Even before [Hegseth] disclosed secret battle plans for Yemen in a group chat, information that could have endangered American fighter pilots, it had been a rocky two months for Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.Maybe Hegseth was jumping the gun a bit, but it's hard to see why any of this would have displeased Trump.
Mr. Hegseth, a former National Guard infantryman and Fox News weekend host, started his job at the Pentagon determined to out-Trump President Trump, Defense Department officials and aides said.
The president is skeptical about the value of NATO and European alliances, so the Pentagon under Mr. Hegseth considered plans in which the United States would give up its command role overseeing NATO troops. After Mr. Trump issued executive orders targeting transgender people, Mr. Hegseth ordered a ban on transgender troops.
Mr. Trump has embraced Elon Musk, the billionaire chief executive of SpaceX and Tesla. The Pentagon planned a sensitive briefing to give Mr. Musk a firsthand look at how the military would fight a war with China, a potentially valuable step for any businessman with interests there....Trump seemed to think this was a bad idea, or maybe he was just embarrassed that the story leaked, but he didn't seem particularly angry.
The president made clear last Friday that he had been caught by surprise by a report in The New York Times on the Pentagon’s briefing for Mr. Musk, who oversees an effort to shrink the government, but also denied that the meeting had been planned.
“I don’t want to show that to anybody, but certainly you wouldn’t show it to a businessman who is helping us so much,” Mr. Trump said.
Remember, Hegseth doesn't have to do a good job. He just has to do a good job by Trump's standards. Even after the China story broke, it didn't seem as if Trump was displeased with Hegseth.
But then another story appeared at CNN, under the headline "Concerns About Hegseth’s Judgment Come Roaring Back After Group Chat Scandal."
Interviews with multiple current and former national security officials this week, including career military and civilian officials, reflect growing concerns about Hegseth’s leadership at the Pentagon....This again?
So far, several high-profile initiatives spearheaded by Hegseth inside DoD since he was confirmed in January— including several related to the southern border mission and a purge of “DEI” content—have either been scaled back or rescinded as he has rushed to implement changes demanded by President Donald Trump and Elon Musk.
The current and former officials said the rocky start underscores both Hegseth’s inexperience and his freewheeling approach to leadership. Many of his orders are verbal and based on gut instinct rather than a deliberative, multi-layered process, people familiar with his methods said.He does things based on gut instinct rather than deliberation? He doesn't do things the way they were done by Lloyd Austin, a black man appointed by Joe Biden? And that's supposed to be bad in Trump's eyes?
“He’s a TV personality,” one of the sources said. “[A general officer] makes a recommendation, and he’s like, ‘Yeah, yeah, go do it.’ [Former Defense Secretary] Lloyd Austin would never be like, ‘Yeah, yeah, go do it.’ He’d be like, ‘We’ll take it under consideration.’”
What we're supposed to take away from this story is that Hegseth is on thin ice. What I took away from the story is that "current and former national security officials" want Hegseth to be on thin ice.
Then yesterday we had this Wall Street Journal story (free to read here):
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who is facing scrutiny over his handling of details of a military strike, brought his wife, a former Fox News producer, to two meetings with foreign military counterparts where sensitive information was discussed, according to multiple people who were present or had knowledge of the discussions.And also this AP story:
One of the meetings, a high-level discussion at the Pentagon on March 6 between Hegseth and U.K. Secretary of Defense John Healey, took place at a sensitive moment for the trans-Atlantic alliance, one day after the U.S. said it had cut off military intelligence sharing with Ukraine. The group that met at the Pentagon....
Hegseth’s wife, Jennifer Hegseth, isn’t a Defense Department employee, defense officials said....
Jennifer Hegseth also attended a meeting last month at North Atlantic Treaty Organization headquarters in Brussels where allied defense officials discussed their support for Ukraine, according to two people who attended the meeting.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s younger brother is serving in a key position inside the Pentagon as a Department of Homeland Security liaison and senior adviser, Hegseth’s office confirmed.Hegseth's haters are clearly calling reporters (or maybe messaging them on Signal) and unloading a lot of grievances. I don't think it will work, at least for now, because Hegseth's presence takes Trump back to his happy place (sitting in front of a TV tuned to Fox News), and because Trump is determined not to admit any error in Signalgate (or Whiskeyleaks or whatever we're calling it), because he's following the Roy Cohn "Never apologize, never explain, go on offense" strategy that, unfortunately for us, has worked for him all his life.
The high-profile job has meant meetings with a UFC fighting champion, a trip to Guantanamo Bay and, right now, traveling on the Pentagon’s 747 aircraft as Hegseth makes his first trip as defense secretary to the Indo-Pacific.
But this tells me that the Trump/Project 2025 strategy of replacing as many people as possible with loyalist ideologues still leaves quite a few government employees who are willing to stab key Trump subordinates in the back, in some cases because their loyalty to Trump doesn't mean they're loyal to one another, and in other cases because the employees aren't loyalists -- apparently you can't purge every non-MAGA person in the federal government. Which means that there's a possibility that the Trump administration can be seriously weakened by infighting, if not now, then sooner or later.
So keep on backstabbing, folks. Eventually you might score some important kills.
