Hegseth is terrible at every part of his job except the one that matters to Trump—a willingness to break with norms that keep the military in check.
This article appears in full at The Nation
For a dead man walking, Pete Hegseth sure seems healthy. Any one of the several scandals he’s weathered recently would have instantly ended the career of a lesser man, but this avatar of masculinity whose fighting spirit so perfectly embodies our “pre-woke” military—the one he wrote about in his best-selling book, the one he never shuts up about—simply cannot die. Hegseth’s penchant for sharing classified information on Signal, his use of an unsecured office phone line and compromised personal devices, and his repeated celebration of Take Your Wife to Sensitive Meetings With Foreign Officials Day add up to more than just a bad look. These things, along with his purges of women and people of color from the top brass, the marginalization and/or termination of his principal advisers, and his increasingly paranoid and erratic leadership style, are actively hollowing out the Pentagon’s ability to perform its basic administrative functions. In the case of geopolitical catastrophe (say, war between India and Pakistan), the question isn’t whether America will respond in a helpful or harmful way, but whether America can mount a coherent response at all.
Hegseth is a liability in every possible sense. So why is he still here? The leading explanation—that Trump doesn’t want to appear acquiescent to liberal demands—carried a lot more weight before the administration canned national security adviser and fellow Signal enthusiast Mike Waltz. Some think this is the first of many Signal-related firings and that Hegseth will be next. Personally, I doubt it. Trump clearly did not pick Hegseth for his leadership skills, or his experience, or his ability to keep track of classified information. Trump picked Hegseth because both men believe the military is a threat to the regime’s authoritarian ambitions and must be neutralized, purged, and remade in Trump’s own image.
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