The competition is fierce in the Worst Member of the White House Cabinet race, but Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is clearly helping lead the pack. While the former television personality was plagued by scandal before he even arrived at the Pentagon, Hegseth has proven his critics right with overlapping failures and fiascos in recent months.
When Donald Trump sat down with The Atlantic for an interview, the beleaguered secretary came up in conversation — though probably not in ways he liked. From the article:
When we mentioned the turmoil at the Pentagon, including recent reporting that Pete Hegseth had installed a makeup room in the building, the president smiled. “I think he’s gonna get it together,” Trump said of Hegseth. “I had a talk with him, a positive talk, but I had a talk with him.”
The good news for the secretary is that he hasn’t yet been pushed out of the job he’s doing poorly, and which he was never qualified for in the first place. The bad news for Hegseth is that the president he works for thinks the secretary will at some point “get it together” — an implicit acknowledgement that the Pentagon chief, after three months on the job, does not yet have it together.
Given the importance of the Department of Defense and our national security, it stood to reason that the president and the Senate’s Republican majority would want a secretary who was ready on Day 1 to oversee one of the planet’s most complex and important bureaucracies. Instead, according to Trump, Americans have a Pentagon chief who hasn’t yet gotten it together as of Day 94.
After the report in The Atlantic was published, a reporter asked White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, “President Trump has said that Secretary Hegseth will ‘get it together.’ Does he think that Hegseth doesn’t have it together right now?”
The president’s spokesperson replied by emphasizing the “confidence” Trump has in the defense secretary’s abilities, which is very likely true. But it doesn’t change what the president said about Hegseth’s current capabilities — or lack thereof.
