Does Trump Even Care About Pete?

Plus: The subtle art of telling the president-elect ‘no.’

and

Dec 05, 2024

Big news on the awards-season front: Donald Trump will be attending the Fox News Patriot Awards this evening to receive in person their Fox Patriot of the Year award. As Trump put it: “so nice!”

Politics can be a thankless job; it’s nice to see some in right-wing media are finally giving Trump some credit for all his hard work. Happy Thursday.

Pete Hegseth speaks to reporters after a meeting with Sen. John Thune (R-SD) on December 4, 2024. (Photo by Anna Moneymaker / Getty Images.)

Where’s Trump When Pete Needs Him?

by Andrew Egger

Does political peril lie in wait for those GOP senators who refuse to support Donald Trump’s most controversial nominees? That depends who you ask.

Right now, an odd split-screen is playing out among the MAGA crowd.

Trump himself is playing the whole thing surprisingly quiet—for now.

But in their podcasts, posts, and media appearances, the hard-charging national populists of the Bannonite right are trying to morph the confirmation fights over the likes of Pete Hegseth, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Tulsi Gabbard, and Kash Patel into titanic, existential struggles over whether it will be Trump or the establishment that controls the GOP.

Listen to shows like Steve Bannon’s War Room or Jack Posobiec’s Human Events Daily right now, and you’ll hear a lot of rhetoric against individual GOP senators like Kevin Cramer, James Lankford, Mike Rounds, and Thom Tillis. To the MAGA crowd, these aren’t conservative lawmakers. They’re representatives of the “uniparty,” the “D.C. duopoly,” the “globalists” representing “entrenched special interests.”

“This is the entrenched power base versus the people’s movement and the people’s president,” Posobiec said on his show yesterday. “These [nominees] were the names that were brought up to champion the agenda of MAGA forward. But the uniparty doesn’t like that. So they are lashing out in any way they can find. And it is time for MAGA to stand strong.”

Posobiec warned that the storm of controversy surrounding Hegseth was just the tip of the spear: “Do you think that if Pete Hegseth goes down, that they’re just going to stop? That you can just placate them and they’ll stop and they won’t move on to the next? No, of course they will.”

Posobiec’s guest, famed political ratfucker (to use the technical term) and Trump confidant Roger Stone, agreed: “The establishment pressure on these senators in these confirmation fights is the first salvo of an effort to dilute, delay, and derail the president’s America First agenda.”

From their lips to God’s ears! But there’s little chance we’ll be so lucky.

Trump is going to get his critical mass of agenda-loving sycophants sooner or later; the question is how many of those sycophants will be alleged rapists, drunks, naked conspiracy theorists, Kremlin enthusiasts, people with publicly published lists of political enemies, and so on. Think of it this way: How much of a practical difference will there be between the job Pam Bondi will do at DOJ versus how Matt Gaetz would have conducted himself?

But what’s increasingly interesting is how little of the push for confirmation is coming from Trump himself. Here was Steve Bannon yesterday:

I’m confused, Kevin Cramer. Because I just heard President Trump say that he called Pete Hegseth and we should all keep fighting for Pete Hegseth. So that’s what the people’s president just put out this morning. And now you’re out here saying that we shouldn’t keep fighting for Pete Hegseth.

Except Bannon didn’t actually hear Trump say this. What he heard was Hegseth saying Trump had said this. “I spoke to the president-elect this morning,” Hegseth told reporters on the Hill yesterday. “He said, ‘keep going, keep fighting. I’m behind you all the way.’”

In fact, Trump has been remarkably quiet about Hegseth. He hasn’t tweeted or truthed or skeeted1 any exhortations for senators to rally behind him or threats against those who don’t. (Maybe he’s been too busy posting photoshops of himself hanging out with Elvis Presley or standing in front of the Canadian flag.) Axios reports this morning that Trump “isn’t working the phones” on Hegseth’s behalf either. And behind the scenes, his people are busy making contingency plans for other possible nominees.

Recall it was this way with Gaetz, too. When it became clear the Florida man didn’t have the votes to be confirmed as attorney general, Trump judged it a poor use of his political capital to try to force the issue. He pulled Gaetz, nominated Bondi, and we’ve heard no more about it.

For the Bannonites, any Trump nominee rejected, even on the grounds of obvious, grave scandal, is an intolerable reminder that the establishment still gets a say. They can rant and rail about the senators resisting the mandate of history by thwarting “the people’s president” in the teeth of the “populist realignment.” The reality is those senators got in a position to supervise Trump’s picks by the people’s vote, too.

It’s Trump who gets the last laugh, though, because Hegseth’s career is falling apart, not his. He’ll start bullying senators plenty quick when we get to stuff he really cares about.

And as Marc Caputo reports today, two nominees may qualify for that treatment: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard. Beyond them, one yes-man works about as well as another.

The Kabuki on the Hill

by William Kristol

Capitol Hill has its customs and conventions, its rituals and rites. One is the way senators dispose of an unwelcome nomination by a president of their own party. The none-too-courageous solons need to usher their president’s nominee to the exit without leaving too many traces of who’s done the ushering, or how forcefully it’s been done.

And so on Capitol Hill a kabuki drama unfolded yesterday, as Donald Trump’s pick for secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, visited with Republican members of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Even a junior senator like South Dakota Republican Kevin Cramer knows the stylized moves.

First you express concern: “The allegations are very, very serious. They can’t be trivialized.”

Then you proceed to trivialize the allegations: “And I just want to know that he’s redeemed, and going forward, he’s going to be better,” and “I need to be convinced he’s not going to drink anymore. . . . Nobody wants a secretary of defense that’s got a drinking problem.”

Hegseth has denied he has a drinking problem. But he’s also pledging to senators that he won’t drink on the job—a curious promise for someone who says there is no problem to deal with. Which makes it hard to see how Sen. Cramer could honestly be convinced that Hegseth would be just fine at this post.

But, Cramer wants to stay on the good side of Trump, so he’s pretending to be nominally on board: “I’m likely to get to a ‘yes’ vote, I’d say, yeah. I see no reason to not be a ‘yes’ vote. Again, it’s not time to vote, but yeah, I look forward to being as supportive as I can of him . . . barring surprises.”

Of course if the nomination survives long enough to produce an FBI report, Cramer can be . . . surprised!

But it won’t get to that point, I’m pretty sure. Cramer’s more senior Republican colleagues on the Armed Services Committee, Iowa’s Joni Ernst and Mississippi’s Roger Wicker, will see to it that it doesn’t. Even if they don’t want to be seen shoving Pete offstage, even if they’ve sadly decided that as a Republican elected official in the age of Trump it’s too difficult to just tell the truth, they’re letting their colleagues, and the president-elect, know where they stand.

After a visit from Hegseth yesterday, Ernst said, “I appreciate Pete Hegseth's service to our country, something we both share. Today, as part of the confirmation process, we had a frank and thorough conversation.”

No endorsement there.

And Roger Wicker, who’ll chair the Armed Services Committee in the next Congress, merely recounted Hegseth’s pledge to him that he would stop drinking if confirmed. “I think that’s probably a good idea,” Wicker told reporters deadpan.

No endorsement there.

And some bit players are stepping up to play their roles. A couple of Republican senators were “granted anonymity to speak frankly” by Politico. One senator confided that Hegseth was in “a lot” of trouble in his bid to lead the Department of Defense. The other said his prospects are “bad and getting worse.”

So it went yesterday on Capitol Hill. I don’t think it will go on too much longer.

I’ve been to one actual kabuki performance, in Tokyo in December 2017. I’m sure if I knew more I’d have appreciated it more. I’ll admit, as a straightforward, “say what you mean and mean what you say” kind of guy, I tend to prefer Western movies where you have obvious good guys and bad guys, and British police dramas where you actually learn how the crime was committed.

Still, the kabuki play was interesting. When it came to an end, we all applauded, and exited the theater into the cold Tokyo evening. The Capitol Hill drama of Pete Hegseth will soon end as well. Then we’ll all have to return to confronting the very real challenges we face in the chilly darkness that is Donald Trump’s America.

Quick Hits

MRS. HEGSETH IS SORRY ABOUT ALL THAT: Pete Hegseth’s mother, Penelope, is showing Tiger Mom levels of ferocious determination to make up for her little indiscretion of a few years ago, in which she emailed her son to denounce in strong terms his routine abuse of women.

When the New York Times reported that email last week, Mrs. Hegseth told them she regretted sending it and that her claims had not been true. But with Hegseth’s nomination seemingly hanging by a thread, his mother is stepping up her efforts: She appeared on Fox & Friends yesterday morning to lament, not her son’s behavior, but her own rashness in objecting to it. “I wrote that in haste. I wrote that with deep emotions. I wrote that as a parent,” she said. “I wrote that out of love. And about two hours later, I retracted it with an apology, but nobody’s seen that.” (Mrs. Hegseth keeps talking about this follow-up email, but one does wonder: Why didn’t she print it herself and bring it to set?)

We persist in feeling a little bad for Mrs. Hegseth, even though she’s working extremely hard to get a manifestly unfit guy confirmed as secretary of defense. She was just trying to rattle some sense into her son, not supply incredibly potent ammunition to all his haters! But we’re also not sure how well it reflects on Pete—on top of everything else—to be subjecting his mother to this sort of agonizing public apology tour.

A ONE-MAN PLAGUE: Mona is spitting fire about Robert F. Kennedy Jr. over on the site today. Really, it’s hard to pick just a couple grafs to share:

[Some] seem to think we can take what we like from the Kennedy buffet and leave the rest. Not so. If he is confirmed, we won’t get only the 3 percent of Kennedy ideas that are sane, we will be saddled with the 97 percent that are deranged. It isn’t that Kennedy is merely misinformed—though he is. It’s that he’s an active agent of misinformation. That’s a character problem. Hiring him to run health policy for this country is like hiring an arsonist to head the fire department. . . .
The truth about health is that most of us could cut our risk of heart disease, cancer, and dementia if we simply ate and drank less, slept better, quit smoking, exercised more, and kept up our social circles. But Kennedy prefers to conjure evil pharmaceutical companies fouling our minds and bodies and conniving agricultural concerns forcing us to eat chemically altered foods. Some of the food on offer in American supermarkets is not healthy, it’s true. If Kennedy were keen to improve our health, he could encourage people to consume more fresh fruit and vegetables. But that’s not the way his mind works. For him, this isn’t really even about health. It’s a battle of good versus evil. He sees himself as a knight errant, but unfortunately, his “cures” involve reversing some of the greatest scientific breakthroughs in history: pasteurization, vaccines, and the scientific method of determining truth.

We mean it: Read the whole thing.

PRE-SURRENDER ON THE AIRWAVES: Yesterday, the Atlantic’s David Frum made a Morning Joe appearance discussing the many controversies surrounding defense secretary nominee Pete Hegseth—in particular, an NBC News report alleging that ten of Hegseth’s former Fox News colleagues had concerns about how his drinking affected his work. Frum made a crack: “If you’re too drunk for Fox News, you’re very, very drunk indeed.”

Minutes later, after Frum left the set, host Mika Brzezinski read an on-air apology, calling the remark “a little too flippant for this moment that we’re in.” “We have differences in coverage with Fox News, and that’s a good debate that we should have often, but right now I just want to say there’s a lot of good people who work at Fox News who care about Pete Hegseth, and we will want to leave it at that.”

We’ve written a lot about institutional pre-surrender to the incoming Trump administration. Frum wrote that the experience felt to him like exactly that. “It is a very ominous thing if our leading forums for discussion of public affairs are already feeling the chill of intimidation and responding with efforts to appease,” Frum wrote. “I do not write to scold anyone; I write because fear is infectious . . . The only antidote is courage. And that’s infectious, too.”