeting with Hegseth in
December, Ernst suggested that she had not been
persuaded to support him. But a few days later, Hegseth met with her again, as
well as with the Republican Party’s remaining “moderates,” Susan Collins and
Lisa Murkowski, and suddenly began talking about how women are, contrary to his
earlier statements, “some of our greatest warriors.” Ernst, who is up for
reelection in 2026, described their second interview as “encouraging.” In November, a senior Trump
adviser told ABC News that the president’s message to Republican lawmakers was
“If you are on the wrong side of the vote, you’re buying yourself a primary”
and that “there’s a guy named Elon Musk who is going to finance it.” Ernst’s
receptivity to Hegseth came in the same days that Musk visited Capitol Hill
with Vivek Ramaswamy and crowed about keeping “naughty” and “nice”
lists of Republican lawmakers. “The Musk money, that’s real,” said one Senate
aide, describing the bind that Republicans are in.
As a member of Armed Services, a
potential “no” vote from Ernst on the committee would kill the nomination and
leave her uniquely exposed. Ernst could play the game of voting Hegseth out of
committee and then joining a group of others — perhaps including Collins and/or
Murkowski — in voting fruitlessly against him while the rest of their party
secures his confirmation. But it’s unclear what that would win her except ire
from both sides.
Meanwhile, Republicans associated with
the wing of the party led by former Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, a clique
that wants an aggressive military front against Vladimir Putin and has defended
the Pentagon’s purview, may be uncomfortable with Hegseth on ideological
grounds and have butted heads with him in the past. In public remarks in his role as a media personality,
Hegseth has called McConnell “foolish,” referred to Collins and Murkowski as
“part of the captured class,” and even needled the Republican chair of Armed
Services, Mississippi’s Roger Wicker, for wanting to increase the defense
budget. But unless a big enough group of anti-Hegseth Republicans decide to
hold hands and jump together, it’s unlikely that any one of them would stand as
a lone pillar whose “no” vote would doom the nomination.
In the face of these dynamics, the
Democrats, who are expected to vote against Hegseth, have their own tortured
calculations to make. At least one Senate aide cautioned that Democrats on the
committee would do well not to go after Hegseth simply as
unqualified, given the enthusiasm of the American people for outsiders who
could be brought in to clean up bloated and dysfunctional institutions,
including the Pentagon. “There is a case for an outsider to fix a Pentagon that
everyone understands can’t pass an audit,” the aide said. “I think most
Americans are like, ‘How do we spend as much money as this?’” Democrats have
defended institutions and norms against the Trumpian onslaught in a way that
may have been counterproductive for a nation that is fed up with much about
government and the elite class of powerful people who’ve been in charge of it
for so long. “We cannot be the defenders of the status quo at the Pentagon,”
said one Senate aide. “We can’t say, ‘You must give us the same person you’ve always
given us.’ The problem is not that you don’t have this line on your résumé. The
problem is that the thin lines you do have, you were bad at them.”
“I don’t expect any candidate to check
every single box,” said Senator Mark Kelly, retired astronaut and Navy captain
who is on the committee. “But he doesn’t seem to check any boxes.”
Hegseth has so far failed to abide by
procedure when it comes to his nomination. Ordinarily, within a few weeks of
being named, a nominee and his team fill out paperwork: questionnaires about
professional and personal history, meant to cover ethics queries and potential
conflicts of interest. The FBI puts together a file on the candidate, which is
then presented to the chair and ranking member of the committee, and sometimes,
but not always, shared with other committee members. Typically, a nominee meets
first with the committee chair, then the ranking member from the minority
party, then other members of the committee, before moving outward toward other
important senators. Hegseth has done barely any of this.
Senate Armed Service Committee members
have only just been presented with the initial tranche of
questionnaires, and Wicker and the committee’s ranking Democrat, Rhode Island’s
Jack Reed, were only shown the FBI file on Friday night, a scant four days
before the hearing. The delay in the FBI file is particularly disconcerting
given the various allegations of personal and professional misconduct that have
plagued Hegseth’s nomination; what’s more, several of his former colleagues
have told reporters that they were not even contacted
by the FBI, putting in question how thorough the investigation was. Back in
December, even Republicans were emphasizing the importance of the report, with
Senator Thom Tillis telling Politico, “I’ve encouraged all the
nominees, number one, be out front on the FBI background check, and you want
that information shared at least with committee members.”
Though Hegseth held meetings with
Republican senators in November and December, he met with only one Democrat,
Pennsylvania’s John Fetterman, who does not even serve on the committee
responsible for vetting his nomination. Democrats on Armed Services told me
that they had received a request for a meeting from Hegseth’s team in the final
days before the holiday break, and when they responded with multiple suggested
times for the first days of January, they received no response. A week before
the hearing, Hegseth’s team was offering some committee Democrats meeting times
beginning on January 15 — the day after the hearing — and
others opportunities to talk the week of Trump’s inauguration on January 20,
about the time that the full Senate would be asked to vote on his confirmation.
Reed met with Hegseth for the first time on January 9, five days before the
hearing, and afterwards expressed his continued concern about the nominee’s
readiness for the job, noting that the conversation “raised more questions than
it answered.”
Simply ghosting the minority members
of the Armed Services Committee was described to me as “appalling” and
“unprecedented” by members and their staffers, especially since many of them
were having conversations in the same time period with other Trump nominees,
including Doug Burgum, Tulsi Gabbard, Sean Duffy, and Lee Zeldin. “A reminder
that these background checks are not designed to be punitive,” one Senate aide
told me. “They’re to ensure that a nominee can’t be leveraged or blackmailed.
We’re not writing a burn book, we’re advising and consenting.”
“I just want to know if he can do the
job,” said Senator Tammy Duckworth, a committee member and combat veteran who
lost both her legs when her Black Hawk helicopter was shot down over Iraq in
2004. “Maybe he has hidden talents that he’s not telling people about. Maybe
he’s led an organization larger than a 40-man platoon, which is I believe the
largest unit that he’s ever been in charge of. Maybe he has successfully led an
organization with a budget of around $800 billion. I don’t know. From what I’ve
seen, he has led two partisan political groups, veterans’ organizations, both
of which said that he mismanaged their finances, but maybe he’s run a Boeing or
a Northrop Grumman and I just don’t know about it. Because from what I can
tell, the manager of your local Applebee’s has more experience managing a
bigger budget and more personnel than Pete Hegseth. And I don’t want that
person in charge of the DOD.”
Then there’s the question of the rape
allegations, which Hegseth has denied. “Why are we asking anything else about
this guy?” another senator remarked to me. “It’s like if somebody walked in and
said, ‘I’m a child molester,’ we would say, ‘Actually, I’m not even going to
ask to look at your financials. I’m kind of done here.’” His own mother wrote
him an email during his 2017 divorce in which she castigated him for being the
kind of guy who “belittles, lies, cheats, sleeps around and uses women for his
own power and ego.” (She has since recanted and chided the media for having
published her correspondence.)
“We have to try to cover all the
bases,” said Kelly, “because there is a lot there. It’s not only the management
issues. It’s the accusations of sexual assault and the sexual harassment, but
also being significantly intoxicated in front of his employees, the stuff he’s
written about in his books about women in combat, about transgender members of
the military — his tattoos! Why does he have all these tattoos associated with
white supremacist organizations? There’s a lot that I think we’re owed an
explanation on.”
Some Democrats retain the wan hope
that they can persuade a Republican or two to actually defeat Hegseth’s
nomination, and they worry that coming in ablaze will impede those
efforts. Winning, said several staffers from offices less inclined
to light Hegseth up, would mean not leaning in on the rape allegations and
instead creating space to oppose him on grounds that Republicans can also
oppose him on. Instead of giving Fox News the woke-mob martyrdom its audience
craves, they say they can highlight his financial mismanagement and lack of
relevant experience.
Many Democrats are still spooked by
the election results. They saw Trump successfully turn the narrative of the
January 6 riot on its head and feel social and podcast media are dominated by
the right. These Democrats have concluded that their messaging is simply not
getting through to voters, and that it’s best to let Republicans fight amongst
themselves and allow the American people to see exactly what their rule has
wrought. “I don’t think there’s any winning in being the first to be offended,”
one aide told me. “Republicans have control of everything; they have to own it.
It’s not about playing nice institutionally. It’s about picking our spots.
Republicans own the media landscape. They can make every good intention sound
bad.” A different aide to a different senator put it this way: “There’s a real
concern that the more we yell about how they’re breaking things, the less
people hear it. So there is definitely a strategy to make these Republicans
solely responsible.”
But, they went on, “not at the risk of
not making people aware of what they’re doing. We need to be able to do both, I
just don’t think we’ve figured out how yet.” As another aide argued to me, “I
think you have to go all in. Because if we’re not going to
make the case for what Republicans are willing to vote for, and how far they
will go for Trump, who else will? The case against Hegseth in particular is so
clear.” And yet another staffer told me, “The only thing we can do is make it
really uncomfortable for Republicans to vote for someone who is this
unqualified.”
Some committee members are already
going hard: Mazie Hirono has said that she hasn’t even tried to meet with
Hegseth, since she only wants to hear from Trump’s nominees in public, on the
record. The week before the hearing, Warren released a 33-page letter to Hegseth that concludes, in part,
“I am deeply concerned by the many ways in which your behavior and rhetoric
indicates that you are unfit to lead the Department of Defense. One Republican
operative described you as ‘perhaps one of the least qualified picks for
Secretary of Defense that we’ve seen.’” And as Democrats planned to gather for
a strategy session on Monday night, committee aides said they would not be
surprised if senators who are not known for their combativeness, including
Kelly and the newly elected Elissa Slotkin, a former CIA analyst who did three
tours in Iraq, get tough on Hegseth.
But everyone is aware that this is not
2017 anymore, when many Democrats — including senators on the Armed Services
Committee — put up fireworks displays of resistance to Trump’s nominees. And
Hegseth is an exceptionally well-trained media personality who is genuinely
good on television, which will give him an edge on Tuesday. (Staffers from
multiple Senate offices told me that he should have been named the Pentagon’s
press secretary, not its leader.)
So much of the strategizing on the
part of the right and the left comes down to how you understand what happened
in November. Much of the Democratic self-analysis has entailed the absorption
of the most defeatist narrative: that they got wiped out, that Trump and MAGA
are wildly popular and aligned with what Americans really want, that they have
no control over anything.
But in fact, half the electorate voted
for a candidate who’d been on the ballot for less than four months, and for
progressive policy initiatives on reproductive health care, minimum wage, and
paid sick leave. Instead of acting like they have the advantage on multiple
issues and lost a very narrow popular vote in an era of anti-incumbent fervor
with a doddering and unpopular president in the White House, many Democrats
have spent the postelection period cowering, which threatens to turn their
helplessness into a self-fulfilling prophecy. Recall that when Trump won the
White House but got walloped in the popular vote in 2016, he still cast his
victory as a massive historic win. Trump understands the possibility of
cementing power by performing power. And the Hegseth nomination — so weak on
the merits, so vulnerable to so many lines of attack — is shaping up to be one
of his boldest performances yet, an exercise in domination not only of his
party and the opposition, but the government itself.
