The Beclowning of the Executive Branch Begins Anew.
Senate Republicans are really okay with this. Whee!!
By conventional standards, Pete Hegseth did not have a great confirmation hearing today. He got raked over the coals by Democrats about his myriad personal scandals and his failure to disclose some of these scandals to the Trump transition team. He acknowledged his lack of large-scale management experience but tried to sell that inexperience as a positive. When pushed on his myriad transgressions, he argued that he had been forgiven by Jesus, which is apparently a “Get Out Of Scandal Free!” card for the incoming administration.
He also displayed a rather appalling lack of knowledge of basic international relations:
This performance is unsurprising to anyone even vaguely familiar with Hegseth’s track record and managerial ineptitude. So, again, by conventional standards, Hegseth had a bad hearing. The problem is, we don’t live in conventional times anymore. In the times we live in, Hegseth managed to stonewall Democrats on questions long enough for Republicans to close ranks behind him.
According to The Hill’s Ellen Mitchell and Al Weaver, Senate Armed Services Committee chair Roger Wicker “declared the hearing a ‘tour de force’ and ‘triumph’ on the part of Hegseth. ‘Mr. Hegseth had three audiences: the committee, the United States Senate and the American general public. I think it was a magnificent display of his knowledge and his ability to communicate his leadership abilities and I feel very good about this hearing today,’ Wicker told reporters. ‘I don’t think [it] could have gone any better.’”
Senator Joni Ernst, who had expressed skepticism about Hegseth back in November, announced she was a yes vote after this shitstorm.1 As the Washington Post’s Karen Tumulty concluded afterwards, “The hearing… revealed the template we are going to see with Trump’s other controversial nominations: Stick to the talking points and avoid answering yes-no questions from Democrats.”
And this was just the tip of the iceberg. Politico reported over the weekend that most of Trump’s controversial, not-really-qualified nominees now look set to be confirmed:
With a whirlwind of confirmation hearings launching on Capitol Hill, Republicans are more confident than ever that they’ve gotten Trump’s personnel blitz back on track — thanks to a combination of hardball politics, appeals to GOP unity and lots of personal charm.
Most Republican senators “are predisposed to let the president have his team absent some extraordinary circumstances,” Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) said on Monday.
The biggest question now for Senate Republicans isn’t who they will be able to confirm, it’s how long will it take to confirm them all. GOP leaders are warning senators to prepare for Friday votes or even weekend work in the coming weeks….
There are signs that GOP senators are preparing to fall in line behind most, if not all, of Trump’s picks. Intelligence Committee Republicans appear ready to embrace Gabbard after she backed a key surveillance program. And early predictions that Kash Patel’s FBI nomination would run into trouble quickly collapsed as he won over potential GOP skeptics in private meetings.
“I think [Gabbard’s] moving in the right direction,” Sen. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.) said. “I really do. I think she’s had some good meetings. She’s a very quick study, and I think she will do well in her open hearings.”
That optimism is shared inside the Trump transition, which has been orchestrating a carefully scripted charm offensive targeting the Senate GOP — with Hegseth, Gabbard and Patel pounding Capitol Hill’s marble hallways particularly hard to woo potential skeptics.
“The nominees have done a lot of hard work, and they are ready,” said one transition official granted anonymity to describe the effort, who added that Trump’s convincing victory has helped smooth the path for nominees: “The appetite of the American people for a bunch of theatrics is pretty diminished and it will be seen as obstructionist to play too many games.”
Sorry, just give me a second to savor the irony of a Trump official decrying theatrics and obstructionism….
…a little longer….
…juuuust a little longer….
[You’ve made your point—ed.]
The hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World was already deeply skeptical of Trump’s collection from the Island of Misfit Policy Principals. Even thinking about whether Hegseth can white-knuckle his way through being Secretary of Defense without regular three-gin-and-tonic-breakfasts is unsettling. The transition team’s efforts to purge civil servants believed to be disloyal to president Trump personally exacerbates the problem. In other words, Hegseth isn’t the only one who is going to be white-knuckling it for the next few years — so is anyone whose job it is to pay attention to U.S. foreign policy and national security.
In the first term the hard-working staff over at Spoiler Alerts wrote at length about the beclowning of the executive branch. By the end of Trump’s first term, he was relying on D-list policy principals, scraping the bottom of the bottom of the barrel.
The D-list is the starting point for most of Trump’s second-term cabinet. Sure, there are a few nominees who would have served in any GOP administration of the last fifty years. Most of these clowns, however, would have been laughed out of the room in any prior administration.
WaPo’s David Ignatius was flummoxed by Republican passivity in the face of Hegseth’s lack of qualifications: “Hegseth’s greatest weakness is his complete lack of experience in significant management. Being defense secretary is probably the hardest management job in America, and Hegseth gave absolutely no evidence that he is prepared for it. It’s amazing to me that pro-defense Republicans seem so oblivious to the potential danger of having a neophyte try to manage this enormous defense enterprise.”
Senate Republicans, however, have decided that either they are fine with these choices or that they prefer voting for Trump’s picks over being pressured and primaried.
Who knows, maybe it will all work out. It’s not like Trump’s first term went so badly. Oh, wait…
To be fair, based on her questions, she was clearly a “yes” before the hearing even started.
Really looking forward to "But XO, Jesus is my Lord and Savior!" next time I have to enforce good order and discipline in my unit.
Dude is really complaining about standards (which were never lowered) when the standards have been lowered literally for him and him alone.
I read your piece and Noah Smith's this morning, along with quite a few others' substack opinions, and it is mind-boggling and frightening to contemplate Pete Hegseth in charge of the DoD at a time so fraught and dangerous. I am in mid-70s, and I have lived through many crises over many different administrations and Congresses. I have always considered myself a rigorously analytic, high-information, well-informed citizen, but never in my life could I have imagined what we are seeing now. Bottom line (and I never thought I would say this in my lifetime), I don't see this country getting back to or getting through this horrifying debacle intact.