Appoint An Incompetent Drunken Rapist To Run The Pentagon— What Could Go Wrong?

Is Pete Hegseth The Worst Of Trump's Appointments?

Two rapists

This morning, Peter Baker noted that Señor T is doubling down on his transgressive, defiant behavior even after the collapse of the absurd Matt Gaetz appointment. Are Tulsi Gabbard, RFK Jr, Kash Patel (Moscow's second favorite pick after Tulsi), Pete Hegseth, Stephen Miller, Russ Vought, Pam Bondi, Dr Oz, Elon Musk & Vivek Ramaswamy, Tom Homan, Charles Kushner and Linda McMahon less problematic? Even for as submissive a Senate as the one just elected, confirming these characters will be, at the very least… embarrassing. And for Republican senators up for reelection in 2026— like Susan Collins (ME), Thom Tillis (NC), Joni Ernst (IA), John Cornyn (TX), Dan Sullivan (AK), even Lindsey Graham (SC)— voting for people like these could turn into a campaign issue hard to defend.

But, wrote Baker, “Rather than turning to more credentialed and respected choices with easier paths to Senate confirmation, Trump in rapid-fire fashion keeps naming more ideological warriors, conspiracy theorists and now even family members to senior government positions… The persistence in advancing unconventional appointments underscores how determined Trump is to surround himself this time with loyalists he can trust to carry out his agenda, including ‘retribution’ against his perceived enemies. Trump has accused President Biden of using the Justice Department and FBI to come after him, although there is no evidence that Biden was involved in the cases of the last few years. Trump’s contentious selections also represent something of a dare to Senate Republicans to see how far they will go in standing against other nominees they view as unqualified after helping to torpedo former Representative Matt Gaetz’s selection as attorney general. ‘By insisting on highly provocative nominees, short on traditional qualifications but long on personal loyalty and zest for confrontation, he seems to be deliberately testing the Senate’s capacity and willingness to play its constitutional role as a check on the president,’ said Gregg Nunziata, a former chief nominations counsel for Senate Judiciary Committee Republicans.”

The most problematic nominees for GOP senators seem to be Tulsi Gabbard, RFK Jr, and Pete Hegseth and, wrote Baker, “the history of Washington confirmations suggests they can focus opposition on one or, at most, a limited number of problematic nominees from a president of their own party, especially a president who punishes dissidents. In some ways, Trump appears to be following a sort of swarm strategy, flooding the Senate with many contentious nominations that might not pass muster in normal circumstances and forcing the incoming Republican majority to choose which, if any, to block and which to let through.”

Hegseth, for example, is a serial rapist “awash in scandal” and even his mother has said he’s unfit for public service. Some think Trump threw Charles Kushner and Kash Patel into the mix on Saturday to take the heat off Hegseth. Jane Meyer did a Hegseth deep dive— very deep dive— over the weekend.

And it goes well beyond just the charges about him being a life-long misogynistic abuser of women— although she lays that out very thoroughly as well. He’s been fired from jobs for “financial mismanagement, sexual impropriety and personal misconduct.” So, not just a rapist but also a crook— and a drunk to the point of having be carried out of multiple events and having to “be restrained while drunk from joining the dancers on the stage of a Louisiana strip club, where he had brought his team… [and even] drunkenly chanting ‘Kill All Muslims! Kill All Muslims!’”

I spoke at length with two people who identified themselves as having contributed to the whistle-blower report. One of them said of Hegseth, “I’ve seen him drunk so many times. I’ve seen him dragged away not a few times but multiple times. To have him at the Pentagon would be scary,” adding, “When those of us who worked at C.V.A. [Concerned Veterans for America] heard he was being considered for SecDef, it wasn’t ‘No,’ it was ‘Hell No!’ ” According to the complaint, at one such C.V.A. event in Virginia Beach, on Memorial Day weekend in 2014, Hegseth was “totally sloshed” and needed to be carried to his room because “he was so intoxicated.” The following month, during an event in Cleveland, Hegseth, who had gone with his team to a bar around the corner from their hotel, was described as “completely drunk in a public place.” According to the report, “several high profile people” who attended the organization’s event “were very disappointed to see this kind of public behavior,” though the report does not identify them.

… Raised in Minnesota, Hegseth signed up for the Army R.O.T.C. in 2001 while attending Princeton, where he majored in politics and published the Princeton Tory, a pugnacious conservative journal that lambasted liberalism on campus. He published a commentary by another student mocking the view, expressed during the school’s orientation program, that sex with an unconscious partner constituted rape. As first reported online by the newsletter “Popular Information,” run by Judd Legum, the commentary claimed that rape required both a failure to consent and “duress,” which a passed-out woman couldn’t experience.

…Advocating for veterans gave him a renewed sense of purpose, he said. In New York, he met a marine who was working for a small nonprofit organization called Vets for Freedom, which advocated for expanding the war in Iraq. In an interview, one early conservative sympathizer with the group described it to me as essentially an “AstroTurf” organization that had been devised by a handful of big-time political players to look like it was a grassroots veterans’ movement. Hegseth once told a former associate that V.F.F.’s donors included three Republican billionaires who have since passed away: Bernard Marcus, the Home Depot magnate; Jerry Perenchio, the former head of Univision; and Harold Simmons, a Texas entrepreneur.

Hegseth appealed to the backers, the early sympathizer told me: he was a handsome, articulate Princeton graduate who had served honorably in the military, and, at the time, he believed ardently in the surge in America’s war in Iraq. By 2007, Hegseth had become the organization’s leader. “I had no idea what I was doing,” he told the National Guard publication. “I didn’t know if it would work.”

In fact, under his leadership, V.F.F. soon ran up enormous debt, and financial records indicate that, by the end of 2008, it was unable to pay its creditors. The group’s primary donors became concerned that their money was being wasted on inappropriate expenses, including rumors of parties that “could politely be called trysts,” as the former associate of the group put it. The early sympathizer said, “I was not the first to hear that there was money sloshing around and sexually inappropriate behavior in the workplace.”

In 2004, Hegseth had married his first of three wives, his high-school girlfriend from Minnesota, Meredith Schwarz. But he often lived apart from her while working in Washington, staying at a pool house owned by the parents of one of her college friends. In 2008, Schwarz filed for divorce after Hegseth admitted to multiple infidelities— his wife later learned that a journalist he’d introduced her to was among those with whom he was having an affair. The couple divorced in 2009.

Meanwhile, the finances of V.F.F. grew so dire that the group’s donors hatched a plan to take control away from Hegseth. The donors’ representatives hired a forensic accountant to review the books. The findings were appalling. In January, 2009, Hegseth sent a letter to the donors admitting that, as of that day, the group had less than a thousand dollars in the bank and $434,833 in unpaid bills. The group also had run up credit-card debts of as much as seventy-five thousand dollars. Hegseth said that he took full responsibility for the mess, but added that, unless the donors gave him more funds, V.F.F. would have to file for bankruptcy and close down.

One of the group’s backers initially agreed to Hegseth’s request. But, according to the early sympathizer, the donors decided, “Let’s shut this thing down. Pete can get another job.” The donors, who were strong supporters of America’s military role in Iraq and Afghanistan, arranged for another veterans’ group, Military Families United, which represented the families of Gold Star warriors, to merge with V.F.F. and take over most of its management. “We tried to castrate him,” Hegseth’s former associate admitted. “It was a handoff.” Annual federal tax filings for V.F.F. show the group’s coffers draining and Hegseth’s compensation dwindling. In 2010, the records show, Hegseth was identified as the group’s “Executive Director/President” and was paid forty-five thousand dollars for thirty hours of work a week. The next year, he was identified as the group’s “officer,” and paid a salary of five thousand dollars for thirty minutes of work a week. In 2012, the tax filing again identified him as the group’s “officer,” and his compensation rose to eight thousand dollars, but the total grants received by the group that year totalled a mere eighty-one dollars.

Margaret Hoover, a Republican political commentator and political strategist who worked as an adviser to V.F.F. between 2008 and 2010, recently told CNN that she had grave concerns about Hegseth’s ability to run the Pentagon, the largest department in the federal government, given his mismanagement at V.F.F. “I watched him run an organization very poorly, lose the confidence of donors. The organization ultimately folded and was forced to merge with another organization who individuals felt could run and manage funds on behalf of donors more responsibly than he could. That was my experience with him.” Hoover stressed that V.F.F. was an exceedingly small organization, with fewer than ten employees, and a budget of between five million and ten million dollars. She told CNN, “And he couldn’t do that properly, I don’t know how he’s going to run an organization with an eight-hundred-and-fifty-seven-billion-dollar budget and three million individuals.”

By 2012, Hegseth had departed from what remained of V.F.F., and had launched an abortive bid for the Senate from Minnesota, where he was a captain in the state’s National Guard. He then volunteered for another tour of active duty, this time in Afghanistan, to train Afghan security forces. Upon completing his tour of duty, he was promoted to the rank of major. In 2012, Hegseth formed a political-action committee, MN pac, to help like-minded candidates, but, according to a report by American Public Media, a third of the funds in Hegseth’s pac was spent on parties for his family and friends, and less than half was spent on candidates.

In 2014, Hegseth joined Fox News, as a contributor. By then, he also was the C.E.O. of the Kochs’ Concerned Veterans for America group. But by 2016 Hegseth had been forced to step aside from the organization. “There’s a long pattern, over more than a decade, of malfeasance, financial mismanagement, and sexual impropriety,” Hegseth’s former associate told me. “There’s a fair dose of bullying and misinformation, too.”

…According to the Wall Street Journal, Trump’s transition team was blindsided by the sexual-assault story because Hegseth had failed to disclose anything about it, including the fact that he had paid off his accuser. He also failed to disclose that he had received a copy of the police report in 2021, long before the Monterey police’s recent release of it. The series of damning revelations has reportedly infuriated the transition team. “When we ask, ‘Is there anything else we need to know about?’ that is usually a good time to mention a police report,” a Trump adviser told Rolling Stone. “Obviously he remembered that this all happened and there is no way— I don’t think— he could have believed this wouldn’t come out once he got nominated.”

In 2016, Justin Higgins, a former Republican opposition researcher, vetted Hegseth for under-secretary roles in the first Trump Administration, on behalf of the Republican National Committee. In a commentary for MSNBC, Higgins wrote that, although he believes that Hegseth is “perhaps one of the least qualified picks for Secretary of Defense that we’ve seen,” he thinks that Hegseth “was likely chosen because he seems willing to say and do anything Trump wants.” It hadn’t hurt, Higgins added, that Hegseth belittled some war crimes, and “Trump thinks he looks and sounds good on TV.” Hegseth has also been a strident opponent of gender equality in the military, proclaiming women unfit for combat, and calling the claim that diversity is a strength “garbage.” In 2021, he was barred from participating in President Biden’s Inauguration because a military officer was alarmed that Hegseth had tattoos of a Crusader’s cross and the motto “Deus Vult”— insignias popular with far-right militants— and had alerted superiors that Hegseth might constitute an “insider threat.”

His team has invented a story about how he was the victim of the Monterey rape case. The police say he's lying again.