Opinion: What I Learned From Enduring Pete Hegseth’s Senate Circus

A photo illustration of Pete Hegseth's senate hearing for Secretary of Defense.
Photo Illustration by Thomas Levinson/The Daily Beast/Getty/Reuters

I watched as much of Pete Hegseth’s confirmation hearings today for as long as I could stand, which was somewhere between forty-five seconds and a minute.

What a f--king joke.

I’m not interested in rehashing all the scandals Hegseth, president-elect Donald Trump’s pick for Secretary of Defense, has been ensnared in—the man is a damned disqualification Mad Libs. Allegations of infidelity, sexual assault (which Hegseth denies), financial mismanagement in the workplace (which he also denies) and struggles with alcohol—most likely, none of it will prevent him for getting the job. We have elected a president without standards, after all, so why should we expect any from our Secretary of Defense?

Hegseth is a menace, but menaces through and through are who our Burger King has selected to fill his court. History teaches us that bad people prefer to surround themselves with other bad people. And these are all bad people, a rogue’s gallery chock-a-block with fools, knaves, and thieves. They’re not bad people because of their politics, but they have the politics they do because they’re bad people.

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That’s not the same as saying the general Trump supporter is a bad person; one might simply be stupid. This stupidity rests in the faith that their candidate has any interest in serving them or the nation we elected him to desecrate for a second time. And that desecration was on full display today at the Senate.

We’ve entered the “nothing matters” era of American political history. Trump’s first four years, a time when we at least still maintained a veneer of political probity, will seem like a paragon of virtue during his second stint in the Oval Office. Behavior that led to two impeachments will now not even cause the raising of an eyebrow in the GOP. Why should it? The electorate didn’t care.

In my younger years, I remember the bipartisan orthodoxy that “character matters” when discussing Bill Clinton’s sexual escapades. They were right. Character does matter, because policy follows personality.

Clinton’s character flaws didn’t just create political problems; they created policy problems. As Robert Reich, Clinton’s former Labor Secretary, wrote in 1998, “What happens to presidential power when he shows such lack of judgment? Power inevitably subsides.”

From left: Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, Tulsi Gabbard, president-elect Donald Trump, vice president-elect JD Vance, and Pete Hegseth attend the Army-Navy football game at Northwest Stadium on December 14, 2024 in Landover, Maryland. / Kevin Dietsch / Getty Images
From left: Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, Tulsi Gabbard, president-elect Donald Trump, vice president-elect JD Vance, and Pete Hegseth attend the Army-Navy football game at Northwest Stadium on December 14, 2024 in Landover, Maryland. / Kevin Dietsch / Getty Images

The White House is no stranger to scandal. We have elected cads before. We will do so again. What’s different now is that our political parties—and one of those parties in particular, let’s be clear—have decided that scandal only matters when the enscandled (a word I just made up) is of the opposition. When it is their own, the person is to be coddled, forgiven, and promoted.

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Sociopathy is now in style. Why do we feign concern when a Pete Hegseth has the gall to sit in front of the Senate and discuss “standards?” There are no standards! And nobody understands that better than Hegseth, who is either too cynical to not enjoy the irony of his own words or too dumb not to recognize his own mendacity.

Standards may not matter when you’re hosting Fox and Friends, but they sure as hell do when you’ve got to explain to members of our nation’s million-person military why you’re sending them into the path of incoming fire.

They matter because our elected officials are supposed to represent the best of us, and to which we every American aspires— as we saw this week in the outpouring of love and support for that humble and good man from Plains, Georgia. When the people in charge do not even pretend to uphold basic ethical standards, why should any of the rest of us? When we pay no price for our misdeeds, why not commit misdeeds?

After today’s hearings, I’m convinced Hegseth will soon be roaming the third floor of the Pentagon’s E Ring with a fancy new business card. He has no business there, beyond perhaps filming a TV hit. That being said, maybe he’ll do a good job. None of his previous abhorrent behavior guarantees a failed tenure. Each of us has it within ourselves to rise to whatever challenges we face.

Generally, though, the work of overcoming one’s bad history requires self-examination, humility, and the grace to ask forgiveness. We’ve seen none of that from Trump, nor any of his nominees. We will see none from Hegseth. As I said, one does not need to be a bad person to be a Trump supporter, but it helps.

Unfortunately, it will not help America.