Dumb Dead Man Walking

Pete Hegseth may not survive the week. Or this weekend.

“We just learned that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth had a little make up room built at the Pentagon to get ready for TV interviews,” joked late night host Jimmy Kimmel on Thursday night. “He totally denies this. He called it a totally fake news story. And a Defense Department official added, ‘It makes no sense. Pete does his own makeup.’ (pause for laughter) Which is more embarrassing?”

Kimmel then showed a video of one of Hegseth’s frequent video statement, filtered with fake makeup.

Hegseth has committed the worst possible offense in Trump World. He has become a joke. He is mocked relentlessly — not just on comedy shows but on regular news coverage. That’s because the bad news just keeps pouring out of the SecDef’s office — or what’s left of it after five of his hand-picked top aides were fired or forced to resign in the past week.

The Signalgate scandal is now over a month old and keeps getting worse. This week, we learned that Hegseth had used the unsecured commercial app Signal for another chat where he sent classified information about impending strikes on Yemen to his wife, brother and personal lawyer. None of them had anything remotely like a need to know this highly restricted information.

Then we learned that he likely did it by having Signal installed on his Pentagon office computer and apparently copy and pasted information sent over a secured information channel used by U.S. Central Command. Just today, it got worse. Hegseth had an unsecured internet cable installed in his Pentagon office that “by passed the Pentagon’s security protocols,” reports the Associated Press.

We should pause here to understand just how bad this is. At the Pentagon, the office of the Secretary of Defense is considered a SCIF, a Special Compartmentalized Information Facility. No one is allowed to bring in cell phones, or computers, or smart watches, or wireless earpods for fear that they could be tapped. Hegseth put in an entire cable connection that could be fairly easily hacked.

“Known as a ‘dirty’ internet line by the IT industry, it connects directly to the public internet where the user’s information and the websites accessed do not have the same security filters or protocols that the Pentagon’s secured connections maintain,” reports AP.

His behavior out of the office is no better. The New York Times reported Friday that Hegseth’s personal number was “easily accessible on the internet and public apps as recently as March. The phone number could be found in a variety of places, including WhatsApp, Facebook and a fantasy sports site.”

We have had some terrible secretaries of defense. We have had secretaries that did truly evil things or truly stupid things. But we have never had a secretary that is so profoundly stupid.

Or arrogant. The Wall Street Journal reports that Hegseth - who never rose beyond the rank of major or attended any service academy or had general staff training - hysterically screamed at senior officers, threating to “polygraph” them over alleged leaks.

“I’ll hook you up to a f—ing polygraph!” Hegseth shouted at Adm. Christopher Grady, the then-acting chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, according to two people familiar with the exchange. Hegseth demanded proof that Grady hadn’t leaked news of the March 21 [Musk China] briefing.

I don’t see how Hegseth can survive. One hundred days in, he accomplished very little, while destroying a great deal. He tried his best to implement the Trump strategy of relentless offense. As New York Times columnist David Brooks describes this strategy in his Friday column:

A leader who takes the initiative forces his opponents into a reactive mode. He forces his opponents to respond when they are not yet prepared. He destroys the enemy’s planning by presenting them with situations they did not anticipate. The purpose of permanent offense is to produce in the minds of your opponents a sense of disorientation, defensiveness, disruption and mental overload. (Welcome to the modern Democratic Party.)

Hegseth did this, coming in with the same revenge and destroy agenda as Trump. He fired a half dozen highly capable generals and admirals for the sin of being black or female. He purged hundreds of books from military institutes. He tore up decades-old rules preventing discrimination in the armed forces. He coated it all in the excuse that he was restoring “war fighting and lethality” to the military, as if the lethality of the most powerful military on the planet had ever been in doubt.

But actual accomplistments? “Ask the Houthis how he’s doing,” Trump said when asked if he still had confidence in Hegseth. Okay, let’s ask. How are those strikes on the Houthis going?

Although the raids have killed scores of Yemeni civilians, they do not appear to have seriously degraded the ability of the Houthis to shoot down American aircraft or disrupt shipping in their coastal waters. “Three U.S. Air Force MQ-9 Reaper drones have been shot down by Houthi militants in Yemen this past week, bringing the number of drones that have been brought down by the Houthis since March 15, when the Trump administration began a sustained air campaign against the militant group, to six,” reports ABC News. Each drone costs $30 million, many times the cost of the weapons Houthi gunners use to destroy them.

The only question remaining is when Hegseth will resign. He increasingly focused solely on survival. “Hegseth has become concerned about how Trump is perceiving the situation and the possibility of being fired,” reports the WSJ. “He has spent hours on the phone shoring up support outside the Pentagon and was late to multiple meetings during his first trip to the Asia-Pacific region.”

Denial. Diversion. Survival. Hegseth is running out of rope. Trump may just be looking for a good time (say five o’clock on a Friday or Saturday during a Pope’s funeral weekend?) to swing the ax.

If Hegseth wasn’t drinking heavily before this week, he very likely is now. Wouldn’t you be?