Trump’s nominee for secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, scurried among Senate offices this past week trying to reassure senators that reports of his wild drinking, sexual harassment, and other improprieties were just media smears.
He even had his mother (whose own years-old letter disapproving of her son’s sexually abusive behavior went public this week) call senators to make Hegseth’s case.
Finally, Hegseth promised senators that if he got the position, he wouldn’t drink at all — as if someone with a drinking problem saying I can stop anytime was credible.
At the moment, Hegseth’s fate seems to rest with Iowa Republican Senator Joni Ernst, a military veteran who has spent much of her time as a lawmaker working on improving how sexual attacks are reported and prosecuted within the ranks.
Yesterday Ernst told a largely GOP audience that she needs to hear more from Hegseth before she decides whether to support him. “I am a survivor of sexual assault,” she said. “I’ve worked very heavily on sexual assault measures within the military. So I’d like to hear a lot more about that.”
Ernst’s unwillingness to support Hegseth outright has prompted a fierce pressure campaign from the right, with some even threatening to primary her when she is up for reelection in 2026.
There are issues beyond sexual assault that are also deeply troubling about Hegseth.
I want to bring to your attention Jason Wilson’s excellent column from TheGuardian, most of which I’ve reproduced below. It is alarmingly consistent with my post last week about how Trump’s efforts to use the U.S. military domestically could foment a second American civil war.
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Hegseth has written in a book [An American Crusade] that he could imagine a scenario in which the US armed forces would be used violently in American domestic politics….
He wrote that in the event of a Democratic election victory in the US there would be a “national divorce” in which “The military and police … will be forced to make a choice” and “Yes, there will be some form of civil war.”
Hegseth’s 2020 book exhorts conservatives to undertake “an AMERICAN CRUSADE”, to “mock, humiliate, intimidate, and crush our leftist opponents”, to “attack first” in response to a left he identifies with “sedition,” and he writes that the book “lays out the strategy we must employ in order to defeat America’s internal enemies.”
Hegseth’s rhetoric about perceived “internal” or “domestic enemies,” along with media reports highlighting his tattoo of the crusader motto “Deus Vult,” may ring alarm bells for those concerned by Donald Trump’s repeated threats to unleash the US military, which Hegseth would directly control, on those he has described as “the enemy within.”….
Hegseth paints an apocalyptic picture of American politics, and encourages his fellow rightwingers to see their opponents as an existential threat.
At various points in that book, he describes leftists, progressives and Democrats as “enemies” of freedom, the US constitution and America, and counts Israel among the “international allies” who can help defeat such “domestic enemies.”
Addressing his conservative audience in a chapter of American Crusade entitled Make the Crusade Great Again, he writes: “Whether you like it or not, you are an ‘infidel’ – an unbeliever – according to the false religion of leftism.” He added: “You can submit now or later; or you can fight.”
Later in the book, he writes: “Build the wall. Raise tariffs. Learn English. Buy American. Fight back.”
Elsewhere in American Crusade, he writes: “The hour is late for America. Beyond political success, her fate relies on exorcising the leftist specter dominating education, religion, and culture – a 360-degree holy war for the righteous cause of human freedom.”
In fighting, Hegseth wrote: “Our weapon is American nationalism,” adding: “The Left has tried … to intimidate us into thinking that nationalism is a relic of a bygone era.”
Hegseth has followed his own advice in this respect: his tattoos include the words “We the People,” quoted from the Constitution, and a “stylized American flag with its bottom stripe replaced by an AR-15 assault rifle” according to Snopes.com reporting.
In relation to the media, “almost all” politicians, and credentialed experts, Hegseth advises readers to “Disdain, despise, detest, distrust – pick your d-words. But all of this must lead to action.”…
Hegseth explicitly rejects democracy in American Crusade, characterizing it as a leftist demand: “For leftists, calls for ‘democracy’ represent a complete rejection of our system. Watch how often they use the word,” adding: “They hate America, so they hate the Constitution and want to quickly amass 51 percent of the votes to change it.”
He explicitly supports forms of election-rigging through gerrymandering. Fair electoral boundaries, he writes, amount to “Playing nice to placate the so-called middle,” which “has been a losing strategy for patriots for decades.” Since “the other side is stacked with enemies of freedom,” Hegseth argues, “Republican legislatures should draw congressional lines that advantage pro-freedom candidates – and screw Democrats.”…
In considering the prospect of Trump’s defeat in 2020, Hegseth claims that a Biden victory will shatter the US and lead to civil war.
In the first chapter, Our American Crusade, he claims: “The fate of freedom is what is at stake in the 2020 election. The immediate years that follow will, once and for all, determine whether the American experiment in human freedom – the America of our founding – will die, get a national divorce based on irreconcilable cultural and political divisions, or return to its founding principles.”
Later in the book he defines a national divorce as “irreconcilable differences between the Left and the Right in America leading to perpetual conflict that cannot be resolved through the political process.”…
For Hegseth, such a move would necessarily involve violence. Hegseth writes: “The military and police, both bastions of freedom-loving patriots, will be forced to make a choice. It will not be good. Yes, there will be some form of civil war.”
Hegseth concedes: “It’s a horrific scenario that nobody wants but would be difficult to avoid.”
Additionally, he writes: “If America is split, freedom will no longer have an army.”
The end of the US military – which he elsewhere calls “the only powerful, pro-freedom, pro-Christian, pro-Israel army in the world” – will in turn mean that “Communist China will rise – and rule the globe. Europe will formally surrender. Islamists will get nuclear weapons and seek to wipe America and Israel off the map.”
Victory, however, will mean the defeat of the allied forces of “globalism”, “socialism”, “secularism”, “environmentalism”, “Islamism”, “genderism” and “leftism”, according to Hegseth.
Hegseth expresses an unstinting loyalty to Trump.
At one point in the book, he describes a conversation between the two after Trump, at Hegseth’s urging, in 2019 pardoned three service members who had been charged or convicted with alleged war crimes committed in Iraq and Afghanistan.
On Hegseth’s account, Trump called him ahead of the pardon, and the call “ended with a compliment to me that I’ll never forget and might put on my tombstone: ‘You’re a f------ warrior, Pete. A f------ warrior.’ I thanked him for his courage, and he hung up.” …
Hegseth leaves his readers with the promise: “See you on the battlefield. Together, with God’s help, we will save America. Deus vult!”
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Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/