Trump’s Defense Secretary loves taking selfies while presiding over administrative anarchy.
Pete Hegseth, the Defense Secretary, loves posting pictures of himself—and you can hardly blame him. Ahead of the NATO meeting in February, Hegseth seeded social media with photos showing him working out with Marines stationed in Europe, lifting weights and going for a jog. His chiselled visage and athletic build aren’t just an asset but arguably his sole selling point. Hegseth keeps getting hired for his looks, which was not so surprising in his previous post as a Fox News host. Being photogenic goes with the job if you are appearing on television.
On the other hand Hegseth’s current position as Defense Secretary is usually not a job where the chief qualification is being visually striking. But Hegseth was chosen for his job by an unusual president. Prior to becoming commander-in-chief, Donald Trump’s greatest claim to fame was being a reality TV star on The Apprentice, where he pretended to make decisions on hiring and firing. As president, Trump has taken a media approach to the same questions. His favorite praise for his own presidential nominees is that they are straight from “central casting.” Aside from Hegseth, Trump has elevated at least 18 Fox news personalities to high level administrative posts.
If Hegseth didn’t fit the Trumpian ideal of a physically appealing man, he might well be unemployable. His nomination was contentious, clearing the Senate only by the grace of Vice President JD Vance casting a tie-breaking vote. Even Republican senators blanched at his sordid personal history, which included a record of heavy drinking, close family members such as his mother and sister-in-law characterizing him as a misogynist, and a $50,000 financial settlement for an rape allegation. Nor was his management experience anywhere near what was required for running the Pentagon—a complex bureaucracy that employs more than 3 million people.
As The New Yorker reported in December, “Hegseth was forced to step down by both of the two nonprofit advocacy groups that he ran—Veterans for Freedom and Concerned Veterans for America—in the face of serious allegations of financial mismanagement, sexual impropriety, and personal misconduct.” Veterans for Freedom employed fewer than 20 people and Concerned Veterans for America roughly 160. If Hegseth made a hash of those organizations, what could be expected when he was in charge of the world’s largest military?
Not surprisingly, Hegseth has brought to the Pentagon the same disorder and disarray that has characterized his entire messed-up and messy life. Part of this mayhem is ideological: as I’ve noted in a previous column, Trump is turning the military into a MAGA institution, using troops to quell domestic protests and giving political speeches where soldiers serve as stage props. Hegseth has been very much part of this dangerous politicization of the military, working to purge the military of trans soldiers as well removing as any positive tributes to civil rights pioneers such as Jackie Robinson and Harvey Milk. Hegseth backed down from deleting Robinson from a Defense Department website after protests, but his general crusade to create a right-wing military continues.
But MAGA isn’t just about ideology. Trump’s chaotic management style is very much a logical outgrowth of his strongman politics, where the whim of the leader counts more than coherent policy.
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In April, John Ullyot, a Trump supporter who had both served as communication director in his 2016 campaign and as a chief Pentagon spokesman during Trump’s first term, warned in Politico of “total chaos” in the Pentagon. Ullyot’s rebuke was echoed in a New York Times report that Hegseth had “produced a run of chaos that is unmatched in the recent history of the Defense Department.” In the wake of these reports, Don Bacon, a Nebraska Republican serving on the House Armed Serviced committee, suggested that Hegseth should resign, saying, “It looks like there’s a meltdown going on.”
The best account we have of the mess in the Pentagon is a deeply reported profile of Hegseth in New York magazine written by Kerry Howley. The profile focuses on a witch-hunt against leakers that came in the wake of bad press coverage, particularly stories focusing on two cases where Hegseth shared sensitive government information on Signal. As a result of the ensuing negative press coverage, Hegseth became increasingly paranoid, with his chief of staff Joe Kasper, a wildly unqualified loyalist, spreading rumours about perceived foes. At one point, Hegseth threatened Admiral Christopher Grady, vice chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, “I’ll hook you up to a fucking polygraph!”
One regrettable outcome of this tumult was the firing of key advisors around Hegseth who had genuine administrative experience, including chief of staff to the deputy secretary of Defense Colin Carroll, senior adviser Dan Caldwell, and deputy chief of staff Darin Selnick. These were much needed voices of prudence. Caldwell’s firing was especially regrettable because he was a leading advocate for a more restrained foreign policy.
This purge was accompanied by Hegseth surrounding himself with an inner circle of loyalists and family members, including his personal lawyer Tim Parlatore, his brother Phil Hegseth, and his wife Jennifer Hegseth. These loyalists now work with Hegseth in the Pentagon. He is especially devoted to his wife, keeping seven photos of her in his office. He says he owes everything to the two “J’s”: Jesus and Jennifer.
Howley provides a vivid picture of the turmoil in the Defense Department:
Sources in the Pentagon during these months describe a sustained sense of instability. People quit or were fired and the roles went unfilled….
Hegseth was different after Signalgate, according to six people in a position to know. He was more prone to anger and less likely to be clean-shaven in the morning. He seemed reluctant to make decisions; scared of doing the wrong thing, paralyzed as he awaited orders from the White House. The Pentagon had ceased, one source says, to be “creative”; it was a mechanism for implementing executive orders. Each new leak contributed to Hegseth’s sense that he was surrounded by moles in league with his enemies.
This level of Pentagon chaos would be troubling enough even under normal peacetime conditions (as rare as those are in modern American history). But they are even more worrying since Donald Trump has betrayed his promise to avoid wars. In his second term, Trump has instead seemed eager to deploy troops at home and abroad, in the streets of Los Angeles as well as over the skies of Iran. The minority of voices advocating for restraint in Trump’s administration have either been purged (as happened to Caldwell) or effectively silenced (as seems to be the case with Vice President JD Vance and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard).
This would be a good time for Congress to investigate Hegseth’s Pentagon and push for his resignation. While some in congress such as Don Bacon are gesturing in that direction, the regrettable fact is the new bipartisan trend is to attack Hegseth on the absurd grounds that he is not militarist enough. In a reprise of the Russiagate follies of Trump’s first term, congressional Democrats and Republicans are uniting to upbraid Hegeth for halting an arms shipment to Ukraine. Whatever the policy merits of this question, it’s a minor matter compared to the Defense Secretary’s politicization of the Pentagon and chaotic management style. Here, as elsewhere, the bipartisan establishment keeps failing to hold Trump’s White House accountable.
