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November 29th , 2024 Len’s Political Note #687 Oppose Pete Hegseth, Secretary of Defense
2025 Trump Cabinet
The Senate should:
Donald Trump has been early in his nominations for his Cabinet and the nominees have been awful. One of them has been stopped already. Matt Gaetz withdrew eight days after his nomination.
Ordinarily, I write notes about Democratic candidates you should give money to. By making such early nominations, Donald Trump has given us the opportunity to oppose those who should be opposed. We need to take advantage of the opportunity. Trump is rejecting the ordinary transition process. He refused to submit a legally required ethics plan. He has refused to sign a legally required ethics pledge to avoid conflicts of interest.
Consistent with these Trumpian behaviors that have prevented proper transition planning, his nominees for Cabinet and other positions that require Senate approval are not being vetted by the FBI. Without the FBI, with the time Trump has given us all by his early nominations, we have to do what the FBI is not being allowed to do – ferret out information about these candidates and publicize that information.
If I were running the DNC, I would be advertising nationally about the inadequacies of the Trump nominees. I am not running the DNC, so I am writing to all of you. Republican Senators are already saying, in effect, once is enough. They are not interested in rejecting another nominee. You do not have to accept that rejection.
You can write letters to your Senators. You can give money to organizations associated with a Cabinet Office area of responsibility. You can thank the four Senators who announced they would oppose Gaetz. Thank Lisa Murkowski of Alaska. Thank Susan Collins of Maine. Thank Mitch McConnell of Kentucky. And thank incoming Utah Senator John Curtis. If, after reading this piece, you think Pete Hegseth should not be Secretary of Defense, while thanking these Senators, you can urge them to oppose Hegseth’s nomination and tell them why.
Pete Hegseth is a 44 year old commentator for Fox News. He has been the weekend co-host of Fox & Friends. Before he took that role in 2017, he was Executive Director of Vets for Freedom and Concerned Veterans for America.
Pete Hegseth was born in Minneapolis. His dad, now a high school activities director (athletic director plus) was a basketball coach. In high school, Pete Hegseth played football and basketball and was the valedictorian for the Class of 1999. He went to Princeton where he played basketball well enough to be part of a team that went to the NCAA tournament. In college, he was active in Republican and conservative groups and wrote for the Princeton Tory magazine.
After graduating, Hegseth joined the Minnesota National Guard and also went to work for Bear Stearns as an analyst. In 2004, his unit was called up to serve at Guantanamo Bay. After returning from Cuba, he volunteered to serve in Iraq. He was an infantry platoon leader and then a civil-military operations officer (that is, he worked with the Iraqis to gain support from, to minimize opposition from the locals).
When Hegseth returned to the States, he went to work for the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank. He stayed there until 2007 when he became Executive Director of Vets for Freedom. In that role until 2012, he was an advocate for increasing the size of the American military in Iraq and Afghanistan. Never once did he notice that the war against Iraq was a product of American lies about Iraq developing weapons of mass destruction.
In 2012, before he returned to active duty as a Captain and an instructor at the Kabul Counterinsurgency Training Center, he tried briefly to run for the US Senate in Minnesota.
He spent a year founding a PAC in Minnesota, raising only $15,000 and spending $5,000 on events (call them parties). He left for Cambridge, Massachusetts where he earned a Master of Public Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School.
After Harvard, after leaving the military, he became the Executive Director of the Koch Funded Concerned Veterans for America which advocates for greater privatization of veteran services. In that role, perhaps to get assistance he trusted, he hired his brother as a media officer.
Hegseth began doing some work for Fox News in 2014. He became a host in 2018. In between, he had some choices to make about which horse to ride in 2016. First he chose Rubio. Then he chose Cruz. Finally, when it became clear who the nominee would be, Hegseth became a Trump supporter. Has been ever since.
Fair enough. If we are going to have a Republican President, we can expect Republican Cabinet officers, even if they are a little young, possibly a little venal, and not experienced in running large organizations.
But…. Hegseth has some more history. A New York Times story begins by explaining that in 2006, he was clear. Soldiers who had shot civilians, executed prisoners, and covered it up had committed atrocities. He is no longer so clear. In 2019, Hegseth advised Donald Trump to pardon service members convicted or about to stand trial for killing a girl and an elderly man after shooting indiscriminately at a group of civilians, and another who stabbed and killed an ISIS teenager who was receiving medical treatment. Hegseth’s change of heart and support for pardoning veterans for war crimes is not disqualifying to Trump. After all, Trump agreed to the pardon.
What might be disqualifying to Trump is Hegseth’s failure to disclose a sexual assault charge by a staffer from a conservative group and a payment which Hegseth apparently made to her to get the charge to go away. Hegseth denies guilt, says he made the payment because just the charge would have gotten him fired from Fox. Whether the charge and payment is disqualifying to Trump is hard to know. Failure to disclose the charge and the payment to Trump, on the other hand, is violating a pretty serious Trump expectation of disclosure to him.
Hegseth’s politics are divisive enough to be disqualifying as well. Before the 2020 election, he foresaw a national civil war if Democrats won. Police and military would have to choose the side they would be on in the civil war. He saw Democrats and leftists as enemies of America. For Hegseth, a victory in that civil war would end Islamism, to him a false religion, secularism, environmentalism, and (whatever he might mean by it) genderism. Though he calls Putin a war criminal, he says Putin’s crimes pale in comparison to the crimes of “wokeness.”
Internationally, he sees favorites and enemies. Israel, he says, is “God’s chosen people.” He sees construction of a third Temple on the Temple Mount as doable and opposes a two-state solution. Hegseth has called Iran’s government an “evil regime” and has urged Trump to bomb that country. He is similarly warlike toward China which, he says, has organized its military to defeat the United States.
Within our own military, Hegseth is opposed to diversity and any effort to achieve it. He is opposed to efforts to root out extremism in the military. Finally, well probably not finally, he is opposed to women in combat roles. I invite hm to tell that to Captain Lacie Hester who was recently awarded the first Silver Star to a woman airman for shooting down 80 drones in the Iranian attack on Israel.
Interestingly, Pete Hegseth expresses himself through his tattoos. He has a Jerusalem cross tattooed on his chest and the Latin phrase Deus Vuit (God Wills it) on a bicep. Both the cross and the phrase were hallmarks of the Crusades and are seen as marks of current Christian nationalism. Having returned to the National Guard, he suggests his 2020 resignation from the military was a result of his being barred from duty guarding President Biden for his inauguration, describing his treatment as being anti-Christian. Those who argued for his being barred suggested they were signs that he was an Insider Threat. If he is confirmed as Secretary of Defense, we will get to see whether his resentment and his vision of the United States as a Christian nation affects the character of the military.
Others who address the issue of character point to Hegseth’s marriages. He is now married to his third wife, a Fox Executive producer with whom he had a child while still married to his second wife.
If you are opposed to Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense, do something. Write to the Senators I suggested above. Write as well to Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island. He will be the ranking Senator. On the Armed Services Committee. If there is serious opposition in the Senate to the Hegseth appointment, he will lead it. Write as well to your local newspaper and larger regional and national newspapers telling their readers what you think. Finally, you can also donate to progressive veterans organizations. DONATE to Common Defense. DONATE to Vote Vets. Ask them to oppose Pete Hegseth’s appointment.
There’s a plan.
