With Gaetz Out Of The Way, How Will The Senate Deal with Hegseth, Gabbard, RFK Jr…?

And The Project 2025 Garbage Trump Is Proposing

Gaetz had some redeeming qualities; Hegseth does not... not one

I’m not optimistic that there are 3 Republicans in the Senate who would go up against Trump in a fight over any of his nominees, regardless of how awful they are shown to be in public hearings. It was hard to make a case that anyone was as bad as the ridiculously absurd Gaetz but there are those who say Pete Hegseth, Tulsi Gabbard, RFK Jr, Tom Homan, Linda McMahon, Russ Vought and Stephen Miller are as bad (if not worse)— not to mention Musk and Ramaswamy (with oversight by Marjorie Traitor Greene). Yes, there will always be the dynamic duo of Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski ready for action (trio if you imagine McConnell has the energy) but… yesterday they had backup from Kevin McCarthy besties, Senator-elect John Curtis (UT) and Markwayne Mullin (OK) and neither of them is likely to show up in any “NO” columns again. There are a few others who might agree to a NO vote on one, put… like I said, ‘not optimistic.’

Maybe Hegseth. He’s a real danger to the country. If Trump wants troops in the streets with loaded weapons… he’ll order tanks and drones. And his “drawbacks are not limited to his light résumé or to the sexual-assault allegation made against him. Inexperienced though he may be at managing bureaucracies, Hegseth has devoted a great deal of time to documenting his worldview, including three books published in the past four years. I spent the previous week reading them: The man who emerges from the page appears to have sunk deeply into conspiracy theories that are bizarre even by contemporary Republican standards but that have attracted strangely little attention. He considers himself to be at war with basically everybody to Trump’s left, and it is by no means clear that he means war metaphorically. He may be no less nutty than any of Trump’s more controversial nominees. And given the power he is likely to hold— command over 2 million American military personnel— he is almost certainly far more dangerous than any of them.

Jonathan Chait continued that “evidence of Hegseth’s extremism does not need to be deduced by interpreting his tattoos. The proof is lying in plain sight. In his three most recent books, Hegseth puts forward a wide range of familiarly misguided ideas: vaccines are ‘poisonous’; climate change is a hoax (they used to warn about global cooling, you know); George Floyd died of a drug overdose and was not murdered; the Holocaust was perpetrated by ‘German socialists.’

The Marxist conspiracy has also, according to Hegseth, begun creeping into the U.S. military, the institution he is now poised to run. His most recent book calls for a straightforward political purge of military brass who had the gall to obey Democratic administrations: “Fire any general who has carried water for Obama and Biden’s extraconstitutional and agenda-driven transformation of our military.” Trump appears to be thinking along similar lines. He is reportedly working on an executive order that will fast-track the removal of officers “lacking in requisite leadership qualities” and compiling a list of officers involved in the Afghanistan retreat, who will likewise be shoved out.

To what end? Trump has already signaled his interest in two revolutionary changes to the Defense Department’s orientation. One is to legalize war crimes, or at least cease enforcement of the rules of war. The president-elect has enthusiastically endorsed the use of illegal military methods and has pardoned American soldiers who committed atrocities against detainees and unarmed civilians, following a loud campaign by Hegseth on Fox News.

In The War on Warriors, Hegseth makes plain that he considers the very idea of “rules of war” just more woke nonsense. “Modern war-fighters fight lawyers as much as we fight bad guys,” he writes. “Our enemies should get bullets, not attorneys.” He repeatedly disparages Army lawyers (“jagoffs”), even claiming that their pointless rules are “why America hasn’t won a war since World War II.” (Ideally, the secretary of defense would be familiar with historical episodes such as the Gulf War.)

…Trump’s second and even more disturbing interest in having a loyalist run the department is his enthusiasm for deploying troops to curtail and, if necessary, shoot domestic protesters. His first-term defense secretaries blanched at these demands. Hegseth displays every sign of sharing Trump’s impulses, but in a more theorized form.

The clearest through line of all three books is the application of Hegseth’s wartime mentality to his struggle against domestic opponents. American Crusade calls for the “categorical defeat of the Left,” with the goal of “utter annihilation,” without which “America cannot, and will not, survive.” Are the Crusades just a metaphor? Sort of, but not really: “Our American Crusade is not about literal swords, and our fight is not with guns. Yet.” (Emphasis— gulp— his.)

Battle for the American Mind likewise imagines the struggle against the communist educational plot as a military problem: “We are pinned down, caught in an enemy near ambush. The enemy has the high ground, and is shooting from concealed and fortified positions.”

And The War on Warriors repeatedly urges readers to treat the American left exactly like foreign combatants. Describing the military’s responsibility to the nation, Hegseth writes, “The expectation is that we will defend it against all enemies— both foreign and domestic. Not political opponents, but real enemies. (Yes, Marxists are our enemies.)” The Marxist exception swallows the “not political opponents” rule because pretty much all of his political opponents turn out to be Marxists. These include, but are not limited to, diversity advocates (“They are Marxists… You know what they are? They’re traitors”), newspapers (“the communist Star Tribune”), and, as noted, almost anybody involved in public education.

Lest there be any ambiguity, Hegseth incessantly equates the left to wartime enemies. “They do not respect cease-fires, do not abide by the rules of warfare, and do not respect anything except total defeat of their enemy— and then total control,” he writes at one point. At another, he argues, “We should be in panic mode. Almost desperate. Willing to do anything to defeat the ‘fundamental transformation’ of the American military and end the war on our warriors.”

Hegseth’s idea of illegitimate behavior by the domestic enemy is quite expansive. Consider this passage, recalling his time advocating for the Iraq War: “While I debated these things in good faith, the Left mobilized. Electing Obama, railroading the military, pushing women in combat— readiness be damned. The Left has never fought fair.” The most remarkable phrase there is “electing Obama.” Hegseth’s notion of unfair tactics used by the left includes not only enacting administrative policies that he disagrees with, but the basic act of voting for Democrats. The inability or unwillingness to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate political opposition likely endeared Hegseth to Trump, who shares the trait.

A defense secretary with a tenuous grip on reality, who can’t differentiate foreign enemies from domestic political opponents, and who seems to exist in a state of permanent hysteria is a problem that the United States has never had to survive. The main question I was looking to answer when I started reading Hegseth’s collected works was whether he would follow a Trump command to shoot peaceful protesters. After having read them, I don’t think he would even wait for the order.

Yesterday, David Graham insinuated there might, judging by the sheer speed of the first one, be a second defeat for Señor T. Gaetz was, after all, “pulled out of consideration, one day after meeting with senators on Capitol Hill.”

Gaetz, anyone would admit, is a pretty unique case who will, at some point, need a presidential pardon to stay out of prison. Graham pointed out that it isn’t that uncommon for a presidential nominee to withdraw at some point in the process but “What is unusual is how quickly Gaetz’s nomination fell apart. Eight days is not the record, but it’s close. (Recall that White House Physician Ronny Jackson’s nomination to lead the Department of Veterans Affairs took nearly a month to collapse.) Just two days ago, Trump was insisting he had no second thoughts about picking Gaetz… [who he] doesn’t appear to have bothered to vet in any serious way before nominating him... The fact that Gaetz, like Trump, has a personal vendetta against the Justice Department seemed to be his main credential for the job.”

Gaetz’s “infamy,” wrote Graham, “hasn’t prevented his rise so far, and he is believed to have designs on running for governor of Florida when Ron DeSantis’s term ends.” And if there’s one place where criminal behavior actually helps win office— think of Rick Scott’s campaigns for governor and senator— it’s certainly Florida. Leaving Gaetz and Florida on the side for a moment, what’s important to figure out “is what this defeat portends for the rest of Trump’s slate of outrageous nominees. The president-elect likes to take a gamble, even if he sometimes loses, but, the presence of so many unqualified picks might perversely make it easier for some of them to get through— after all, the Senate couldn’t reject them all, right?”

Like many observers, Graham hopes that “Gaetz’s quick exit shows that Senate Republicans aren’t willing to accept literally anyone who Trump throws their way, and the fact that they were able to send that message so quickly suggests just how deep their reservations were. If the rejection is a sign of weakness for Trump, it is also one for his vice president-elect, Senator J. D. Vance. Vance was given the tough job of squiring Gaetz around Senate offices yesterday to drum up support, which obviously did not go well. The Gaetz failure doesn’t mean that senators will reject any other picks, but with Gaetz out of the way, the troubled nomination of Pete Hegseth to lead the Pentagon will be able to get more attention. A police report about a sexual-assault allegation against Hegseth from 2017 was released today, and it’s a stomach-churning read. Alternatively, Gaetz could end up looking like a sacrificial pick to save the others, or like a stalking horse for Trump to appoint someone else at DOJ. It seems unlikely that Trump intended either of these— he doesn’t usually play to lose— but that could be the effect. Before Trump chose Gaetz, he reportedly concluded that other contenders simply didn’t have what he wanted in an attorney general, according to the NY Times. Now he’ll have to go back his lists to choose someone who has one thing that Gaetz conspicuously lacked: the ability to get confirmed.”

Pam Bondi fits that definition. She shouldn’t; she’s both conflicted and a crook who accepted a $25,000 bribe from a certain someone to drop the Trump University case when she was Florida Attorney General. It almost— almost— doesn’t matter who Trump picks for which job. They will all be as transgressive as he is. Otherwise he wouldn’t be picking them. Did you not believe all that stuff about Project 2025 during the campaign? He’s using it to staff his regime now. 

Trump may have disavowed them “but with the campaign over,” reports NBC News, “Trump’s transition team is turning to Project 2025 to help staff the next administration. Already, transition officials are taking suggestions for potential hires from the extensive personnel database created by Project 2025… While Project 2025’s massive book of conservative policy recommendations received most of the attention from Democrats, a central part of the effort was putting together a database that officials had framed as a conservative LinkedIn to help staff an incoming Republican administration.” And it goes beyond Project architects (and arch-villains) like Tom Homan, Brendan Carr and Russ Vought. “The personnel database was a cornerstone of Project 2025. Under Paul Dans, a former Trump administration official who led Project 2025, the group built a database of more than 10,000 candidates vetted for their MAGA credentials who would build out the administration in the event Trump won, as ProPublica reported in August. The idea behind the effort was to ensure that a future Trump administration would have the foot soldiers necessary to rapidly enact his agenda upon taking office.”

I got a weird feeling from his latest column that David Frum— I think he finally just quit the GOP— had different expectations. I mean, not just that Trump would lose— we all did—but beyond that. He based it, he wrote, on 3 observations and a belief:

• Inflation was coming under control

• A majority of Americans expressed an unfavorable opinion of Señor T

• In the 2022 midterms, abortion proved a powerful anti-Republican voting issue.

And he wrote that “If that was not enough— and maybe it was not— I held onto this belief: Human beings are good at seeing through frauds. Not perfectly good at it. Not always as fast as might be. And not everybody. But a just-sufficient number of us, sooner or later, spot the con. The Trump campaign was trafficking in frauds. Haitians are eating cats and dogs. Foreigners will pay for the tariffs. The Trump years were the good old days if you just forget about the coronavirus pandemic and the crime wave that happened on his watch. The lying might work up to a point. I believed that the point would be found just on the right side of the line between election and defeat— and not, as happened instead, on the other side. My mistake.”

He wrote that “For millions of Americans, [Trump’s] record was disqualifying. For slightly more Americans, however, it was not. The latter group prevailed, and the United States will be a different country because of them. American politics has never lacked for scoundrels, cheats, and outright criminals. But their numbers have been thinned, and their misdeeds policed, by strong public institutions. Trump waged a relentless campaign against any and all rules that restrained him. He did not always prevail, but he did score three all-important successes. First, he frightened the Biden administration’s Justice Department away from holding him to account in courts of law in any timely way. Second, he persuaded the courts themselves— including, ultimately, the Supreme Court— to invent new doctrines of presidential immunity to shield him. Third, he broke all internal resistance within the Republican Party to his lawless actions. Republican officeholders, donors, and influencers who had once decried the January 6 attempted coup as utterly and permanently debarring— one by one, Trump brought them to heel. Americans who cherished constitutional democracy were left to rely on the outcome of the 2024 election to protect their institutions against Trump. It was not enough… So, the ancient struggle resumes again: progress against reaction, dignity against domination, commerce against predation, stewardship against spoliation, global responsibility against national chauvinism. No quitting.”