The Fox Information pundit—an alleged sexual assaulter with a ingesting downside—has moved into Matt Gaetz territory.
Pete Hegseth hosts Fox Information Channel’s Fox & Pals All-American Summer time Live performance Sequence exterior Fox Information Channel Studios on Might 31, 2019, in New York Metropolis.
(Slaven Vlasic / Getty Pictures)
The tabloid drama within the rogues’ gallery of potential Trump cupboard appointments continues: Simply over every week since Matt Gaetz’s wild downward experience from attorney-general designate to Cameo hustler, Pete Hegseth, Trump’s choose to guide the Division of Protection, could also be subsequent down the funhouse slide.
Hegseth, a Fox Information host, was considered one of Trump’s first “shock and awe” nominees to the president-elect’s incoming cupboard. He had shortly forfeited posts atop two veterans’ nonprofit teams amid prices of economic mismanagement, extreme ingesting, and sexual misconduct, in response to an investigation by The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer. From that inauspicious begin within the navy advocacy world, he landed his Fox gig, the place he simply as quickly took up the identical conduct, engineering a payoff and a nondisclosure settlement from a lady who alleged he sexually assaulted her at a right-wing convention in California the place Hegseth was a featured speaker. The police complaint over the incident makes for a bracing learn.
The complainant describes the feeling of awakening in Hegseth’s resort room, which she didn’t acknowledge, in a disoriented state, suspecting that she had been drugged; she additionally remembers repeatedly saying “no” as Hegseth reportedly moved in on her for intercourse, and requested a rape check after the encounter. Hegseth denies the account and says the intercourse was consensual; his lawyer says he reached the monetary settlement solely to guard his Fox gig. Nonetheless, Hegseth manages to face out, even in Trumpland, as the one cupboard nominee denounced as “an abuser of ladies” by his own mother.
The Trump White Home was reportedly blindsided by the assault prices, however continued to advertise Hegseth’s nomination and dispatched him to fulfill with senators on Capitol Hill to organize for his affirmation hearings. In spite of everything, the president-elect is a self-confessed and court-certified sexual assaulter, and presumably expects potential members of his cupboard to bluff by way of these scandals as he has.
What seems to have tipped Hegseth’s nomination into Gaetz territory is an NBC report documenting a sample of extreme on-the-job ingesting at Fox—one thing that’s doubtless a far brighter pink flag to Trump, a lifetime teetotaler, than experiences of brutal sexual predation. Fox staff spoke about Hegseth arriving simply minutes earlier than his early morning present went on the air, whereas others described the necessity to “babysit” the hard-partying Hegseth. One former Fox hand mentioned, “We’d need to name him to ensure he didn’t oversleep, as a result of we knew he’d be out partying the night time earlier than”; one other flatly mentioned, “He shouldn’t be secretary of protection. His ingesting must be disqualifying.”
That these newest damning leaks are coming from the internal sanctum of Fox is one other main strike towards Hegseth’s nomination: Trump’s executive-branch picks replicate in no small half the president-elect’s personal cable viewing tastes, with figures similar to Tulsi Gabbard, Vivek Ramaswamy, and Mehmet Oz logging many pundit hits on the right-wing two-minute hate supply system. The official rely of former Fox Information personalities slated to serve within the second Trump administration is now as much as 12. Hegseth’s being outed as each a belligerent drunk and an unprofessional Fox on-air persona is a probable bridge too far for Trump.
Present Challenge
Amid the blizzard of scandal now surrounding Hegseth, it’s straightforward to miss his flagrant lack of {qualifications} to run the US navy within the first place. As my colleague Joan Walsh writes,
There may be nothing to suggest Hegseth to take this job, operating the nation’s navy and weapons technique and supervising a pressure of two.1 navy service members and greater than one million civilian employers or contractors. (Does Hegseth even supervise his Fox producers? One or two?) Trump has his choose of certified folks, amongst them proficient if loathsome conservatives. Hegseth is just not considered one of them.
In 1989, the Senate rejected George H.W. Bush’s nominee to run the Pentagon, John Tower, amid experiences of rampant alcohol abuse—however Tower was at the very least a former senator who had chaired the inquiry into the Iran-Contra scandal and led arms-reduction negotiations with the Soviet Union. Hegseth, in contrast, has devoted his bully pulpit on Fox to engineering pardons for US war criminals and calling for unlawful mobilizations of the US navy to quash domestic protests.
Early indications are that, ought to Trump lastly bitter on Hegseth’s prospects, he’ll tap Florida Governor Ron DeSantis for protection secretary. DeSantis is a Navy veteran and a former US congressman, and would doubtless be a readily confirmable and comparatively scandal-free nominee. However simply as Florida Lawyer Normal Pam Bondi emerged after the Gaetz fiasco as a extra superficially palatable model of the identical model of fawning and uncritical Trump loyalist, DeSantis would supply the Trump White Home a blander, wonkier gloss on Hegseth’s pet obsessions.
Like Hegseth, DeSantis is a diehard foe of the Pentagon’s alleged swoon into wokeness, providing up assaults on gender-inclusive personnel insurance policies at DOD, and pledges to roll again climate-mitigation insurance policies within the sprawling protection sector. “It’s time to rip the woke out of the navy and return it to its core mission,” he has written. And disturbingly, DeSantis shared with Hegseth a report of downplaying navy abuses of energy; as a JAG lawyer serving within the extralegal detainment of noncombatant prisoners within the US struggle on terror in Guantánamo, Cuba, DeSantis equipped a “mirage of accountability” as detainees suffered grotesquely abusive therapy, Jasper Craven wrote in a 2023 exposé for The Baffler. Former Guantánamo detainee Mansoor Adayfi recounted to Craven how, when he helped arrange a starvation strike to protest circumstances on the base and was coercively force-fed 5 occasions a day, DeSantis overtly mocked him:
We had been crying, screaming. We had been tied to the feeding chair. And [DeSantis] was watching that, he was laughing,” Adayfi recalled. Throughout one session, Adayfi mentioned, DeSantis approached the chair and informed him, “You need to begin to eat.” He responded by puking on the younger JAG’s fairly face.
In a bunch textual content chat that Adayfi organized amongst former detainees, one recalled that DeSantis was “with a bunch of essentially the most vile officers that tortured us severely”; one other dubbed him “actual evil satan’s shit!!”
These prices don’t look to pose a lot of a problem to a DeSantis nomination; the key reported sticking level within the preliminary negotiations to swap DeSantis in for Hegseth is whether or not the Florida governor will appoint Lara Trump, the president-elect’s daughter-in-law and designated RNC flunkey, to fill out Marco Rubio’s Senate time period when he will get confirmed as Trump’s secretary of state. In at the moment’s Republican Occasion, in spite of everything, the usual profession trajectory is to maneuver up from “actual evil satan’s shit” to standard-issue MAGA shit-eating. And that’s an space the place Ron DeSantis is a battle-tested professional.
