Hegseth Battle Shows Republicans An Easy Way To Stop Losing

Longtime Democrat activist and ABC News host George Stephanopoulos gave Republicans two wins this weekend. The first was settling with Donald Trump for $15 million, plus $1 million in lawyer’s fees, for lying about the president elect. Stephanopoulos had falsely characterized the result of one part of the Democrat Party’s lawfare strategy to bankrupt and imprison Trump and otherwise prevent his election.

The second gift to Republicans was the inadvertent showcasing on Stephanopoulos’ Sunday show of how the GOP can effectively maneuver against the media complex and weak Republicans who carry water for the permanent D.C. bureaucracy.

Stephanopoulos asked a panel of D.C. insiders if Pete Hegseth, who attended the Army-Navy football game this weekend with Trump, had “turned the tide” in his pursuit of confirmation as the secretary of defense. Hegseth, a decorated veteran and former Fox News host, had been the target of a media campaign to force him out as the nominee.

Republican strategist Reince Priebus said Hegseth had turned the tide because “[y]ou’re seeing Trump double down” on his nomination by reiterating his desire to see him confirmed and publicly showing his expectation that he would be confirmed. He also highlighted how corporations were coming out of the woodwork to support the inauguration, something that was unthinkable eight years ago, as the battle over Hegseth was heating up.

“I think Trump is as tough as ever right now. I mean he’s on the world stage. People are coming to him. I just think this thing is on — it’s on a big-time cruise control, you know, 85 miles an hour down the middle of the interstate,” Priebus said.

Washington Post congressional reporter Marianna Sotomayor agreed with the assessment and said there had been a “significant shift” on the previously embattled nominee. She credited the grassroots Republican attacks on weak Republicans as particularly helpful to Hegseth’s case.

“And I think the reason why is because the moment that Trump came out and said that he is behind his pick, we did see a number of Trump allies kind of green lighting to the MAGA base, all right, start calling senators who are a little bit worried on Hegseth. Start — start to threaten, actually, a number of senators, including Sen. Joni Ernst, that she could get primaried. This is something that Elon Musk has also said publicly that he will use his super PACs to not just find candidates to go against any senator who may vote against a nominee, but also fund those campaigns.”

The Federalist’s Shawn Fleetwood broke the news that Ernst was waging an “aggressive” campaign against Hegseth’s nomination in the hope she might be appointed defense secretary. Her past support for pushing transgender ideology on the military was also highlighted. The Federalist’s John Daniel Davidson explained the stakes of the nomination battle in his piece, “Pete Hegseth’s Nomination Is A Hill Trump Should Die On.”

Associated Press executive editor Julie Pace also agreed that Republican voters had apparently figured out how to remind senators that they mattered at least as much as their beltway friends.

“I think Marianna has it right, there was this sort of pivot point where you could see, particularly, I think, when the pressure campaign against Ernst really started to mount, that I think that took over and became the dominant focus of a lot of these senators as opposed to some of the allegations and some of the questions around Hegseth,” Pace said.

Democrat strategist Donna Brazile said controllers had unleashed “MAGA” on senators who were “waffling” on the nominees.

Priebus pushed back on the claim. “[T]hey didn’t unleash MAGA. America unleashed MAGA. I mean the point — the whole point of Trump’s victory is, how did the traditional picks that we used to always put in place, how did that work for us? The American people rejected it. And they accepted what Donald Trump’s been selling in this country for the last couple years. So, I mean, he won with Muslim voters in Dearborn. He won with Puerto Ricans in Florida. He won a majority of male Hispanic voters. He won every state across the country better except for I think Washington and Oregon,” Priebus said. “MAGA is here because MAGA has been accepted by the American people, and so that’s why we’re here. We’ve got to be reminded of this all the time.”

The four panelists more or less helped explain how to fight the constant information operations deployed by the media and other Democrats in order to get weak Republicans to assist in the sabotage of Republican policy goals. Republicans should show strength and conviction in the face of obvious media campaigns against their nominees or policy ideas. And Republicans need to remind weak elected officials that they should fear their voters fare more.

These simple steps enable Republicans to neuter, blow up, and render impotent the awful playbook that the media, Democrats, and the permanent D.C. class use to get their way.

A bit of fortitude and a reminder that there are consequences to assisting the opposing party with its goals helps the GOP start rolling down the highway at 85 MPH on cruise control, as Priebus put it. And the strategy can be repeated over and over because Trump’s Republican agenda is supported by a majority of the American people.