Timothy Snyder lays out the case against Pete Hegseth. It’s worse than you think:
1. Pete Hegseth, Trump’s nominee for secretary of defense, has no qualifications for the job. He has never run a large organization and has no national security expertise.
2. Hegseth has zero notion of which other countries might threaten America or how. In his books this is simply not a subject, beyond a few clichés.
3. Hegseth does not believe in alliances. For him, “NATO is a great example of dumb globalism.”
4. Hegseth wants a political army that bans women from combat roles, is purged of “cowardly generals,” and is anti-woke.
5. Hegseth never notes that the politicized Russian army meets all of his standards perfectly, but is is ineffective and commits war crimes.
6. Hegseth never notes that the Ukrainian army, which does have women in combat, and is not politicized in the way he would like, has overperformed.
7. Hegseth has almost nothing to say about the most significant armed conflict of our time and has not visited Ukraine or learned anything about it.
8. Hegseth’s misogynist gender politics are consistent with his polygamy and the accusations of rape.
9. Hegseth’s enemies are all internal: the Left, Muslims, and immigrants. He repeatedly claims that the Left wishes to annihilate everyone else, which is a call to violence.
10. Hegseth, a Christian Reconstructionist, believes that Americans should be governed not by law or by the Constitution but by God — as interpreted of course by Hegseth and his friends.
11. Hegseth calls for a “holy war” and a “crusade” against Americans who think differently than he does because “God wills it.” Trump is the pretext: Hegseth wants “to make crusade great again.”
12. Hegseth, according to his books, could be counted upon to ignore threats to America from abroad, and to use a purged and politicized military against “enemies within.” This is consistent with Trump’s avowed intention to build a kind of dictatorship on the ruins of a dysfunctional government.
13. Hegseth thus represents a policy of regime change. Trump’s nomination of Hegseth is best understood as part of a decapitation strike against the republic. A Christian Reconstructionist war on Americans led from the Department of Defense is likely to break the United States.
People like Hegseth who have half-baked ideas based upon superficial reading of history are all over the place. Sometimes I am one of them. But people like that should not be put in charge of anything as important as the US Military. The danger lies in the egomania that compels him to accept such a position despite his totally unqualified background and experience. Hegseth is someone who does not believe that war crimes should be crimes. He is a violent sexual assaulter. He is, in other words, a violent man, possibly a sociopath.
I can easily see him and the enablers around him doing some truly terrible things because they are too ignorant of the consequences and have no restraint. People like that often do something destructive simply because they don’t have the imagination or the know-how to do anything different.
This one worries me greatly.