When Secretary of Protection Pete Hegseth summoned round 800 high navy officers to Quantico, Virginia, this week, there was widespread hypothesis about mass firings, new geopolitical priorities, even a declaration of battle.
None of that occurred. As a substitute, President Donald Trump confirmed as much as ship lots of his ordinary boasts and grievances to a largely subdued group of service members. However Trump then pivoted to one thing new for the navy: basically asserting that they need to be deployed to US cities, together with San Francisco and Chicago.
“I instructed Pete we should always use a few of these harmful cities as coaching grounds for our navy, Nationwide Guard, however navy, trigger we’re going into Chicago very quickly,” Trump stated.
Hegseth adopted this together with his personal meandering speech, largely centered on restoring the navy’s lethality and so-called warrior ethos.
The weird gathering, and Hegseth’s speech, can train us quite a bit concerning the protection secretary’s management model — and why his choice by Trump to run the Pentagon looms as an particularly consequential alternative. To discover additional, In the present day, Defined co-host Noel King spoke with Kerry Howley, a author at New York journal who not too long ago wrote a characteristic on Hegseth.
Under is an excerpt of their dialog, edited for size and readability. There’s rather more within the full podcast, so hearken to In the present day, Defined wherever you get podcasts, together with Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.
You wrote a terrific piece about Pete Hegseth. What was the headline? It was a terrific headline.
I consider it was referred to as “Taking part in Secretary.”
“Pete Hegseth is enjoying secretary.” That was it. You spend numerous time speaking to individuals who know the secretary of protection and also you painted an image of a man who’s chaotic. Is that honest?
I feel that’s an correct description, sure.
Why is a man who’s chaotic on this job within the first place?
I feel Pete Hegseth is on this job as a result of he seems to be to Donald Trump just like the sort of man who must be on this job. Trump encountered Hegseth in his earlier life as a Fox & Mates Weekend co-host, during which Hegseth would generally speak about navy issues.
And I feel it’s fairly universally acknowledged that Trump thought that’s the best way a secretary of protection ought to look. I do know it was very shocking to folks in Hegseth’s fast orbit that he was chosen for this appointment and I can solely think about it was additionally shocking to Pete Hegseth.
From what you’ve seen overlaying him over the previous couple of months, how unorthodox is he when it comes to his management of the Division of Protection?
I might say that he has fixations which can be uncommon for this place. This can be a man who got here from tv and his preoccupation continues to be possibly crafting a visible second, social media, the best way the division seems to be to the broader public, the sort of branding for the Division of Protection, and he spends numerous time crafting that picture.
He’s somebody who has a protracted historical past of points with impulse management. There are the very well-documented substance abuse points. There are sexual assault allegations. There are affairs. There have been accusations of monetary mismanagement at, I consider, each organizations that he led previous to his job because the secretary of protection, the place he leads probably the most difficult, largest human organizations on this planet.
There have been sort of fixed personnel points, high-profile resignations, leak investigations. This can be a very leaky division, and what that tells you is that individuals are involved, however don’t really feel that they’ll run these considerations up the ladder in an official capability and so are speaking by the press. There’s after all Sign Gate, and there was a second Sign Gate. Hegseth didn’t do himself any favors by sort of failing to acknowledge that something had gone fallacious. And there was this type of panicked aggression that emerged in additional interviews.
It appeared to be an issue even with disaster communications. It wasn’t clear to this division methods to deal with the disaster itself. This was an actual focus of the administration: “The place are the leaks? We should discover the leakers.” And that created a scenario the place totally different political factions who’re sort of jockeying inside his workplace may attempt to painting folks they didn’t like because the leakers. So that you had Pete Hegseth publicly blaming two shut buddies and a 3rd high aide of leaking, of betraying him.
After which how do issues change after the fallout from Sign Gate? What occurs on the Protection Division then?
So what sources instructed me was that within the early days of this administration, of this tenure, Hegseth got here in with ambition. He was curious, he was , though he didn’t have the deep expertise of his predecessors. There was sort of an openness to study. After which after Sign Gate, the angle was extra of paranoia, worry.
“As a substitute of attempting to resolve a few of the issues that Hegseth talked about throughout his affirmation…the division stopped being inventive, and it began being only a mechanism for implementing government orders.”
His trusted circle grew to become a lot smaller. You noticed, sort of oddly, his spouse was regularly within the workplace giving orders to the general public relations arm of the division. His brother got here on, his private lawyer. And so as a substitute of counting on this deep bench of people that have been there for a really very long time, he’s surrounding himself with extra of his sort of private entourage.
It feels like he could also be in search of individuals who received’t betray him.
Sure. And the worry actually, I might say it contaminated the ambitions that everybody had for the division. As a substitute of attempting to resolve a few of the issues that Hegseth talked about throughout his affirmation — issues he may need been bold about reforming earlier, as somebody described it to me — the division stopped being inventive, and it began being only a mechanism for implementing government orders.
In different phrases, he was simply sort of ready for Trump to inform him what to do.
Hegseth will not be an ideological character. That is one thing that sources near him emphasised. He used to have a extra interventionist mindset. He wrote a number of books about how we should always have been in Iraq longer. And as quickly as he got here into this administration, he began parroting a few of these extra isolationist factors of view. He’s somebody who’s prepared to shift his ideology relying on who he is perhaps speaking to, and I feel that’s significantly helpful to somebody who would possibly need Hegseth to comply with questionable orders.
This isn’t someone who’s going to have a purple line, as a result of he’s not somebody who has robust concepts about what the navy must be doing. So if Hegseth’s sq. jaw is finally what bought him this job, what’s maintaining him within the job is his demonstrated loyalty to the robust man on the high. I feel he’s right here as a result of Donald Trump trusts that when Donald Trump calls on Pete Hegseth to do one thing questionable, he’s a man who’s going to comply with orders.
