Opinion | An absurd choice by Pete Hegseth

A notable moment of the extremely depressing Senate confirmation hearing for Pete Hegseth, the Fox News personality who is Donald Trump’s choice for Secretary of Defense, occurred right at the beginning, when he was introduced by former Republican Senator Norm Coleman.

“Four years ago, President Biden’s nominee, Lloyd Austin, a good and honorable man, got 97 votes in the Senate,” Coleman said, “and we went through the debacle of withdrawing from Afghanistan, Putin invaded Ukraine, the Houthis threatened our shipping lanes.” and America was insufficiently supportive of Israel. The implication seemed to be that since the good and honorable had failed, it was time to try something else.

Hegseth is something else. As was widely reported, in 2020 he paid off a woman who filed a police report accusing him of sexual assault. (He insists they had consensual sex.) As Jane Mayer reported in The New Yorker, Hegseth “was pressured by both of the two nonprofit advocacy groups he ran — Veterans for Freedom and Concerned Veterans for America — to step down from the serious charge. about financial mismanagement, sexual impropriety and personal misconduct.” His own mother wrote, in an email obtained by the New York Times, that he “he belittles, lies, cheats, sleeps around and uses women for his own power and ego.“ (She has since dismissed the message.)

But this is Trump’s America; abusing and humiliating women is clearly not a disqualification for high office. As Democratic Senate aides told Rebecca Traister of New York magazine, success in hearings “That would mean not relying on the rape allegations and instead creating a space to counter him on the basis that Republicans can counter him as well.“ Much of Tuesday’s hearing appeared to involve a search for those foundations, but it’s not clear they exist.

Several Democrats have focused on Hegseth’s offensive comments about female soldiers, perhaps hoping to reach Joni Ernst, an Iowa Republican who is a veteran and advocates for women in the military. (“We need moms,” Hegseth wrote in one of his books. “But not in the military, especially in combat units.”)

Tammy Duckworth, a Democrat from Illinois and a veteran of the Iraq War, nailed him on sheer ignorance of American defense policy. At one point she asked him to name one of the countries in ASEAN, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, and to describe our security arrangements with them. He couldn’t do that, instead ranting about Japan, South Korea and Australia, three non-ASEAN countries. Mark Kelly of Arizona, a former astronaut and Navy veteran, blasted him for multiple reports that he was drunk on the job. Gary Peters of Michigan found that Hegseth never led an organization of more than a few hundred people; The Pentagon employs nearly three million.

Any of these things should invalidate this pointless nomination. I doubt any of them will.

The hearing was over in about four hours; Democrats’ requests for a second round of questioning were denied. They’ve only scratched the surface of Hegseth’s record, but Republicans have heard enough.