There’s A Case To Be Made That Pete Hegseth Is Even Worse Than Matt Gaetz, Tulsi Gabbard & RFJ Jr

Trump Doesn't Want The FBI Looking Into It

Yesterday, in a note to members, Public Citizen’s co-presidents wrote that Trump has demonstrated a “knack for getting some people— assorted feckless, craven, insecure, stupid, gullible, and willfully ill-informed members of Congress, for example— to do what he wants them to do while saying (and maybe actually thinking) it’s what they themselves want to do. So now Trump is talking about forcing through his manifestly unqualified cabinet picks by abusing what is very clearly meant to be a limited ability of presidents to make appointments when Congress is in recess for more than a few days (going back to a time when it could take weeks for legislators to return to D.C. from all over the country because, you know, we hadn’t invented airplanes yet)… This plot only works if enough members of both the House and Senate agree to put themselves into recess in abject fealty to Trump and utter dereliction of duty to their constituents and the American people. If Republicans in the House and Senate go along with this ruse, they will in essence be rendering Congress— and therefore themselves— a no-longer-coequal branch of the federal government.”

They urged every Republican in Congress to, regardless of what they think of him and his nominees, “not forfeit the role of Congress as a coequal branch of the federal government.” Let’s see if that works. The nominations are stunning, as in stunningly grotesque. Even Trump’s allies are getting the idea that the Senate’s not going to budge on Gaetz and that they’re wasting their time and political capital by pushing. They can only lose 4 Republicans on any one nomination and There are more than that on Gaetz.

The Trump decision to skip FBI vetting for this scandal-ridden bunch of miscreants and degenerates was a bad idea for any non-bought in MAGAt. A team of Bloomberg reporters noted that the decision upends more than 60 years of precedent and puts him on a collision course with members of his own party. Republicans are especially concerned about Gaetz, Gabbard and Hegseth— although Susan Collins (R-ME) isn’t too excited about RFK, Jr and Dr. Oz skating by either. Trump’s transition team has refused to sign an agreement with the Justice Department and FBI that would allow the bureau to vet nominees.

“I believe that the current process of having a background check, a committee investigation and a public hearing has served us very well and constitutes our responsibility,” Collins said this week.

Instead, Trump is considering privately run vetting, CNN reported, even as Senate Republicans continue to push for a full FBI check.

…“Being completed as expeditiously as possible, the background investigation focuses on character and conduct,” the FBI said in an emailed statement Tuesday. The agency doesn’t render a judgment on what it finds.

The FBI has more resources than private companies, said Barbara McQuade, a former US attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan. National security applicants submit a form, known as an SF-86, which is typically posted online by the Senate committee of jurisdiction. Attorney General Merrick Garland’s completed questionnaire is still available.

“It’s a very detailed process,” said McQuade, who went through the process herself. “I agreed that they may search my criminal background, I agreed that they may have access to my finances, I agreed that they may interview all my friends and family.”

Every place a nominee has lived and worked for the last 10 years, along with schools, assets and bank accounts, are put into the form, and then the FBI begins its investigation to check the veracity and any potential red flags.

Anyone who might be embarrassed at the findings shouldn’t apply, she said, adding that forgoing the FBI check is a “terrible idea.”

The FBI has a protocol and standards, and are subject to the Privacy Act, she said. The agents themselves have been vetted and undergone the same clearance. “If you farm this out to private companies, who are the people who’s doing this? Are they on the take? We don’t know.”

Senator Dick Durbin, the outgoing Judiciary chairman and No. 2 Senate Democrat, said the FBI also brings with it credibility. 

…Trump has threatened to use recess appointments to speed his nominees through while the Senate is out of session. Doing so, however, is potentially problematic given the tight margins in both chambers. And, in Gaetz’s case, the level of animosity congressional Republicans have for him would make it harder for Trump to do an end-run around the Senate.

There’s also potential blowback for the president-elect as that sort of scorched-earth tactic could have repercussions for other parts of his agenda, where he’ll need a united party to pass tax cuts and other budget-related items.

Republican senators are eager to protect their constitutional role to advise and consent, said Senator Mike Rounds of South Dakota, a pillar of the establishment wing of the party.

While everyone has been focused on Pete Hegseth raping an intoxicated woman, People for the American Way honed in on something more pertinent to national security, his plan to create a Christian Nationalist ‘educational insurgency.’ On Tuesday, Kyle Mantyla wrote about Hegseth’s undisguised Christian nationalism. “Hegseth, who has admitted that his multiple crusader tattoos got him ‘deemed an extremist’ by his own National Guard unit, has deep ties to misogynistic Christian nationalist pastor Douglas Wilson. On Monday, Hegseth appeared on the ‘CrossPolitic’ podcast, which is hosted by Toby Sumpter and Gabe Rench, both of whom are closely tied to Wilson and his church.”

“During the discussion,” wrote Mantyla, “about Hegseth's book Battle For The American Mind, Hegseth said that he is working to create a system of ‘classical Christian schools’ to provide the recruits for an underground army that will eventually launch an ‘educational insurgency’ to take over the nation. ‘I think we need to be thinking in terms of these classical Christian schools are boot camps for winning back America,’ said Sumpter. ‘That's what the crop of these classical Christian schools are gonna do in a generation,’ Hegseth agreed. ‘Policy answers like school choice, while they're great, that's phase two stuff later on once the foothold has been taken, once the recruits have graduated boot camp. We call it a tactical retreat,’ Hegseth continued. ‘We draw out in the last part of the book what an educational insurgency would look like, because I was a counterinsurgency instructor in Afghanistan and kind of the phases that Mao [Zedong] wrote about. We're in middle phase one right now, which is effectively a tactical retreat where you regroup, consolidate, and reorganize. And as you do so, you build your army underground with the opportunity later on of taking offensive operations in an overt way. Obviously, all of this is metaphorical and all that good stuff,’ Hesgeth claimed, which promoted both hosts and himself to burst out laughing.”

As for Hegseth’s tattoos, they’re not just personal expressions; they’re deliberate signals of his alignment with an ideology that has no place in a pluralistic democracy, let alone in a cabinet position. The Jerusalem Cross and “Deus Vult” slogan inked on his body are steeped in the history of the Crusades— a period marked by religious violence and the subjugation of non-Christians. These symbols have been cynically repurposed by modern extremists as rallying cries for white supremacy and Christian nationalism. Hegseth’s decision to wear these symbols openly, knowing their contemporary connotations, is an affront to the values of inclusion and equality that should underpin any public servant's ethos. His own admission that his National Guard unit flagged him as an extremist for the tattoos underscores their disturbing associations. His dismissal of the criticism as “anti-Christian bigotry” is classic deflection, but it doesn’t hold water. This is not about his faith; it’s about the message he sends to the nation and the world by celebrating symbols tied to exclusion, violence, and authoritarianism.

When you pair this imagery with a plan for a Christian Nationalist educational insurgency what we see is nothing short of a roadmap to undermine the separation of church and state. His laughable invocation of Mao’s insurgency strategies as a framework for subverting American education should have disqualified him instantly. Instead, Trump and his enablers want to reward him with a cabinet post— another slap in the face to a democracy already strained under the weight of MAGA’s authoritarian fantasies. The tats are ideological billboards advertising his unsuitability for any position of power. They’re blatant symbols of the theocratic dystopia he and his allies want to impose on the country.