Trump’s Defense Secretary Pick Keeps Getting Worse

Donald Trump’s nominee for secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, was forced to leave two veterans’ advocacy groups he ran due to serious allegations against him.

The New Yorker reports that Hegseth was forced to step down from Veterans for Freedom and Concerned Veterans for America over allegations of sexual impropriety, personal misconduct, and financial mismanagement.

According to a seven-page whistleblower report from Hegseth’s time as president of the CVA from 2013 to 2016, the former Fox News host was repeatedly intoxicated while working in his official capacity, even needing to be carried out of organizational events. At one point, a heavily intoxicated Hegseth had to be physically restrained from joining dancers onstage at a Louisiana strip club, where he had brought his team.

“A Fox News contributor, with the rank of captain (at the time) in the National Guard, and the CEO of a veterans’ organization … was in a strip club trying to dance with strippers,” the whistleblower wrote.

The report also stated that Hegseth, who was married at the time, and the rest of his management team sexually pursued women who worked for the CVA and even divided them into “party girls” and “not party girls.” According to the report, the organization ignored accusations of impropriety from staff members, including one of sexual assault.

In one letter of complaint sent to the CVA in 2015, a former CVA employee said that Hegseth was drunk in a Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio bar, early in the morning of May 29, 2015, while on an official tour, chanting, “Kill All Muslims! Kill All Muslims!”

The author of the letter told The New Yorker, “If you print that, I will deny I wrote it.” When told that it came from the same personal email account that he still uses, he said, “I don’t care. I’ll just say it never happened.” Hegseth was pressured into resigning from the organization in January 2016.

During Hegseth’s time in charge, Veterans for Freedom also ran up serious debts. Only one year later, VFF couldn’t afford to pay its creditors, with the group’s donors, Republican billionaires Bernard Marcus, Jerry Perenchio, and Harold Simmons, concerned over what their money was being spent on.

That concern was more than justified, as their money was apparently being spent on wild parties rife with sexual impropriety. The three donors hired a forensic accountant, and Hegseth admitted in January 2008 that the organization had $434,833 in unpaid bills, less than $1,000 in the bank, and credit card debts of as much as $75,000. The donors eventually arranged a merger with another veterans’ organization and drastically reduced Hegseth’s role.

These new revelations raise significant questions about whether Hegseth is fit to run the world’s most powerful military, particularly in light of the sexual assault allegations against him and his extreme personal views. While Trump’s team is already compiling a list of alternative nominees, it’s unknown whether Trump will double down on supporting Hegseth.

Donald Trump has tapped his daughter Tiffany’s father-in-law, Massad Boulos, to serve as his adviser for Arab and Middle Eastern affairs.

The selection is a totally unqualified one, save for one known example in which Boulos, a Lebanese billionaire, acted as a foreign intermediary for Trump with the Palestinian Authority, meeting with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas at the U.N. General Assembly while the leader of the devastated nation attempted to appeal to the pro-Israel president-elect.

Boulos also aided Trump’s 2024 campaign, helping the MAGA leader canvas for support among disillusioned Arab Americans in key swing states such as Michigan.

“Massad is an accomplished lawyer and a highly respected leader in the business world, with extensive experience on the International scene,” Trump wrote in a statement Sunday. “He has been a longtime proponent of Republican and Conservative values, an asset to my Campaign, and was instrumental in building tremendous new coalitions with the Arab American Community.”

“Massad is a dealmaker, and an unwavering supporter of PEACE in the Middle East. He will be a strong advocate for the United States, and its interests, and I am pleased to have him on our team!” Trump added.

Boulos comes from a long line of political figures in Lebanon, and his father-in-law co-founded the country’s Free Patriotic Movement, a Christian political movement connected to Hezbollah. He’s the first selection in Trump’s Cabinet who holds critical views of Israel’s conduct in its assault on Palestine, reported Haaretz.

But Boulos is at least the second recent, thoroughly unqualified pick for such an influential position. On Saturday, Trump tapped another family member—his son-in-law Jared Kushner’s father, Charles Kushner—to serve as U.S. ambassador to France.

Over the course of the last month, Trump has made several jaw-dropping nominations to fill his Cabinet, including tapping former Hawaii Representative Tulsi Gabbard to serve as the director of national intelligence, despite the fact that she has regularly amplified Russian propaganda and conspiracy theories. The Republican also selected Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—a virulent vaccine conspiracy theorist with a wild history that includes propping up dead bear cubs in New York City’s Central Park for fun—to run the Department of Health and Human Services, a decision that has led authoritarianism scholars to describe Trump’s nominees as purposefully “anti-qualified.”

But beyond the obvious lack of credentials on his recent selections, Trump’s decision to lean into his family to staff the executive branch is an alarming choice by a politician who banged pots and pans claiming that investigations into his misconduct constituted a banana republic.

Kash Patel, Donald Trump’s pick to head the FBI, is essential to the president-elect’s takeover, and will allow him to use the full force of the U.S. government against anyone Trump decides is an enemy.

On Saturday, Trump nominated Patel, a former chief of staff at the U.S. Defense Department, to replace the FBI’s current director, Christopher Wray, who still has more than two years left in his 10-year term. Trump appointed Wray in 2017 after unceremoniously firing James Comey.

During an interview on MSNBC Saturday, The Atlantic’s Tom Nichols voiced his concerns about Trump’s “incredibly dangerous” prospective Cabinet of sycophants, including Tulsi Gabbard, John Ratcliffe, Pam Bondi, and now Patel—a champion of the president-elect, with his penchant for “deep state” conspiracy theories and making threats against the press.

To Nichols, Patel’s nomination demonstrates not only a direction for Trump’s second administration, but also an accelerating velocity.

“You have the makings of, you know, a not-so-slow-motion authoritarian takeover of the United States government,” Nichols said.

In a subsequent piece published Saturday in The Atlantic, Nichols wrote that Patel’s appointment was part of Trump’s plan to transform the FBI into an “excellent instrument of revenge against anyone Trump or Patel identifies as an internal enemy—which, in Trump’s world, is anyone who criticizes Donald Trump.”

Trump, having nominated loyalists to serve as the heads of his intelligence, legal, and law enforcement agencies, “eliminates important obstacles to his frequently expressed desires to use the armed forces, federal law-enforcement agents, intelligence professionals, and government lawyers as he chooses, unbounded by the law or the Constitution,” Nichols wrote.

By nominating Patel, and the rest of his motley crew of conspiracy theorists and alleged sexual predators, Trump is removing the guardrails on his second administration.

Last week, Elon Musk—rearing up to fire federal employees he deems wasteful en masse as the head of the Trump administration’s planned DOGE commission—put a number of workaday government employees on blast to millions of users on X.

At the time, The New Republic reported that his behavior was not “just cruel, it’s dangerous.” Indeed, CNN reported Wednesday that those Musk singled out have been inundated with hate, leading others to fear that they too will have Musk devotees sicced on them.

Several federal employees told CNN that “they’re afraid their lives will be forever changed—including physically threatened—as Musk makes behind-the-scenes bureaucrats into personal targets.” Others said the specter of being targeted by Musk “might even drive them from their jobs entirely.”

One target of Musk’s posting spree last week was a woman who works at the International Development Finance Corporation. Her role, an official told The Wall Street Journal, involves “identifying innovations that serve U.S. strategic interests, including bolstering agriculture and infrastructure against extreme weather events.” She had her job deemed “fake” by Musk—seemingly because her title, “Director of Climate Diversification,” contains words that tend to raise right-wing culture-warrior hackles.

Facing a barrage of negative attention, she “has since gone dark on social media, shutting down her accounts,” reported CNN.

Others whom Musk and his fans went after include senior advisers for climate and environmental justice at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, as well as a chief climate officer at the Department of Energy.

Last month, CNN reported that Musk “promised a gentle touch” as the head of DOGE—a commission TNR’s Matt Ford described this month as itself a symbol of “inefficiency and waste in government” that “cannot achieve its stated ambitions for legal, constitutional, or practical reasons”—but his insatiable itch to post apparently takes precedence over his word.

With its newfound electoral mandate, Donald Trump’s team is debating on whether to attack or invade Mexico, as the president-elect promised on the campaign trail.

“How much should we invade Mexico?” one senior Trump transition member told Rolling Stone. “That is the question.”

Trump has reportedly been gathering “battle plans” to attack drug cartels in Mexico since early 2023, with or without Mexico’s permission. Now he is president-elect, and even mainstream Republicans are on board with the idea. His nominees for secretary of defense and secretary of state, Pete Hegseth and Senator Marco Rubio, respectively, have spoken favorably of U.S. military action against Mexico, as has his “border czar,” Tom Homan. 

One source close to Trump told Rolling Stone about a plan for a “soft” invasion of the country, in which U.S. special forces would assassinate cartel leaders covertly, an idea Trump was in favor of earlier this year. The magazine spoke to six Republicans in all who have privately discussed Mexico with the president-elect and briefed him on different proposals. 

These actions vary in their level of force, including drone strikes and airstrikes against cartel targets such as drug labs, sending military advisers and trainers to Mexico, sending “kill teams” to the country, using cyberwarfare against drug lords and their organizations, and the assassination plan. 

Trump has told Republicans privately that he plans to tell Mexico to stop the transport of fentanyl into the U.S. within months otherwise he’ll deploy the military. This would seem to fit into the tariff threat he made against Mexico, Canada, and China on Monday, when he warned the three countries to stop the flow of migrants and drugs into the United States. Mexico’s President Claudia Sheinbaum didn’t take Trump’s words well, and she probably won’t like U.S. forces deploying in the country either. 

In his first term, Trump proposed to “bomb the drugs” in Mexico, according to his former national security adviser H.R. McMaster. Thankfully, nothing came of it. Now,  in addition to the presidency, Trump has captured the Republican Party, much of the judiciary, and both chambers of Congress. His Cabinet and staff appointments are made up of sycophants and people much less likely to confront or correct him. In the next four years, there won’t be much standing in the way of Trump’s violent “solutions.”