On Monday, the liberal outlet National Public Radio reported that Donald Trump’s administration was looking for a replacement for Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth. This report may in fact have helped shield Hegseth from being sacked for having arranged a second Signal chat group about impending war plans for Yemen that apparently included his wife, Jennifer, his brother, Phil and personal lawyer, Tim Parlatore. The White House has embarked upon a full-scale offensive to defend Hegseth as a victim of a nefarious deep-state plot intent on undermining the President and his aides.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt was first off the mark. She depicted Hegseth as a figure of valour. ‘This is what happens when the entire Pentagon is working against you and the monumental change you are trying to implement,’ Leavitt said. ‘Unfortunately, there have been people at that building who don’t like the change the Secretary is bringing, and they are leaking and lying to mainstream media, we have seen this game played before.’
Hegseth functions as Trump’s pliant tool
Hegseth had recently fired three top aides, including Dan Caldwell, a former Marine who served in Iraq. According to Caldwell, who recently appeared on the Tucker Carlson Show, he was never administered a polygraph or even told what he was accused of leaking. Carlson says that Caldwell wasn’t fired over leaks but because he opposed a new war with Iran.
Then there was Donald Trump Jr. He took aim at a widely read essay in Politico by Hegseth’s former press spokesman, John Ullyot, that declared, ‘It’s been a month of total chaos at the Pentagon. From leaks of sensitive operational plans to mass firings, the dysfunction is now a major distraction for the President – who deserves better from his senior leadership.’ Writing on X, Don Jr. declared, ‘This guy is not America First. I’ve been hearing for years that he works his ass off to subvert my father’s agenda. That ends today. He’s officially exiled from our movement.’
After this fatwa was issued, the President himself waded in to defend his beleaguered defence secretary. On the South Lawn of the White House during the annual Easter Egg Roll, Trump called the attacks on Hegseth ‘a waste of time’. Hegseth, he said, was ‘doing a great job’.
Trump has made similar proclamations in the past, only to dump his advisers. But at least for now, he has several reasons to stand by Hegseth. For one thing, the President has now embraced a ‘no scalps’ to the news media policy. He’s determined to avoid a repetition of what occurred during his first term, when a series of aides, starting with his national security adviser Michael Flynn, resigned after they became enmeshed in scandal. For Trump 2.0 the only scandalous thing would be cravenly bowing to the fourth estate.
Another reason is that Hegseth functions as Trump’s pliant tool. The more he gets bashed by the media, the more dependent he is on the President. During his first term, Trump repeatedly clashed with ‘my generals’, as he liked to call them, who turned out to be no such thing at all. He was often defied by them. After Trump visited France in 2017, he got parade envy, telling his aides that ‘we’re going to have to try and top it’. But the top military brass put the kibosh on the idea.
This time, Trump and Hegseth have fired four-star General Charles Q. Brown Jr. as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff as well as a number of other top lawyers in the Navy and Air Force who might raise objections to a lavish military parade. 14 June is rumoured to be the date for this affair in Washington – the 250th anniversary of the US army and, incidentally, Trump’s own 79th birthday. The cost of this extravaganza is pegged at a cool $92 million (£68.7 million). Parade’s end? Not for Trump and Hegseth.
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