Pete Hegseth, Belligerent Drunk, May Be Too Much Even for Trump

The rogues’ gallery tabloid drama about Trump’s upcoming Cabinet appointments continues: It’s been just over a week since Matt Gaetz slid down the aisle from attorney general to Cameo hustlerPete Hagsett, Trump’s pick to head the Department of Defense, could be next in the line of fun games.

Hagseth, a Fox News anchor, was one of Trump’s first nominees for the president-elect’s cabinet. He quickly lost his positions at two veterans’ nonprofits amid allegations of financial abuse, excessive drinking and sexual misconduct. investigation into The New YorkerJane Mayer. From that inauspicious start in the world of military advocacy, he landed his gig at Fox, where he just as quickly took over by working out a settlement and a non-disclosure agreement from a woman who claimed he sexually assaulted her at a right-wing conference in California, where Hegseth was the keynote speaker. The report to the police about the incident makes for invigorating reading.

Appellant describes waking up in Hegsett’s hotel room, whom she did not recognize, in a disoriented state, suspecting that she had been drugged; she also recalls repeatedly saying no when Hegseth reportedly approached her for sex, and requested a rape test after the encounter. Hegseth denies the account and says the sex was consensual; his attorney says he reached the financial settlement solely to protect his Fox gig. Still, Hegseth manages to stand out, even in Trumpland, as the only Cabinet nominee condemned as a “woman abuser” to his mother.

The Trump White House was reportedly surprised by the assault allegations, but continued to promote Hegsett’s nomination and sent him to meet with senators on Capitol Hill to prepare for his confirmation hearing. After all, the president-elect is a self-confessed and court-certified sex offender, and apparently expects future members of his cabinet to bluff their way through these scandals like he did.

Which apparently prompted Hegseth’s nomination to Goetz territory an NBC report documenting a pattern of excessive drinking on the job at Fox is probably a far more glaring red flag for Trump, a lifelong non-drinker, than reports of violent sexual predation. Fox employees spoke of Hegseth arriving minutes before his morning show aired, while others described having to “babysit” Hegseth, who is in a frenzy. One former Fox employee said, “We had to call him to make sure he hadn’t overslept because we knew he was going to be partying the night before”; another said flatly: “He shouldn’t be defense minister. His drinking should be a disqualification.”

That the latest damning leaks emanate from the depths of Fox’s sanctum is another major blow against Hegsett’s nomination: Trump’s executive picks mirror in no small part the president-elect’s own TV viewing tastes, with figures like Tulsi Gabbard, Vivek Ramaswamy, and Mehmet Oz records many hits by experts on the right-wing two-minute hate system. The official tally of former Fox News personalities appointed to serve in the second Trump administration is now complete 12. Hegseth is revealed as a belligerent drunk and non-professional on Fox is probably a bridge too far for Trump.

Amidst the blizzard of scandals currently surrounding Hegsett, it’s easy to overlook his glaring lack of qualifications to lead America’s armed forces. Like my colleague By Joan Walsh,

There is nothing to recommend Hegseth accept the job, directing the nation’s military strategy and armaments and overseeing 2.1 service members and more than a million civilian employers and contractors. (Hagsett even oversees his Fox producers? One or two?) Trump has his pick of qualified people, including talented if loathsome conservatives. Hegseth is not one of them.

In 1989, the Senate rejected George W. Bush’s nominee for Pentagon chief, John Tower, amid reports of rampant drinking, but Tower was at least a former senator who led the investigation into the Iran-Contra scandal and negotiated arms reductions. with the Soviet Union. Hegseth, on the other hand, dedicated his bully pulpit to Fox pardoning American war criminals and calls for the illegal mobilization of US armed forces suppress internal protests.

Early indications are that, if Trump ultimately worsens Hegsett’s prospects, he click Florida Governor Ron DeSantis for the post of Minister of Defense. DeSantis is a Navy veteran and former US congressman, and is likely to be an easily confirmed and relatively clean candidate. But just as Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi emerged after the Goetz fiasco as a more superficially palatable version of the same brand of sycophancy and uncritical Trump loyalist, DeSantis would offer the Trump White House a softer, creepier gloss on Hegsett’s pet obsession.

Like Hegseth, DeSantis is an ardent foe of the Pentagon allegedly lost consciousnessoffering attacks on the Department of Defense’s gender-responsive personnel policies and promising to reverse climate mitigation policies across the broader defense sector. “The time has come to demobilize the military and return it to its core mission,” he wrote. And disturbingly, DeSantis shared a memo with Hegsett downplaying military abuses of power; As a JAG attorney involved in the illegal detention of non-combatant prisoners during the US war on terror at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, DeSantis created a “mirage of accountability” as prisoners were grotesquely mistreated, wrote Jasper Craven in 2023 revelation Baffler. Former Guantanamo detainee Mansour Adaifi told Craven how, when he helped organize a hunger strike to protest conditions at the base and was force-fed five times a day, Desantis openly mocked him:

We cried, screamed. We were strapped to a feeding chair. And (Desantis) was looking at it, he was laughing,” Adaifi recalled. During one session, Adaifi said, DeSantis approached a chair and told him, “You have to start eating.” He responded by throwing up at the young JAG’s pretty face.

In a group text chat that Odaifi organized among former inmates, one recalled that DeSantis was “with a group of the most vile officers who tortured us brutally”; another dubbed it “real devil shit!!”

Those allegations don’t pose much of a problem for DeSantis’ nomination; A major sticking point in initial negotiations to trade DeSantis for Hegsett is reportedly whether Florida Gov. to appoint Lara Trumpthe president-elect’s daughter-in-law and recognized RNC lackey to fill Marco Rubio’s Senate term if he is confirmed as Trump’s secretary of state. After all, in today’s GOP, the standard career trajectory is to go from “real evil devil shit” to standard MAGA shit eating. And that’s the area where Ron DeSantis a battle-tested professional.