The Only Two Republicans Voting Against Trump’s Defense Pick Are Women

Senators Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski were the only two Republicans who voted against Donald Trump’s choice to head the Department of Defense, Pete Hegseth, in a procedural vote Thursday, citing concerns with his ability to lead the U.S. military.

In a long post on X after the vote, Collins took note of the many pressures facing the military, including active conflicts in Europe and the Middle East, as well as threats in the Pacific. Hegseth “does not have the management experience and background that he will need in order to tackle these difficulties,” Collins’s statement said. 

Collins also said that she was concerned about Hegseth’s past statements questioning women serving in the military, saying that after she and Hegseth had a “candid conversation in December about his past statements and apparently evolving views,” she is “not convinced that his position on women serving in combat roles has changed.”

Like Collins, Murkowski also announced her decision to oppose Hegseth in an X post. The Alaska senator said she was concerned about Hegseth’s inexperience, as well as his previous statements against women serving in the military. Murkowski also cited the allegations against Hegseth of sexual assault and excessive drinking in her decision, as well as his repeated marital infidelity.

“These behaviors starkly contrast the values and discipline expected of servicemembers. Men and women in uniform are held accountable for such actions, and they deserve leaders who uphold these same standards,” Murkowski’s statement read.  

In recent days, more allegations against Hegseth have surfaced as his former sister-in-law said in a sworn affidavit that he made his second wife fear for her safety with his “volatile and threatening conduct” and that he doesn’t think women deserve the right to vote.

Murkowski’s and Collins’s votes against Hegseth Thursday led to his nomination only advancing by a 51–49 vote, with every Democrat voting against the former Fox News personality. A final vote on Hegseth’s nomination is expected later this week, and if he loses just one more Republican vote, his confirmation would need Vice President JD Vance’s tiebreaker. Either way, it would be the narrowest confirmation of Trump’s Cabinet nominees so far.

Donald Trump has revoked the security detail for Mike Pompeo, despite the fact that the former secretary of state is reportedly facing threats for actions he took under the president’s direction.

Pompeo and former aide Brian Hook both lost their security details Tuesday, The New York Times reported, despite warnings from the Biden administration that both men had received threats from Iran.

Pompeo and Hook had been involved in America’s aggressive stance toward Iran during the first Trump administration, and Pompeo was reportedly a driving force behind convincing Trump to have Gen. Qasem Soleimani, the leader of the Revolutionary Guard Corps’ Quds Force, killed.

This change, which the Times reported Thursday, came one day after Trump decided to revoke the security detail of John Bolton, Trump’s former national security adviser. Bolton has been an outspoken critic of the president.

When Bolton’s security detail was removed, it seemed like a petty jab at someone on Trump’s list of political enemies (it’s really Kash Patel’s list), which could potentially have dangerous consequences. Bolton has also received death threats from Iran and was the target of a murder plot by a member of the Revolutionary Guards Corps in 2022.

Pompeo has done a few small things that could have incurred Trump’s wrath. During his first administration, Pompeo once undermined Trump’s claim that Iran wasn’t funding terrorist groups while Trump was president. In 2023, Pompeo warned that the GOP should shift away from “celebrity leaders” with “fragile egos.” He also was honest about the administration’s financial failures, saying that “the Trump administration spent $6 trillion more than it took in, adding to the deficit,” a truth Trump would rather ignore as he begins his second term.

Trump previously said that Pompeo would not have a place in his forthcoming administration, and said he doesn’t want anyone who worked under Pompeo to join his administration either.

Biden administration officials had stressed to members of the Trump administration the need for security details for all three men, someone with knowledge of the matter told the Times.

The rampant, vile horniness of Republican lawmakers may stop them from getting a key witness on the stand in their sham “reinvestigation” of the January 6 insurrection. 

One of House Speaker Mike Johnson’s aides warned Republicans not to subpoena former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson  because doing so would likely reveal all of the sexually explicit text messages Republicans have been sending Hutchinson since 2018, according to The Washington Post. 

Hutchinson is known for delivering an explosive testimony about the events of January 6, 2021, exposing President Trump as the power-crazed man he is. She told Congress that Trump grabbed the wheel of a moving limousine, jumped at a Secret Service agent, and threw a plate of food at the wall in the days leading up to January 6. 

The idea to subpoena Hutchinson was first raised by Representative Barry Loudermilk, who led the first Republican-only investigation into January 6. He was seeking testimony and electronic messages from Hutchinson in regard to her communications with former Representative Liz Cheney, the Republican leader of the House select committee investigating January 6.

But Loudermilk was dissuaded from this by the Johnson aide, who stated that such a subpoena could add “sexual texts from members who were trying to engage in sexual favors” to public record and “potentially reveal embarrassing information.”

One can only speculate the horrors Hutchinson was sent by our own public officials.

Donald Trump has outright admitted to profiling immigrants.

Speaking with Fox News’s Sean Hannity Wednesday night in his first Oval Office interview since being inaugurated, Trump insisted that you could tell how much “trouble” immigrants are going to be for the country based on the “look” of them.

“Open borders with people pouring in. Some of whom, I won’t get into it, but you can look at them and you can say, ‘Could be trouble, could be trouble,’” Trump told the network.

The forty-seventh president has effectively promised a full-throttle immigration crackdown for the next four years. It includes attacking birthright citizenship and ordering high-profile ICE raids around the country against undocumented immigrants, decisions that could keep the backbone of the nation’s agricultural workforce inside.

Just two days into the administration, the Department of Homeland Security announced it would roll back an Obama-era directive, suddenly allowing the immigration agency to detain people in sensitive areas such as hospitals, places of worship, courtrooms, funerals, and weddings.

“Criminals will no longer be able to hide in America’s schools and churches to avoid arrest,” a spokesperson for the agency said in a statement Tuesday. “The Trump Administration will not tie the hands of our brave law enforcement, and instead trusts them to use common sense.”

And those aren’t the only aggressive policies that Trump’s new administration is cozying up to. In an interview with Fox News last week, Vice President JD Vance promised to resume Trump’s “family separation” program, claiming that the system—under which more than 4,600 children were separated from their parents—was being “dishonestly” brandished by its critics. (As of December, 1,360 children remain unaccounted for because of the Trump-era policy, according to a report by Human Rights Watch, which said the practice met the definition for “enforced disappearance,” amounted to “torture,” and was a “crime under international law.”)

“If you come into this country illegally, you need to go back home,” Vance told Fox. “And what the Democrats are going to do is they’re going to hide behind this. They’re going to say this is all about compassion for families.”

The Senate on Thursday confirmed former QAnon doomscroller John Ratcliffe to serve as Trump’s CIA director, 74–25. 

Ratcliffe, who served in Trump’s first administration as director of national intelligence, is a hard-line Trump loyalist with a penchant for conspiracy theories. 

Just four years ago, the “Following” list on his official Twitter account was rife with alt-right QAnon accounts. He followed often graphic accounts like Hobbit Frog and Political Madness, which to this day continue to advance right-wing conspiracy theories on X. While Ratcliffe has since made a new account on X that no longer follows them, his ideological alignment with them very likely remains unchanged. 

Ratcliffe’s nomination didn’t get much objection from Republicans or Democrats, perhaps thanks to the long list of unqualified people Trump has picked for his Cabinet. But Ratcliffe leading the CIA is still cause for concern. In 2019, his initial nomination for director of national intelligence was scuttled after he was caught exaggerating his involvement in counterterrorism efforts. After he was finally confirmed the second time he was nominated, he refused to seriously investigate the murder of Saudi journalist and U.S. resident Jamal Khashoggi, impeding the release of a report on Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s role in the killing. He also called the FBI investigation into Russia’s 2016 election interference a deep state, anti-Trump plot.  

Democrats contested Ratcliffe’s CIA confirmation much less than they did his 2020 DNI nomination, which passed by just a slim 49–44 vote.