U.S. President Donald Trump attends an event in the Oval Office at the White House. REUTERS
Denials that the Pentagon is not a flaming mess under President Donald Trump are likely premature, reports the Guadian, because that’s not what officials from inside are saying in private.
“While the Pentagon insists that any suggestion the defense department is in disarray under Hegseth is “completely baseless,” alarm over [Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s] conduct in the role – and the implications – has not merely been expressed by Hegseth’s political opponents,” reports the Guardian.
“The secretary of defense is a clear and present danger to the national security of the United States and the world,” said Randy Manner, a retired major general in the US national guard and member of National Security Leaders for America (NSL4A), a group of former military leaders. “He has done more harm to the national security of the United States than any secretary of defense since the country was created.”
Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), who is abandoning the U.S. Senate after relentless clashes with Trump, urged the president this week to outright fire his defense secretary.
“I have never witnessed more inept management of the brave men and women who serve our country,” Tillis wrote on social media. “He is intimidated by competence and retreats to ginning up culture wars instead of soberly attending to the vital work of our national defense and the health and wellbeing of our fighting force.”
Last week sources directly inside the White House claimed Trump was catching the consequences of surrounding himself with yes-men and “good news” maidens while Iran beat the president to pieces, according to Daily Mail. Furious to finally see the truth of his failure, Trump whipped into his bootlicks and sidelined at least one, according to sources.
“One is a sledge-hammer and the other is a scalpel,” an anonymous source told Daily Mail, comparing Hegseth to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent — who was allegedly crawling over Hegseth’s bloody back to direct Iran War policy.
But retired major general Paul Eaton told the Guardian that even Donald Rumsfeld’s failings paled in comparison to Trump and his “secretary of war.”
“… [T]his is infinitely worse because we had a lot of other very smart people to corral the bad ideas coming out of Rumsfeld. [This time] we’ve had the whole removal of seasoned men and women who have learned things the hard way most of the time in combat,” said Eaton.
Michael O’Hanlon, a defense and strategy expert at the Brookings Institution, similarly, told the Guardian that Trump will not easily survive the peril his department leaders have put him in with their incompetence.
Hegseth, he said, was “not going to wind up leaving a major mark. He’s going to wind up being known as the guy who fought Trump’s culture wars for him – and maybe failed to help Trump stay out of trouble in the Iran war, depending on how bad that gets.”
