Trump’s New Defense Secretary Is a Total Nightmare

Donald Trump has appointed Fox & Friends co-host Pete Hegseth as secretary of defense—and he’s one of the worst choices yet.

“Pete is tough, smart and a true believer in America First,” Trump said in a statement Tuesday night. “With Pete at the helm, America’s enemies are on notice—Our military will be Great Again, and America will Never Back Down.”

While Hegseth is a veteran of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, he is significantly less experienced than a traditional pick to head the Department of Defense. Hegseth once called the very same Iraq War that Trump and JD Vance just spent weeks pretending to critique “an example of what we got right, when we got it right.”

He will now run the Pentagon and command 1.3 million active-duty troops. Or maybe fewer: Just last week, Hegseth said, “I’m straight up just saying, we should not have women in combat roles.

“It hasn’t made us more effective. Hasn’t made us more lethal. Has made fighting more complicated,” he explained. “Our institutions don’t have to incentivize that in places where traditionally—not traditionally, over history—men in those positions are more capable.”

Hegseth doesn’t seem to want anyone but white men to be in the military. In his 2024 book The War on Warriors, Hegseth painted the military as anti-white and suffering from a “long-term infection of radical left wing social justice policies.”

He wrote that “affirmative action posts have skyrocketed, with ‘firsts’ being the most important factor in filling new commanders. We will not stop until trans-lesbian Black females run everything!”

Trump seemed to echo many of Hegseth’s complaints on the campaign trail, with his own ramblings about “woke” military leadership.

Hegseth has repeatedly fearmongered about the spread of Islam in the United States, both as a contributor to Fox News and in his 2020 book, American Crusade.

“Just like the Christian crusaders who pushed back the Muslim hordes in the twelfth century, American Crusaders will need to muster the same courage against Islamists today,” Hegseth wrote in his book.

“Islamists—and even mainstream Muslims—use aggressive tactics to exploit American ‘tolerance’ as utter weakness in order to achieve accommodations that would never otherwise be tolerated,” he wrote. “I’m not talking about on the battlefield, I’m talking about in our classrooms, city councils, and social media.”

Hegseth has also complained about Muslim birth rates in states such as Michigan, which has the largest Arab population in the country. He pushed fears about the “integration” of Muslims into American society and has lamented France’s changing “demography” in the wake of the Syrian refugee crisis, which he compared to an invasion.

“Next to the communist Chinese and their global ambitions, Islamism is the most dangerous threat to freedom in the world. It cannot be negotiated with, coexisted with, or understood; it must be exposed, marginalized, and crushed,” he wrote in American Crusade.

Unsurprisingly, Hegseth is a big supporter of “proud Islamophobe” Laura Loomer.

Although he graduated from Princeton University, Hegseth has criticized elite universities. “I have a new rule, the more elite the university and advanced a graduate is, the dumber they are,” Hegseth said on an episode of Fox News’s The Five. “If you went to an Ivy League, prove that you have any common sense at all.”

Hegseth has claimed that he sent his degree from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government back.

Maybe he’s right. In 2019 Hegseth, laughed on air about not washing his hands for 10 years, saying, “Germs are not a real thing. I can’t see them, therefore, they are not real.”

This story has been updated.

Despite Republicans winning control of the presidency, the Senate, and likely the House, one losing GOP candidate is still alleging fraud in his race and refusing to concede.

Wisconsin Senate candidate Eric Hovde, who lost to incumbent Democratic Senator Tammy Baldwin, posted a video on X Tuesday afternoon claiming inconsistencies in the vote tally, citing everything from a surge in “same-day registration on a rainy day” to a sudden spike in absentee ballots, as well as “voting irregularities” in Milwaukee.

As of Tuesday afternoon, Hovde had refused to concede but not requested funds needed for a recount, according to the Wisconsin Republican Party. He addressed that question in the video, saying “asking for recount is a serious decision that requires careful consideration.”

“Further, there are meaningful limits on a recount, because they don’t look at the integrity of a ballot,” Hovde added, before complaining about two third-party candidates on the ballot.

Hovde claimed that Democrats “organized and funded a phony America First candidate,” Thomas Leager, in addition to Libertarian candidate Phil Anderson, both of whom Hovde claimed took votes away from him.

“Is this right and fair to deceive voters? Is this the democratic process we want?” Hovde asked.

Hovde probably isn’t pushing for a recount because his complaints don’t actually address the vote count. Instead, he’s upset that his margin was low enough to have third-party candidates matter in Baldwin’s margin of victory. Wisconsin, like the other battleground states in this election, was won by Donald Trump and in fact clinched his victory. If Hovde is mad about his loss, he has only his own campaign to blame.

House Speaker Mike Johnson’s job may be in jeopardy once again.

Some conservative lawmakers are plotting to nominate an alternative candidate to Johnson during internal GOP elections this week, The Hill reported Tuesday.

One source told The Hill that “there will be a nomination” on Wednesday.

Johnson, a close ally of President-elect Donald Trump, has expressed confidence that he will be reelected. “I think you’ll have total unity in the party,” he said.

The Louisiana Republican previously faced a failed challenge to vacate the speakership from Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene and Thomas Massie. He has also been openly criticized by Representative Chip Roy, who said that there were “a lot of Republicans” who were concerned about Johnson.

Roy said Tuesday that it “seems likely” that Johnson will have a challenger in the vote but did not clarify whether he or someone else would be the one to challenge the current speaker.

Johnson said Tuesday that Republicans will be “ready to deliver” Trump’s 2025 agenda.

“We will be ready day one. We are prepared this time,” he said.

Ready for what, exactly? Johnson has previously promised to push for government spending reform that could threaten Medicare, the Affordable Care Act, and Social Security. Johnson has also said he would repeal the CHIPS Act, which is set to create hundreds of thousands of jobs and bring in billions of dollars, even though it’s not currently on the GOP agenda. He later walked back that statement by saying it wasn’t on the agenda.

Republicans have begun warning Trump’s transition team that it cannot select any more Republican representatives to the president-elect’s Cabinet, because it threatens the GOP’s narrow House majority.

Trump’s transition team has a “warrior board” executive order ready for the president-elect’s desk. 

An executive order draft is floating around MAGA world that would establish a Trump-appointed “warrior board” with the power to purge any three- or four-star generals as it sees fit. The board would send its dismissal recommendations to Trump and they would be acted upon within 30 days.

The draft executive order, which was first reported on by The Wall Street Journal, makes it easy to quickly remove military officials “lacking in requisite leadership qualities” but leaves open the question of what those requisite qualities are. The executive order draws on General George C. Marshall’s 1940 creation of a “plucking board” led by retired general officers to “remove from line promotion any officer for reasons deemed good and sufficient.” But that plucking board was to uplift young officers with high potential, not to cull anyone not perfectly aligned with MAGA. 

It’s not yet clear if Trump will sign the executive order, but Trump has held vitriol toward certain military leaders for some time now. He has vowed to weaponize them against the “enemy within,” to fire anyone involved in the 2021 U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, and to create a task force to weed out “woke generals.”  

“This looks like an administration getting ready to purge anyone who will not be a yes man,” former Army lawyer Eric Carpenter told The Wall Street Journal. “If you are looking to fire officers who might say no because of the law or their ethics, you set up a system with completely arbitrary standards, so you can fire anyone you want.”

This draft may be ready to see President-elect Trump’s desk on day one.

Last month, the Biden administration gave Israel a 30-day deadline to increase aid flow to Gaza, or the U.S. would potentially cut military assistance. On Tuesday, that deadline came and went without Israel facing any consequences.

Aid groups including Oxfam, Mercy Corps, and Save the Children issued a statement Tuesday saying Israel failed to meet any of the conditions that Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and Secretary of State Antony Blinken laid out in an October 13 letter to Israeli Minister of Strategic Affairs Ron Dermer. These include increased civilian access to food and other necessities.

“Israel’s actions failed to meet any of the specific criteria set out in the U.S. letter,” the statement read. “Israel not only failed to meet the U.S. criteria that would indicate support to the humanitarian response, but concurrently took actions that dramatically worsened the situation on the ground, particularly in Northern Gaza.”

In a press briefing on Tuesday, State Department deputy spokesman Vedant Patel said, “I certainly don’t have a change in U.S. policy to announce today.”

“We have seen some steps being taken. There need to be some additional steps that are also taken,” Patel added. “There is nobody in this administration saying that the humanitarian situation in Gaza is pristine.… It continues to be a crisis.”

On Tuesday, Israel announced that it was opening a new crossing into Gaza, meeting one demand in the October 13 letter, but there were no indications that any aid had traveled through it. At least 44,383 Palestinians have been killed in Israel’s brutal war on the territory since October 7, 2023, including more than 16,765 children.

A July study from the medical journal The Lancet estimates that the actual death toll could exceed 186,000, taking into account thousands of bodies trapped under rubble and indirect deaths due to the destruction of infrastructure, including hospitals and food distribution systems. Last month, 99 health workers who worked in Gaza sent President Biden a letter saying that they had “witnessed crimes beyond comprehension,” urging a U.S. arms embargo to Israel.

Those pleas appear to have fallen on deaf ears in the Biden administration and the State Department, following a pattern where expert advice on Gaza has been ignored by top U.S. officials. During the 2024 election campaign, any potential changes in policy toward Israel and Palestine were dismissed by Kamala Harris’s campaign, a factor that likely contributed to her loss.

Donald Trump’s incoming administration is bringing in hawks who support Israel’s further killing and destruction, including Representative Elise Stefanik as the new ambassador to the United Nations and former Governor Mike Huckabee as ambassador to Israel. In his last few months as president, Joe Biden has a chance to not only negotiate an end to the war but save lives, and he seems to be passing it up.