Is this a joke?
President-elect Donald Trump chose Pete Hegseth, who is a combat veteran and co-host on the weekend edition of “Fox & Friends,” to be his defense secretary.
Hegseth has no defense experience—aside from having lots of opinions. He has no government experience and no experience dealing with the Pentagon bureaucracy. He's never run anything bigger than a broom closet. Even at Fox he's only junior varsity, co-hosting the weekend edition of Fox & Friends.
On the other hand, he sure looks like a cabinet secretary. And he agrees with Donald Trump a lot. I suppose that might be good enough for a press secretary, but heading up the biggest, most complex organization in the federal government? You'd think that even the most servile Republican senators might think twice before letting a Fox talking head run the Defense Department. It's considered a pretty important job in some circles.
Does this make Putin happy? I sure think so. Remember who’s really calling the shots in our new Trumpian era!
Couldn't agree more. If in office, this will set off two or three years of officer purges, just like Stalin did to his military before Barbarossa, and it'll do Stalin one better by also purging enlisted ranks. With all that going on, our military will be hollowed out, undermanned, as useless as a wet dishrag and scrambling to recover, for years after the purges burn themselves out.
A pledge to Putin fulfilled, evidently. Reports were saying official Russian reaction to the big win on Tuesday was muted and skeptical about what they'd get from trump's victory, and I guess that pressured trump to really aim for really breaking our military just to prove to Putin that he got what he paid for.
Also a big favor for Xi, btw. Makes me think all the tension and threatening has been nothing more than WWE kayfabe. I feel even worse for Taiwan now.
Maybe ironically, it will also weaken the Israeli position.
The chaos is the point of this nominee, is what it looks like.
+1
The pattern is emerging….trump will be making all the decisions…these cabinet picks are just window dressing….and he’ll do it all by recess appointments…no advise and consent…the circus is coming to town
His picks have been worse than even I imagined. And I imagined something really bad to begin with. Marco Rubio as sec of state. Elise Stefanik as ambassador to the U.N. Kristi Noem as homeland security secretary. It's like a dystopian nightmare. I don't know how much worse his picks are going to get.
The worst part is, well, we held an election, and this is what "the people" want.
They're going to get what they wanted, and they're going to get it good and hard.
the problem is we’re gonna get it to
Very slightly more than half of "the people" wanted to protest inflation. They certainly didn't want incompetent toadies running the executive branch (they just didn't listen to the rest of us warning them that that's exactly what we'd get under the Tangerine Dream).
Don't insult Tangerine Dream, who are great.
Been a while since I've listened to any electronica from their point of origin. Well, except for maybe Larry Fast's Synergy projects.
Trump was elected (in the electoral college) in 2016 when inflation was not a factor. He showed that he knew nothing about appointing suitable and able people, although so far the appointees look worse.
What the core Republican voters like about Trump, and why he has gotten about half the votes in three elections, is his advocacy of White Christian Supremacy. When tribal allegiance is involved, little else matters.
I honestly think they don't care what he does. They will eventually. I would think, but who the hell knows. If you're wearing a shirt that says "Trump will fix it" you're not exactly the sharpest knife in the drawer.
They certainly wanted toadies, and they wouldn’t know competence if it bit ‘em on the ass.
Our incoming ambassador to Israel opposes two states, supports settlement expansion, and has openly called for ethnic cleansing.
Sounds about right.
What we call the West Bank, he and the extremist settlers call Judea and Samaria.
The other picks are all very competent people.
I am much less happy with Hegseth. I have no confidence that he will be able to manage the Pentagon beauracracy and get things done quickly - four years is a short time to change course on a massive ship like the US DOD.
However, I think claiming he has no Defense experience is ridiculous. Being a combat veteran is obviously defense experience.
Being a combat veteran isn't defense experience in any way relevant to being the Secretary of Defense.
Ha! Sure, buddy. And the guy selling phones at the mall cart has the experience to be CEO of Verizon.
+1
"The other picks are all very competent people." Kristi Noem as homeland security secretary? This is why no one takes you seriously. You're stretching the definition of competent to the breaking point. That's just one example in an abundant pool of them.
Trump and MF'er think immigrants from South of the border are wild animals that should be shot on sight. Noem has experience shooting animals. Ergo, she has experience for that job.
That's the kind of logic they are working with.
lol. Good point.
You have to remember, MF has no ability to tell if an idea is good or bad. If some reason is given for a decision, that is good enough. The idea that some reasons are dumb or nonsensical doesn't occur. Even if it is obvious that the reason given is an obvious con, MF considers that the same as an extremely good reason. All that matters is some preconceived notion gets confirmed.
I guess this will be our test of whether the Republicans have any principles left. They used to value our military a lot, time to find out if they still do, or whether they'll just slavishly follow the leader no matter what.
They don't. They lost most of them in 2016. The rest evaporated since then.
Not that they've had much to begin with.
2016?
Clearly you meant 1990?
Most likely. I was being generous with my estimate.
The Republican Party no longer exists. It’s the Trump/MAGA Party now and the people in it are Trumpians. That doesn’t mean leaving your principles at the door. It means throwing them away.
No test needed
They don't have any
They care about power
And judges.
probably in that order
I knew how it stood when John Kerry, awarded a Silver Star, a Bronze Star and three Purple Hearts for actions in Vietnam, was the Democratic nominee, and delegates to the 2004 Republican Convention wore Band-Aids with tiny purple hearts on them. That was disrespectful to any service member, and yet it pales compared to things that TFG has said. So, no, you won't see any Congressional Republicans showing any spine or principle.
As a peacenik and something of a free speech absolutist, I certainly don't think that the military deserves the hushed tones and performative fealty that so much of US culture heaps on it--I'm absolutely fine with people being "disrespectful" to soldiers/troops/the military/etc.
That said, the military is an incredibly vast, hugely complicated, and insanely powerful institution; it absolutely should not be in the hands of people who do not approach the task of leading it with a profound and deeply philosophical sense of restraint coupled with a laserlike focus on efficacy.
I don't know much about Hegseth other than his making a niche career for himself as a teevee apologist for war criminals, so he seems like both tempermentally and competence-wise a terrible pick.
Also, from that photo, he looks like a foil who would get beaten in some sort of dramatic mid-season arc competition involving ad copy or infidelity by Don Draper. Maybe time to start a whisper campaign Just Asking why Trump seems so attracted to hiring pretty men?
Would that be Duck Phillips, perennial Draper punching bag?
Principles are not going to be involved.
But senators get their power from being elected, so they are top of the losers when democracy is destroyed. They may realize that if they don't stop Trump that what will happen, and they will lose their privileges.
I would say that a pretty thin straw, but it is still thicker than their principles.
His whole administration is going to be one large, bad and unfunny joke.
Like a flopsweat comedian who, failing to get a laugh the first time, repeats the "joke" louder and more forcefully the second.
Punch line: the chaos is the point.
We're just the extras in Bannon's wet dream.
I wouldnt be surprised if he appoints Jeanine Pirro as press secretary! Could you imagine the circus she will make out of any press conference?
Must see TV.
Not Kari Lake? I mean, she is a loser, but looks good on Tee-Vee.
Would she be able to take on a third job, though? She's already a governor and a senator, from what she's been saying.
The Republican who lost to Tammy Baldwin hasn't conceded yet and it looks like he's gonna go full Kari Lake soon. He's been getting "credible messages about election irregularities ". AKA as "Waaaahhh I lost and can't admit it."
Her consolation prize for losing her election.
I think Tucker has dibs on that job.
But Kevin, who better to lead a bunch of losers? /s … no piling on please
"It's considered a pretty important job in some circles." Not so much in a circus.
"You'd think that even the most servile Republican senators might think twice before letting a Fox talking head run the Defense Department."
Remember Trump's demand a day or two that the Senate allow recess appointments? He ain't gonna submit anyone in his maladministration to Senate vote.
Perhaps anyone considering a role in Trumps administration should read this and maybe reconsider their decision.
The Supreme Court dealt a major legal blow to former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows on Tuesday, refusing to move the Georgia election interference charges against him from state to federal court.
When the shit hits the fan he won't pay a price, all his sychophants will. They'll learn like so many before them that people who get involved with Trump live to regret it.
This is one thing I don’t get. Many of these people - even if they have no principles to care about - have been around enough to be fairly savvy. They have surely seen that everyone who works for trump ends up, at least, with shit on their shoes, if not spending all their money on lawyers, if not actually in jail.
Even someone like Bill Barr, who could have retired as a respected Washington hand, has to know that the first sentence of his obituary is going to be about how he pimped for trump.
Why does the present bunch think it will somehow be different for them?
"has to know that the first sentence of his obituary is going to be about how he pimped for trump"
In our circles, sure. But Barr doesn't swim in those circles. He's likely contemptuous of obits appearing in papers to the left of the WSJ, and probably really only excited about what the Federalists and Opus Dei will say about him when he's gone.
The others are all too stupid to care. They are D-listers who would never get this level of power on any kind of merit--their "skill" is flattering a moron who evaluates people/reality by how well they/it flatter him. They aren't thinking about their obituaries, because absent a moron like Trump elevating them, they'd never be in a position where any periodical of note would bother writing an obit for them.
Scraping the bottom of the barrel. Anyone willing to associate themselves with Trump has to be as bad as him if not worse.
The first time there were adults willing to restrain Trump and keep everyone in check to a certain degree. This time there are none. I think they believe themselves impervious to consequences. There's not going to be anyone to hold anyone accountable. Well except being accountable to Trump.
I don't know whether or not to laugh or cry. Last time around there were grownups that protected us. Will any of the Senators step in on this one?
I don't have quite enough in savings to retire at age 57 - I hope I can survive a bit more before getting shafted, I think maybe 2-3 more years and I'd be okayish.
Widely quoted as "Turkish proverb," although provenance not at all clear:
"When a clown moves into the palace, the clown does not become a king; the palace becomes a circus."
Reminds me of Max Headroom
Colonel Sanders and General Mills were busy I guess?
Call for Major Woody and Private Partz!
I'm not a real Secretary of Defense but I play one on TV
Trump's a troll.
Charlie Sykes: A clown with a firehose still has a firehose.
Well I may be paraphrasing. And Charlie may not have been the first to say that.
Flamethrower
A clown with a flamethrower still has a flamethrower.
"Is this a joke?" says Kevin Drum. "Just why the fuck do you sound surprised?" says I. I don't think Pollyanna Drum has quite realized the horrors that are about to unfold. But he will. He will.
I feared the worst. It's turning out that my worst didn't even scratch the surface.
He wants to appoint people like this because anybody will be able to get around them. Lobbyists, contractors, billionaires, any corrupt interest will find no resistance to anything they want, but a welcoming hand.
"I mean I guess it could have been Vince McMahon or Ted Nugent." -- Paul Campos
He could appoint Kid Rock to guard the girls' bathrooms.
So you're ok turning the DoD over to a serving board member at Raytheon who was recently serving as a general, but this is a big problem?
BTW, nobody even knew where Lloyd Austin was for periods of time.
I think this is the first pick that’s actually a blunder and may not get confirmed.
And people wonder why he was so hot specifically and explicitly about the senate leadership getting out of his way and letting him make recess appointments.
Which can stay in place for two years, constitutionally. Longer than most of his first-term appointees stayed, iirc. How many Scaramuccis is two years?
lol. Is that the new measurement of time? "I give him two and a half Scaramuccis before he's gone!".
While you can clearly dislike him or say that he is no qualified, the statement that "Hegseth has no defense experience" is un true.
Hegseth was a Major in the Army, with two Bronze Stars, and deployed to Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pete_Hegseth
Bro, and I mean this with all civility: get the fuck out of here with that nonsense bullshit.
He has no defense experience. He has experience being a finance bro, a national guardsman for a handful of years, and a talking head. That's not defense experience.
Majors don't create or implement policy. They don't manage an organization with tens of thousands of employees or a budget of a billion dollars, let alone the 2.7 million employees and a budget of $800 billion dollars.
Hegseth has no relevant defense experience.
I've had a bank account for decades, and never bounced a check. Maybe I should run the federal reserve.
+1
I bounced a rent check in 1974 so I'm out of the running; the job's yours as far as I'm concerned, no hard feelings.
But are you a Trump sychophant? That's the number one qualification. Anything else is gravy.
What's that on his jacket, above the pocket-- service ribbons? (At first I thought it was a Canadian flag, tbh.) Genuine question: what do regulations say about wearing that on civilian clothing?
I thought it was a really dorky pocket square.
This does not feel like 11-dimensional chess. It feels like big ol' truckload of stupid, like "It didn't work for me last time, so this time I'll do the same as I did before, but harder."
The collapse of democracy into dictatorship remains a dark possibility, but we may have failed to appreciate the impact of the adults in the room the first time through. They did protect the nation from Trump, but did they also save Trump from himself?
With paste-eating doofuses like this, are the now-missing guardrails the ones which prevented Trump from faceplanting and self-destructing?
Trump wants to use the military as his personal army. I think he learned last time that actual military leaders think the military should serve the country rather than him. So it is not surprising that he would get somebody who does not hold this old fashioned view about the military. And a talking head on Fox has probably made clear where he stands on the issue.
Hegseth has a book about how wokism broke the military, so people on the inside whose media I've seen think the focus would be a full-scale internal war on woke-- purging officers and enlisted of anyone who doesn't sign on to anti-woke purity, rewriting all doctrine and training, stuff like that, that would tie the whole operation in knots for years (and not incidentally clear the field for Putin, Xi, and Kim). There have already been proposals for officer review boards to weed out the ones who could be problematic for the New Order.
This makes me incline to agree more with Yehouda that trump and his people will want to deputize private militias and local and state police, who are already much more in synch with the program and won't need much by way of anti-woke purges.
Shrug. US military has definitely gone too woke.
For example, see https://usarmybasic.com/army-physical-fitness/us-army-male-pushups-standards-2024/and https://usarmybasic.com/army-physical-fitness/female-pushup-standards/.
An 18 year old male needs to be able to do 71 pushups to get a fitness score of 100. An 18 year old female? Just 42.
Given that the demands of combat are obviously not gender normed, can anyone explain to me why military fitness tests are gender normed other than because of a decision to incorporate women into the military even if they do not meet the minimum standards we demand from male recruits?
But, but,... the lining of his suit coat is an American flag!
https://x.com/americasgreat/status/1856498210744815711
... and he looks Fab U Lussss !!
Trump hugs and kisses Old Glory, but this based, hip dude *wears it*.
I wonder what post he has in mind for Frodo? Treasury secretary? Attorney General?
Alas Frodo is too honest to accept one, but otoh trump has people working around the clock to recruit clones of Grima Wormtongue.
Is this the place to recall that Thiel, whose creature Vance is, runs an outfit he called Palantir? Would that cast Vance as Saruman? I might say so, but Vance would like that too much.
Do you mean Jr? Or the hobbit from lord of the rings. If it's the latter what about Gollum? Head of the secret service? Must protect the precious!
Gollum would be Ric Grenell, right, and wasn't he already named for some post or other?
Could FrankM have been referring to Barron? I have a hard time thinking of junior as Frodo, tbh; he strikes me as much more like one of the blowhard dwarves, and I do mean blow . . . But that makes it obvious, then-- DEA head.
Sorry. Typo. Should have typed Fredo. That clearer?
I take it you mean Jr. then? Yeah, he'd be equally bad wherever he ends up. More so for the dumb blonde guy. I think Ivanka knows better not to get involved this time. I think she's savy enough to know a shit show when she sees it.
All I'll say is that at least it wasn't Tulsi Gabbard.
Gabbard is being rumored to be in line for a top post.
I think we need to come to grips with the fact that history will see Mr Trump as a hugely consequential person on the world scene.
Because I pushed and was so happy with the candidacy of Ms. Harris, post-election I am getting lots of people, one woman actually giggling at me and my position in this election....giving me a hard push, almost gleeful with Trump's victory.
In reflection I think I am coming to see Mr Trump to be much like Andrew Jackson in his two terms in the Presidency. He destroyed the Indian Nations on the Eastern seaboard to include the Seminoles in Florida, setting them all on the Trail of Tears to the West.
Mr Jackson was a very controversial person in his day and much hated. He signed the Indian Removal Act, destroyed the Second Bank of the Untied States, threatened military action against South Carolina to enforce his tariff law.
Some of what follows may be offensive to people:
"While traveling to assume his new position, Jackson stopped in Jonesborough. While there, he bought his first slave, a woman who was around his age" Ultimately, he would own 150 slaves. (but for a time, Jackson lived with is slaves in the same barn with the livestock).
He was shot in a duel, bu the bullet shattered against his breast bone, (Lawyer Diskenson was a fine shot...he would have done better shooting left of right because Jackson in return fire killed Mr Dickinson.)
Jackson was also shot in the shoulder in a later street brawl with Thomas Benton in Nashville.
From Wiki :"The political campaign was dominated by the personal abuse that partisans flung at both candidates.[176] Jackson was accused of being the son of an English prostitute and a mulatto,[177][178] and he was accurately labeled a slave trader who trafficked in human flesh"
I am trying to see if you Trump/Jackson analogy holds up. Traveller
Jackson was consequential in other ways too and some of them would be comparable. I'm thinking of the way the party system restructured in response to him and how he filled the government with loyalists (who had to do kickbacks out of their salaries to support the party organization), and how his basic MO was to break things. Also how, once he emerged as a political figure, everything had to revolve around him and answer to him. The Whigs named themselves after the movement that resisted George III, after all. Google for anti-Jackson political cartoons sometime for a taste of that.
A big difference, I think, is that Jackson had quite a bit of political and government experience by the time he got into office and wanted a functioning system and a viable Union, just one that revolved around him and his party. He also had Van Buren behind him, one of the key designers and operatives of the system Jackson brought in. I don't see any real system-building aim in trump or some of the key people behind him, especially arch-destructor Bannon. That may be one of the big internecine fights to come (and the fights will come, because trump likes to have his underlings go at each others' throats).
But it's too depressing and too early on to get any deeper into this right now. Thinking about these kinds of changes from a historical distance is one thing; being a mouse among the crazed elephants while they're stampeding is another.
Than you for filling out better my Jackson thought, he did have the political experience across several platform and positions as you noted.
I would like to add there is, as with Mr Trump, a certain degree of blind luck to his propulsion upward...specifically the Battle of New Orleans which moved Jackson onto the National stage, was fought after the war of 1812 had already ended with the Jay Treaty having already been signed.
The comparisons can be a little attenuated...but looking to history if probably my way of dealing with my deep grief over the Harris loss...I war really on board with her. Traveller
I'm so so so shocked Trump doesn't want cabinet head hearings. Why wouldn't he want to show off such glorious talent?