A telling moment in the supremely depressing Senate confirmation hearing for Pete Hegseth, the Fox News personality who is Donald Trump’s pick for defense secretary, came right at the beginning, when the former Republican senator Norm Coleman introduced him.
“Four years ago, President Biden’s nominee, Lloyd Austin, a good and honorable man, received 97 votes on the floor of the Senate,” said Coleman, “and we went through the debacle of the Afghanistan withdrawal, Putin invaded Ukraine, the Houthis endangered our shipping lanes” and America was insufficiently supportive of Israel. The implication seemed to be that, since good and honorable had failed, it was time to try something else.
Hegseth is something else. As has been widely reported, in 2020 he paid off a woman who filed a police report accusing him of sexual assault. (He insists they had consensual sex.) As Jane Mayer reported in The New Yorker, Hegseth “was forced to step down by both of the two nonprofit advocacy groups that he ran — Veterans for Freedom and Concerned Veterans for America — in the face of serious allegations of financial mismanagement, sexual impropriety and personal misconduct.” His own mother wrote, in an email obtained by The New York Times, that he “belittles, lies, cheats, sleeps around and uses women for his own power and ego.” (She has since disavowed that message.)
But this is Trump’s America; abusing and degrading women is obviously not disqualifying for high office. As Democratic Senate aides told New York magazine’s Rebecca Traister, success in the hearings “would mean not leaning in on the rape allegations and instead creating space to oppose him on grounds that Republicans can also oppose him on.” Much of the hearing on Tuesday seemed to involve a search for those grounds, but it’s not clear they exist.
Several Democrats focused on Hegseth’s insulting comments about female troops, perhaps hoping they could reach Joni Ernst, an Iowa Republican who is a veteran and an advocate for women in the military. (“We need moms,” Hegseth wrote in one of his books. “But not in the military, especially in combat units.”)
Tammy Duckworth, a Democrat from Illinois and a veteran of the Iraq war, nailed him on his sheer ignorance of American defense policy. At one point, she asked him to name one of the countries in ASEAN, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, and to describe our security arrangements with them. He couldn’t do it, instead sputtering about Japan, South Korea and Australia, three countries that are not in ASEAN. Mark Kelly of Arizona, a former astronaut and Navy veteran, grilled him on the many reports about him being drunk on the job. Gary Peters of Michigan established that Hegseth has never led an organization of more than a couple of hundred people; the Pentagon employs almost three million.
Any one of these things should derail this preposterous nomination. I doubt any of them will.
The hearing was over in about four hours; Democrats’ requests for a second round of questioning were denied. They’d just scratched the surface of Hegseth’s record, but Republicans had heard enough.
Michelle Goldberg has been an Opinion columnist since 2017. She is the author of several books about politics, religion and women’s rights, and was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize for public service in 2018 for reporting on workplace sexual harassment.
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