A telling second within the supremely miserable Senate affirmation listening to for Pete Hegseth, the Fox Information persona who’s Donald Trump’s choose for protection secretary, got here proper originally, when the previous Republican senator Norm Coleman launched him.
“4 years in the past, President Biden’s nominee, Lloyd Austin, and honorable man, acquired 97 votes on the ground of the Senate,” mentioned Coleman, “and we went by means of the debacle of the Afghanistan withdrawal, Putin invaded Ukraine, the Houthis endangered our delivery lanes” and America was insufficiently supportive of Israel. The implication appeared to be that, since good and honorable had failed, it was time to attempt one thing else.
Hegseth is one thing else. As has been extensively reported, in 2020 he paid off a woman who filed a police report accusing him of sexual assault. (He insists they’d consensual intercourse.) As Jane Mayer reported in The New Yorker, Hegseth “was compelled to step down by each of the 2 nonprofit advocacy teams that he ran — Veterans for Freedom and Involved Veterans for America — within the face of great allegations of monetary mismanagement, sexual impropriety and private misconduct.” His personal mom wrote, in an e-mail obtained by The New York Instances, that he “belittles, lies, cheats, sleeps round and makes use of girls for his personal energy and ego.” (She has since disavowed that message.)
However that is Trump’s America; abusing and degrading girls is clearly not disqualifying for prime workplace. As Democratic Senate aides told New York journal’s Rebecca Traister, success within the hearings “would imply not leaning in on the rape allegations and as an alternative creating area to oppose him on grounds that Republicans may oppose him on.” A lot of the listening to on Tuesday appeared to contain a seek for these grounds, but it surely’s not clear they exist.
A number of Democrats targeted on Hegseth’s insulting feedback about feminine troops, maybe hoping they may attain Joni Ernst, an Iowa Republican who’s a veteran and an advocate for girls within the army. (“We’d like mothers,” Hegseth wrote in one of his books. “However not within the army, particularly in fight models.”)
Tammy Duckworth, a Democrat from Illinois and a veteran of the Iraq warfare, nailed him on his sheer ignorance of American protection coverage. At one level, she requested him to call one of many international locations in ASEAN, the Affiliation of Southeast Asian Nations, and to explain our safety preparations with them. He couldn’t do it, as an alternative sputtering about Japan, South Korea and Australia, three international locations that aren’t in ASEAN. Mark Kelly of Arizona, a former astronaut and Navy veteran, grilled him on the various reviews about him being drunk on the job. Gary Peters of Michigan established that Hegseth has by no means led a company of greater than a few hundred individuals; the Pentagon employs nearly three million.
Any one in all these items ought to derail this preposterous nomination. I doubt any of them will.
The listening to was over in about 4 hours; Democrats’ requests for a second spherical of questioning had been denied. They’d simply scratched the floor of Hegseth’s report, however Republicans had heard sufficient.