Pete Hegseth’s Nomination Is A Hill Trump Should Die On

The Washington GOP establishment’s opposition to Pete Hegseth serving as President Trump’s secretary of defense has nothing to do with the unsubstantiated allegations against Hegseth and everything to do with resistance to Trump’s plans to reform the Department of Defense and end America’s involvement in endless foreign wars that are so beloved by the establishment.

That’s why Hegseth’s nomination is a hill Trump should die on. If a handful of Senate Republicans can sink Hegseth, they will spend the next four years undermining and obstructing Trump’s entire agenda. Trump needs to send them a message that such obstruction won’t be tolerated in his second term. Now is the time for the president-elect to make them understand that if they oppose his nominees, they’ll be putting their political careers in jeopardy.

Republican senators like Joni Ernst of Iowa and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who purport to be concerned about Hegseth because of alleged wrongdoing in his past, are just being dishonest. Their real objection is not with Hegseth but with Trump’s plans and his policies, especially his foreign policy.

Last week, Ernst waged a personal jihad to sink Hegseth’s nomination. As my colleague Shawn Fleetwood reported here at The Federalist, the Iowa senator repeatedly called Trump urging him to dump Hegseth, while at the same time surrogates, including Graham, were urging Trump to nominate Ernst instead. Both Ernst and Graham have expressed concern over a series of unsubstantiated allegations against Hegseth, of wrongdoing during his time working at Fox News and also while leading veteran-related nonprofit organizations. Hegseth has denied the allegations, and numerous colleagues of his have come forward to dispute the anonymous accusations.

All of it amounts to an effort to do to Hegseth what Democrats and the media did to Brett Kavanaugh when Trump nominated him to the Supreme Court in 2018. Like the accusations against Kavanaugh, the accusations against Hegseth aren’t serious or remotely believable. The only reason anyone would take them seriously is if they had other reasons for opposing his nomination, namely, that they seek to undermine Trump’s plans to reform the Defense Department and reorient America’s military posture. 

Which is to say, Ernst and Graham’s problem isn’t really with Hegseth, it’s with Trump’s vision for American foreign policy and the U.S. military. But because Trump is fresh off a landslide victory in which 77 million Americans voted for him and his MAGA agenda, they can’t just come out and oppose him openly. So instead they’re looking for reasons to oppose Trump’s nominees, the people who will be charged with carrying out his agenda. 

That’s why a handful of Senate Republicans killed the nomination of Matt Gaetz for attorney general, whose primary task was going to be to clean up a corrupt DOJ. Indeed, the GOP establishment’s success in that effort has now emboldened them to go after Hegseth, a decorated combat veteran who has spent much of his post-military career advocating for reform in the U.S. Armed Forces. 

But of course the last thing Republicans like Graham and Ernst (and Sens. John Thune, John Cornyn, Mitch McConnell, and others) want is deep reform of Washington, either at the Justice Department or the Department of Defense. What these senators would like to do is something like a repeat of what happened during Trump’s first term, when the president was hamstrung by political appointees and career bureaucrats alike who either slow-walked his priorities or undermined him, all while lying to his face about it.

For example, the Trump administration’s top envoy to the military coalition to defeat ISIS admitted in 2020 to repeatedly lying to the White House about U.S. troop levels in Syria. This was after Trump’s decision to withdraw U.S. troops from Syria prompted Defense Secretary James Mattis to resign in protest. The military bureaucracy fought Trump every step of the way on troop deployments to the Middle East and elsewhere, essentially playing shell games with the president about where and how many American troops were deployed to combat zones overseas.

It was the same with the border and immigration. When Trump decided to end DACA, the illegal Obama-era program to grant legal status to illegal immigrants who had been brought to the U.S. as minors, the acting secretary of Homeland Security, Elaine Duke, initially refused to sign the memo that would end the program. Duke agreed with the Trump White House that DACA was “problematic and probably illegal,” but she had moral qualms about ending it. Instead of resigning in protest, Duke chose to undermine Trump from within. She drafted the memo in such a way as to all but guarantee it would be struck down by the federal judiciary for being “arbitrary and capricious,” which is exactly what a 5-4 majority of the Supreme Court did in June 2020.

Something similar happened with Trump’s plans for building a border wall, ending Temporary Protected Status, and a host of other plans that would have profoundly disrupted business-as-usual in Washington. At nearly every turn, Trump’s own political appointees or the permanent bureaucracy stepped in to delay, deflect, obstruct, and mislead the president.

He can’t let that happen again. That’s why it’s so important to ensure that Hegseth and other qualified nominees don’t get derailed by Republican senators like Ernst and Graham, who pay lip service to the Trump agenda while working to undermine it behind the scenes. If Trump wants to avoid the pitfalls of his first term, he won’t let the GOP establishment and the permanent Washington bureaucracy undermine him from the inside. That starts with not allowing them to kill Hegseth’s nomination to run the Department of Defense. 

John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. He is the author of Pagan America: the Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.