A telling second within the supremely miserable Senate affirmation listening to for Pete Hegseth, the Fox Information character who’s Donald Trump’s choose for protection secretary, got here proper initially, when the previous Republican senator Norm Coleman launched him.
“4 years in the past, President Biden’s nominee, Lloyd Austin, an excellent and honorable man, obtained 97 votes on the ground of the Senate,” stated 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 gave the impression 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 pressured 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 significant allegations of economic mismanagement, sexual impropriety and private misconduct.” His personal mom wrote, in an e mail obtained by The New York Occasions, that he “belittles, lies, cheats, sleeps round and makes use of ladies for his personal energy and ego.” (She has since disavowed that message.)
However that is Trump’s America; abusing and degrading ladies is clearly not disqualifying for top 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 a substitute creating area to oppose him on grounds that Republicans may also oppose him on.” A lot of the listening to on Tuesday appeared to contain a seek for these grounds, nevertheless it’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 want mothers,” Hegseth wrote in one of his books. “However not within the army, particularly in fight items.”)
Tammy Duckworth, a Democrat from Illinois and a veteran of the Iraq battle, nailed him on his sheer ignorance of American protection coverage. At one level, she requested him to call one of many nations in ASEAN, the Affiliation of Southeast Asian Nations, and to explain our safety preparations with them. He couldn’t do it, as a substitute sputtering about Japan, South Korea and Australia, three nations that aren’t in ASEAN. Mark Kelly of Arizona, a former astronaut and Navy veteran, grilled him on the numerous experiences 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 virtually three million.
Any considered one of this stuff 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.
