Pete Hegseth Smarms His Way Closer to Running the Pentagon

Iowa GOP Senator Joni Ernst got elected in 2014 promising that her past as a hog-castrating farm woman meant she was qualified to cut pork in Washington. She promised to “make ’em squeal.”

At Tuesday’s Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on the utterly unqualified Pete Hegseth’s nomination to be defense secretary, the 23-year military veteran seemed to have lost her own… ovaries? (Sorry, there’s no good female equivalent.) Clearly, threats to primary Ernst, who started out skeptical of Hegseth’s nomination, worked. She put aside her long-standing concerns about the rights of women in the military and her work to combat sexual abuse and harassment against them (Hegseth stands credibly accused of both), and gave the Fox host a warm welcome.

Ernst asked him softball questions, quoted an Iowa leader who’d worked with Hegseth testifying to his integrity, and overall looked nothing like the strong advocate for military women she’s always been.

That was the only slight surprise in Tuesday’s hearings. All the other Republican senators were worshipful toward Hegseth, praising his promises to combat “woke” in the military, fight (nonexistent) “quotas” for women and people of color, and ignoring the many claims about his alleged sexual behavior and his drinking on the job that concern Democrats—and have, in the past, bothered at least a few Republicans. Including Ernst.

GOP Senator Markwayne Mullins put it colorfully. After Virginia Democrat Tim Kaine grilled Hegseth on his well-documented history of adultery—”Can you so casually cheat on a second wife and cheat on the mother of a child that had been born two months before?” he asked—Mullins retorted: “Senator Kaine, or I guess I better use the senator from Virginia, starts bringing up the fact that ‘what if you showed up drunk to your job?’ How many senators have shown up drunk to vote at night?… How many senators have gotten a divorce for cheating?”

Essentially, Mullins’s defense of Hegseth is that the United States Senate is full of drunken, cheating bastards. And it just might work.

What was most remarkable about Hegseth’s hearing performance was not that he backtracked on some of his previous stances, especially his oft-stated opposition to women serving in combat roles. It was his consistency on some of his other terrible past stances, especially his opposition to “wokeness” in the military. And Republicans on the committee lapped it up.

Hegseth repeatedly scorched the Pentagon’s alleged “woke” policies and promised that Trump will issue “new lawful orders” based on “readiness, accountability, standards and lethality.” He added: “The troops will rejoice” when woke policies are ended.

Asked about his past denunciation of Geneva Convention protocols on the treatment of enemy combatants, Hegseth, a torture defender, declared those conventions “burdensome.”

“What an America-first national security policy is not going to do,” Hegseth told the committee, “is hand its prerogatives over to international bodies that make decisions about how our men and women make decisions on the battlefield.”

When Democratic Senator Mazie Hirono asked Hegseth if he’d obey Trump’s “unlawful” orders, like his demand that soldiers shoot protesters “in the legs” during Black Lives Matter actions in June 2020, Hegseth essentially said yes.

“I saw 50 Secret Service agents get injured by rioters trying to jump over the fence,” Hegseth said, “set a church on fire and destroy a statue. Chaos.” And when Senator Elissa Slotkin asked if “there are some orders that could be given by the commander in chief that could violate the US Constitution?” he essentially answered no.