Pete Hegseth Is Self-Destructing at Lightning Speed
A new Signal scandal. Personnel nightmares. A torrent of leaks and condemnations. It’s almost as if he was a terrible choice for this gig.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth attends the White House Easter Egg Roll on Monday, April 21, 2025.
(Tom Williams / CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)Pete Hegseth, we knew ye too well. The Trump administration’s secretary of defense endured a bruising Senate confirmation, including reports of a police investigation for sexual assault and communications from his own mother impugning his character. But Hegseth, like many other brazenly unqualified Trump cabinet nominees, weathered the storm, and seemed to be on course to be a prime exemplar of the Trump leadership model: Shout down and dismiss assault charges after paying off your accuser; run businesses into the ground; position yourself as a martyr to a faithless political establishment and a biased pack of press jackals, despite being deeply networked in both worlds; and be rewarded with huge power and privilege. Lather, rinse, repeat—and in Hegseth’s case, order up another round.
Hegseth withstood his confirmation barrage thanks in no small part to the calendar: Trump named him to run the Pentagon just after he was forced to scuttle his truly deranged nomination of Matt Gaetz as attorney general. Rapidly tossing Hegseth aside would have meant that Trump’s long-mythologized executive savvy would be exposed for the media-confected lie it has always been; what’s more, Trump likes to see his apparatchiks pantomime a good fight, which is arguably the only leadership skill Hegseth possesses (so long, that is, as said pantomiming doesn’t involve actual axe-throwing.)
But that was long ago—all the way back in January. Now Hegesth is once more sputtering toward professional oblivion, and reports indicate that the White House may be scouting out his potential replacement. (The White House is denying that it’s doing any such thing—at least for now.)
The proximate cause of this new Hegseth death watch is a New York Times report that, after participating in the notorious Signal chat that wound up dropping key operational details of a lethal Houthi bombing attack into the smartphone of The Atlantic’s editor, Jeffrey Goldberg, Hegseth promptly adjourned to share the same sensitive data on a second Signal chat that included his brother and his wife, a former Fox News producer. (Earlier this month, The Wall Street Journal had also reported that Hegseth had brought his wife along to two meetings with foreign military counterparts that again involved the exchange of sensitive military information.)
That’s damning—and stupefying—enough. But Hegseth’s shaky hold on his core job responsibilities was giving way well before this latest revelation. In an essay for Politico, Hegseth’s former—yes, that’s former as in “didn’t even last 100 days”—communications director, John Ullyot, described a full-blown meltdown in the Pentagon’s senior leadership, and forecast greater squalor ahead.
Last week culminated in a Friday night massacre at the DOD, with Hegseth cashiering his most loyal coterie of aides, senior adviser Dan Caldwell, deputy chief of staff Darin Selnick, and Colin Carroll, the deputy secretary of Defense’s chief of staff. The trio was then subjected to anonymous smears from other Pentagon sources claiming they were responsible for a battery of damaging leaks. The leaks concerned an unhinged scheme to arrange a DOD briefing for Elon Musk, who has massive business interests in China, on the military status quo there; plans to suspend intelligence gathering in Ukraine; to deploy a second aircraft carrier to the Red Sea; and to game out a potential military offensive in the Panama Canal. (As with the original Signalgate scandal, where the attack in question claimed the lives of more than 50 Houthi civilians, the Beltway furor over the procedural conduct of the leaks has crowded out the truly demented abuses of power at the heart of them.)
It’s never a good sign in the scrum for DC power when your communications director abruptly bails out amid a torrent of scandals—and it’s a far worse sign when he goes public with predictions of worse revelations to come. After recounting all the leaks and clumsy internal retribution campaigns now whipsawing the Pentagon, Ullyot warned, “There are very likely more shoes to drop in short order, with even bigger bombshell stories coming this week, key Pentagon reporters have been telling sources privately.” In Hegseth’s case, it’s difficult to picture what worse bombshells could be in the offing. Will his wife be captaining a Bay of Pigs–style raid on Greenland or Canada? Will he give Mark Zuckerberg his own airbase in the Philippines? Did he set more Houthi bombing plans to music on a TikTok video? Will he scrub Jackie Robinson’s military service from DOoD websites, and a slew of anodyne historical works from Pentagon-run archives and libraries? (Oh, wait—that actually happened already.)
It could well be that Hegseth somehow emerges from the roaring din of self-inflicted fiascos with his job intact. After all, the Pentagon has shielded all sorts of incompetent scoundrels, from Robert McNamara to Caspar Weinberger to Donald Rumsfeld, from the deadly consequences of their misconduct and incompetence; the morally pliable mandate of managing the freebooting national security state both conceals and stokes a multitude of sins. What’s more, if Hegseth’s head rolls, it could set an unlovely precedent for an administration overstuffed with unqualified and on-the-make former Fox News personalities. If a soulless and predatory hack like Pete Hegseth isn’t safe, whither dipshit “counterterrorism czar” Sebastian Gorka or vengeance-minded Deputy FBI Director Dan Bongino?
It was largely Hegseth’s swerve into full-impunity, never-apologize mode that won him Trump’s loyalty during his confirmation fight, and that could well carry him through the professional trials ahead. Just ask Brett Kavanaugh, Pete Navarro, Steve Bannon, Paul Manafort, Roger Stone, or 1,500-plus January 6 felons.
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