For Pete's Sake

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It’s never a good sign when a cabinet nominee needs to have his mom go on TV to defend him.  And oh-so far worse when the position is to be Secretary of Defense, in charge of the Pentagon, all U.S. military forces and national security.
 
Not just a bad sign for Pete Hegseth, but for the United States, as well, having to imagine the reaction of our adversaries he’ll have to meet with.  “Before we start negotiating, Secretary Hegseth, I just want to be sure that you have the official word in the room today, or will you have to check with your mother?”  No, that won’t be said – or probably won’t be said – but I can’t imagine that it won’t be an unspoken thought.

By the way, as deep a dive as we're about to take into the hellish world of Pete Hegseth, ultimately this is all about something more.  Bear with me.

But when a Secretary of Defense nominee has his mom go on TV to defend him, and for all the reasons he needs her to defend him, that's an unprecedented starting point so huge that to ignore it and All That is Pete Hegseth would border on malpractice.
 
Penelope Hegseth was on Fox mostly to try to tamp down a story about how she had written a letter to her son several years back about how he had been abusing the women in his life and that he should seek help – a letter which she says she quickly retracted a day or so later.  The thing is:  she did write it.  And however much she might have regretted writing it at the time, she wrote it for a reason.  Whether the reason wasn’t as substantive as she wrote, a mother doesn’t write that if her child was an angel.  More likely, it seems, is that she regretted it because, as a mother, she felt it was written out of anger or disappointment or was too harsh and hurtful, and could be dealt with better.  Or not.  Who knows?  But she did write it. For whatever reason she felt in the moment had at least some validity underneath.
 
This wonderful man nominated to be Secretary of Defense, she said on Fox, is "not the Pete from seven years ago. But the Pete of today," claiming he is now a changed man.
 
I always love it when someone’s mom (or when anyone, but especially a mom) says: let me tell you what I meant when I took the time to sit down and write my son to stop abusing women because when I did that it's not what you think. And he's much better now than he was a whole seven years ago, so please let him be in charge of national defense, okay?  He’s a changed man, now.
 
Now.  Thank goodness.  He’s changed.  From a whole seven years ago!  And yes, people can change over seven years, even from having a drinking problem and being an abuser of women.  Usually that takes many years and requires intense therapy or finding God and doing relentless penance or hitting rock bottom and having to strip your past and making up for misconduct with great regret, deep apologies and efforts of good deeds.  But it can, conceivably, occur over just seven years.  Though such a fast growth from such a dark past tends to be seen in a beatific personality change of thankfulness and kindness.  Or perhaps requires having a lobotomy.  Pete Hegseth appears to evince none of that.  He comes across like a viscerally angry and obsessed guy, who still has women issues, including believing that women don’t belong in military combat.  Despite it being a settled matter for almost a decade, and the military itself being fully behind it.
 
But, okay, so his mom says he's not the same from seven years ago. Does that mean he doesn't abuse as many women as before?  Or doesn’t drink as much?  Or...what?  For that matter, what had he been doing that he had to be a "changed man" from??
 
Of course, the issue isn't that Pete Hegseth is better now and well-enough today to be alone with women, and drive a car without fear of being pulled over for weaving in traffic but...well-enough to run the United States Department of Defense, for which he has zero experience.
 
Pete Hegseth posted on TwiXter that the charges against him come from anonymous sources, and that The Left is afraid of him and Trump because they're afraid of "disrupters and change agents." 

It's a cool, tough-sounding bit of bombast.  But then, when dealing with facts, his mom is not an anonymous source.  And police and hospital records of assault charges are actually real.  And what concerns The Left (and should concern all Americans, especially those who care about protecting democracy) is that Trump is a convicted felon found liable of rape with dementia who wants to be a dictator. And wants as his Defense Secretary a man who his co-workers say has a drinking problem and records show was accused of rape.
 
Hegseth also did an interview yesterday with former Fox host Megyn Kelly.  Among other things, he commented, "No one's ever approached me and said, oh, you should really look at getting help for a drink. Never. I've never sought counseling, never sought help.”
 
That sounds like something on the first page of the Alcoholics Anonymous handbook, for signs of an alcoholic.  Not that people without a drinking problem couldn’t say the same, just that they’d say it very differently.  You say it like that, and it’s as if you know you drink a lot and are mostly trying to convince yourself you’re fine.  Until you hit rock bottom and realize you need help.  (It also conveniently separates others never saying he should get help "for a drink" from his mother telling him to get help for his treatment of women.  And whether his insistence about others is even true is another matter entirely.)
 
But also notable is something else he said in the interview – but it’s even more notable when taken in context with something else he said in the interview, when he stated how he’d been in combat when you’re sworn by “General Order Number 1” that prohibits military personnel from consuming alcohol during deployment.  "That's how I view this role as Secretary of Defense is, I'm not going to have a drink, at all. And it's not hard for me because it's not a problem for me," Hegseth said so forthrightly.  Adding as well, to drive the point dramatically home -- "So this is the biggest deployment of my life, and there won't be a drop of alcohol on my lips while I'm doing it.”
 
Cool.  Except that that other thing he said in the interview was “You know, how do you deal with the demons you see on the battlefield? Sometimes it's with a bottle."
 
That does not sound like someone who actually followed General Order Number 1.  Maybe he did, but he’s saying you deal with battlefield stress with alcohol.  His words.  And to think being Secretary of Defense for the entire country isn’t stress every day, every hour, that’s fooling yourself.
 
If it wasn’t clear before that interview, it is now.  The game is over for Pete Hegseth.  He just doesn’t seem to know it yet.

When the person leading your support in the Senate to be Defense Secretary is Tommy Tuberville, the first-term senator and former football coach who held up the nation's security by blocking the promotions of over 400 officers for 10 months, you have to know that your confirmation is not only in trouble, but over.
 
The thing is, for all this – and I know that “all this” is a lot – this really isn’t about Pete Hegseth.  But to point out the depth of the bigger problem it shows about Trump.
 
That’s because all this and even more – the rape accusation, police and hospital reports, payment of NDA hush money, public drunkenness, financial mismanagement at a veterans charity he was president of and ran before being replaced (which doesn't bode well for someone nominated to run the entire U.S. military of 3 million people...), claims by fellow-workers of worrying drinking on the job, a history of sexist behavior with women, the letter to him from his mother – all of that caught the Trump team off guard!!!  Because Trump didn’t want to use the FBI.  Seemingly because he always says he doesn’t trust the FBI, though more probably because he knows their vetting process is in-depth and will disqualify the deeply loyal people he wants.  Never realizing that other people -- like the press, and senators tasked by the Constitution to decide on cabinet nominees, and outside political groups – all will be doing their own investigations.  And will come up with all of this material you buried your head in the sand to avoid knowing.
 
Never mind that what you didn’t want to know concerned the person to whom you were asking to entrust U.S. national security to.
 
And it caught them all off-guard and made the incoming administration look more than incompetent, but also okay with putting the country at risk.
 
Furthermore, they’ve already lost one high-profile nominee, Matt Gaetz, who Trump wanted to be Attorney General.  And other critical security nominees are teetering on the edge – Tulsi Gabbard for Director of National Intelligence, and maybe even Kash Patel as FBI Director.  For all we know, Robert Kennedy Jr. might be a challenge to get confirmed as Director of Health and Human Services, since for all his weird problems, MAGOP senators hold no great loyalty for him as a lifelong Democrat.  Of them all, Gabbard may even be a higher hurdle than Hegseth, since there are reports that even some MAGOP senators are concerned she might be a Russian asset!  Moreover, Trump's nominee to head the DEA dropped out.  (No, no, Trump later claimed, of course, he fired the guy.)
 
The problem for Trump with losing Gaetz and likely Hegseth, and Gabbard deeply problematic even among MAGOPs in the Senate, is that it emboldens MAGOP senators in pushing back against Trump’s worst nominations.  For all the threats made to them by those in the Trump circle, that if  you don’t confirm Trump’s choices, we will make your lives a living hell, when the senators see three high nominees go down (very possibly, though not certain), it lessens the fear about not confirming a fourth.  And as much as Kash Patel is disliked by both sides, and seen as woefully underqualified, and Kennedy is almost lunatic with stances all over the place – conservative, liberal and interplanetary –they both might have slid through, if all the other nominees held strong.  That’s no longer the case.
 
And ultimately, Patel and even Gabbard might get confirmed.  And Hegseth, too, though that seems improbable at this point.  But even if so, it’s weakened Trump, because it got all the senators who were loyally and firmly on his side to actually think about going against him.  And that’s before he’s even been sworn in.  And won’t be for another six weeks.  So, when your own party starts to chip away at your perceived power – either just a little, or very possibly a great deal – it bodes poorly for you.
 
And Trump did it all to himself.  It’s his hubris.  His self-delusion, not helped by dementia and not surrounding himself with anyone who will say “This is a very terrible idea.”  And it’s that hubris, believing and trying to claim to all that he and his party won in a landslide – when he won by only 1.5% and the party actually lost a seat in the House, and even the Senate majority is small – that is probably the biggest risk and hurdle he faces.
 
Because as Rick Wilson famously stated, “Everything Trump touches dies.”  And that doesn’t just pertain to others.