Hegseth Undermining Trump

Trump needs a War Department reformer, not a liability.

The Trump administration entered crisis mode as Washington returned from Thanksgiving—placed there by Secretary of War Pete Hegseth and his alleged role in a black-letter violation of the War Crimes Act.

Trump must now move decisively to protect the major accomplishments his second administration has set in motion or realized.

There seems to be no doubt that a war crime has been committed. Now begins the age-old Washington logroll of “who knew what when?”

On September 2, the U.S. military struck a suspected drug boat that had departed from Venezuela. While Democrats, pointless Europeans, and anti-Trump Republicans have complained about these tactics, few Americans have lost sleep over the idea of using the military to curb foreign contributors to the large number of overdose deaths in the United States.

An October poll by Harris indicated 71% of Americans support destroying boats importing illegal drugs from South America into the United States. Some 77% of Americans believe that fentanyl is the leading cause of overdose deaths in the United States.

However, one problem with this attack is that someone ordered the military to go back and kill the survivors of the initial assault. On November 28, the Washington Post—admittedly a low-ratings, anti-Trump political tabloid with little credibility—reported that Hegseth himself gave the verbal order. According to the left-wing outlet:

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gave a spoken directive, according to two people with direct knowledge of the operation. “The order was to kill everybody,” one of them said.

On the same day, Hegseth attacked the Washington Post, writing, “As usual, the fake news is delivering more fabricated, inflammatory, and derogatory reporting to discredit our incredible warriors fighting to protect the homeland.”

This fits a pattern with Hegseth by which he attempts to shift perception of attacks on him to attacks on servicemembers.

However, it is difficult to ignore that he did not, at that time, deny that the killing occurred or that he ordered it.

The immediate problem is that this act is an unambiguous violation of the law of war and of specific U.S. law (i.e., not make-believe “international law”). The longer-term problem is political in nature.

I’m not a lawyer, and I don’t even play one on TV. But according to ChatGPT, which I ran past a Republican attorney with war-crimes prosecution experience:

It is a federal crime for a U.S. national or servicemember to willfully kill wounded, sick, or shipwrecked combatants who are protected by the Geneva Conventions, because such killings constitute grave breaches of those Conventions and thus “war crimes” under the War Crimes Act. Furthermore, these prohibitions are status-neutral: it is likewise a war crime to intentionally kill wounded, sick, or detained unprivileged belligerents (“unlawful combatants”) who are taking no active part in hostilities.”

On Monday, President Trump seemed to grasp the severity of the alleged crime, even as parts of his administration attempted to deflect blame from Hegseth. The President said that he “wouldn’t have wanted that, not the second one.”

Hegseth and perhaps other administration officials are attempting to shift blame for the decision to Admiral Mitch Bradley, the head of U.S. Southern Command. Unnamed officials speaking to the New York Times have backed this claim.

However, Congress seems incredulous. The leadership of both parties in the Senate and House Armed Services Committees have launched investigations. The Pentagon is already stonewalling the Hill, refusing to turn over the written order related to the attack. Inevitably, there will be a steady drip of this information, and both eyewitness and indirect accounts, in the weeks and months ahead. This is Washington at its best and worst. Trump’s agenda will suffer.

Trump’s instinct to defend Hegseth, or at least give him the benefit of the doubt, is commendable and understandable—but nonetheless ill-advised. In Trump’s first term, in which I did a second stint at the State Department, it was clear that the Defense Department was never really part of the administration. After Trump’s urgent mission of eliminating ISIS as an organized military force was achieved, Pentagon chiefs mistakenly saw it as their job to represent their bureaucracies to the White House rather than vice versa. The Deep State was mostly in charge.

As a result of this reality and other shortcomings of the first term, in his second administration the President has turned to outsiders, whether they literally had no prior Washington experience, such as Hegseth and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, or people who ran against the Washington grain, such as Vice President J.D. Vance or Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

This decision has great benefits, but also great risks. Vance, Rubio, and Bessent are naturals. Others, like Hegseth, are fools, seemingly waging a war on gravitas, who put not only their careers and the fates of the departments they manage at risk, but who put Trump himself in needless political peril. Hegseth is the biggest wonderment, since he was thought to have media skills coming from a job at Fox News, but is terrible on media and runs a laughable press shop.

They risk shifting perceptions of Trump’s second term from one of greatness to something more like that of President Warren Harding: a remarkable and popular president in his day who was later relegated by history to a second-rate president because of his poor choices in personnel who engaged in corrupt and stupid acts.

Hegseth’s offense, as it appears now, is not just a prima facie violation of U.S. law, but one of providing the President’s opponents on the left and right an easy avenue of political attack against the President. Put bluntly, imperiling a presidency is the greater crime than the one of which Hegseth is accused.

For example, the President was on a roll in lambasting Democrats who produced a video that called on members of the military to refuse to execute illegal orders—something servicemembers are not only allowed to do, but required to do. This seemed like a red-herring call for insubordination, since no evidence of illegal orders seemed to exist when the video was released on November 18. Hegseth even implicitly threatened one of the video’s participants, current U.S. Senator and retired Navy Captain Mark Kelly (D-Arizona), with recall and prosecution. The FBI has sought to interview the video’s speakers—often an ominous harbinger of federal prosecution.

So far, so good. Since the Biden administration elevated lawfare to a level unprecedented in modern U.S. political history, it makes perfect sense to return the favor. Wimpy Republicans on Capitol Hill and in pointless environs like the Wall Street Journal editorial page inevitably suggest that Republicans should rise above the fray and set an example. This tactic always fails and instead amounts to unilateral disarmament—a fundamental realization of the New Right, which rejects their weakness.

But Hegseth has seemingly now vindicated Trump’s opponents. Even though they produced their video before news broke of Hegseth’s alleged illegal order, they now look prescient. Hegseth has pulled the carpet out from under Trump.

Then there is the rest of the Hegseth problem. The U.S. military is in great need of reform. In the early 2000s, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld faced a herculean task of transforming the military from a heavy force still configured to fight the long-gone Soviet Union into a more agile and expeditionary force. Today, the essential task is to transform the military from one designed to wage counterinsurgency or field exotic, boutique weapons that are exquisite but hyper-expensive into one that can learn lessons from the Ukraine War and fight in a drone-centric, high- and low-tech, networked environment. Achieving this feat requires reconstituting all of the Armed Services and getting buy-in not only from the military but from both parties in Congress.

Hegseth, who is literally an over-promoted weekend-morning cable news host, is particularly unsuited to this job. Not only does he lack any real vision for the military other than a laudable toughening of requirements for individual servicemembers, but he has no support from either party on Capitol Hill. And as the saying goes, “Administrations come and go, but congressional committees are forever.” It is Congress that ultimately decides how the military is composed, based on what Congress decides to fund. And clearly Congress has no confidence in Hegseth.

Neither should Trump.