Trump Allies Predict Pete Hegseth Will “Implode” Soon

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is weathering calls for his resignation thanks to the support of President Trump. But he may not be able to hold on for long.

Politico reports that some of Trump’s allies doubt whether Hegseth will be able to keep his job, with two anonymous sources telling the publication that he is still in hot water. One of them said that Hegseth may “implode on his own,” while the other said that Trump could get tired of the distractions from the former Fox News host’s tenure at the Department of Defense.

Three top Pentagon staffers were fired on Friday over leak concerns, one of them being Hegseth’s former chief of staff from his time at a veterans charity.

“Central Casting can become problematic if all they’re doing is generating questions of instability,” the second source said. “What’s so troubling about it is—it’s not like these were people that were forced upon Pete. They were his own guys he had to get rid of.”

According to Politico, Trump and Hegseth met privately on Sunday, where the president reportedly offered his support to the DOD chief, as he has done publicly. At the White House’s Easter Egg Roll Monday, Trump criticized Hegseth’s detractors.

“They just bring up stories. I guess it sounds like disgruntled employees. You know, he was put there to get rid of a lot of bad people, and that’s what he’s doing, so you don’t always have friends when you do that,” Trump told reporters.

But NPR also reported Monday that Trump has begun the search for a new secretary of defense, following this weekend’s report that Hegseth shared details about U.S. airstrikes in Yemen in a private Signal chat last month that included his wife and brother while also sharing the war plans in another group chat containing The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg.

If NPR’s report is true, it suggests that Trump is so frustrated that he doesn’t care if Hegseth’s firing validates his administration’s critics. It also suggests that Trump would be willing to deal with another confirmation battle in the Senate.

“Trump goes to bat for people until the moment he flips on them,” said one of Politico’s sources. “That’s always a possibility.”

Republican Representative Byron Donalds was met with boos and jeers at his town hall on Monday, after refusing to answer a basic question about Elon Musk and DOGE.

“As a member of the Oversight Committee, what oversight are you imposing on Elon Musk and DOGE?” a constituent asked. The question was followed by over 10 seconds of cheering and applause. 

Donalds proceeded to explain how DOGE works rather than answer the question directly, insisting that Musk’s anti-woke, government-slashing operation was in the same vein as what former Presidents Joe Biden and Barack Obama did with “special employees” in their own administrations.  

“In terms of oversight from Congress, that’s much more of an Appropriations [Committee] aspect,” Donalds said. “What DOGE is doing right now, is they’re going through every agency and they’re examining any contracts or any lack of efficiency in spending federal dollars. This is something that—”

The crowd began to groan and boo, but Donalds continued. 

“Like I said, what they are doing is under the direction of the president of the United States. If you’re gonna talk about what oversight is doing, we actually have to let the DOGE uh, uh, Committee, the DOGE Department, actually finish its work,” Donalds explained. “What they are examining right now is inefficiency in the federal system. This is something that President Obama wanted to do when President Obama was elected—”

This nonanswer was met with even more frustration from the town hall crowd. 

“You can boo if you want to, but those are the facts,” Donalds replied.

Donalds essentially admitted that he’d be doing absolutely nothing to monitor DOGE as an Oversight Committee member. Trump already gave DOGE permission to fire thousands of people and start cuts to Social Security, so everything must be fine. 

Donald Trump blew his top at the Supreme Court Monday, complaining that the high court, along with the rest of the judicial system, is getting in the way of his removing “criminals from our Country.”

The president took to Truth Social to vent after the nine justices voted 7–2 over the weekend to block Trump’s deportation of Venezuelan immigrants under the 1798 Alien Enemies Act without due process.

“My team is fantastic, doing an incredible job, however, they are being stymied at every turn by even the U.S. Supreme Court, which I have such great respect for, but which seemingly doesn’t want me to send violent criminals and terrorists back to Venezuela, or any other Country, for that matterPeople that came here illegally!” Trump posted.

The president scoffed at the notion of every immigrant receiving due process before deportation.

“We cannot give everyone a trial, because to do so would take, without exaggeration, 200 years. We would need hundreds of thousands of trials for the hundreds of thousands of Illegals we are sending out of the Country. Such a thing is not possible to do,” Trump added.

Trump is upset that his mass deportation efforts are running into legal hurdles. The self-proclaimed “law and order” president, however, seems to think that people he doesn’t like don’t deserve the right to due process but only the punitive measures of the law.

If Trump is concerned that there are too many people to stand trial, perhaps he should have increased funding for immigration courts and judges rather than divert so many government agencies and resources to arresting and detaining immigrants. But again, due process is something he doesn’t quite understand. After all, he refused to face accountability for his own criminal charges, and he pardoned some particularly violent criminals who rioted on his behalf.

Fox News host Will Cain inexplicably claimed Monday that he had never heard Donald Trump say he wanted to deport U.S. citizens—even though the president has now floated the idea several times.

During an interview, Florida Representative Maxwell Frost spoke about the stakes of the Trump administration’s removal of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Maryland man with no criminal record who was deported to El Salvador due to an “administrative error,” on thin allegations of gang membership. 

“It’s not just about him, it’s about the fact that in the Oval Office, Donald Trump brought up that he wants to do the same thing to ‘homegrowns,’ homegrowns being U.S. citizens,” Frost said. The Florida Democrat was referring to a disturbing remark Trump made last week during a press conference with El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele. 

But Cain said he couldn’t remember, insisting he had never heard Trump say any such thing. 

“Donald Trump’s made a statement about wanting to deport American citizens? Do you have that in front of you? I’ve not seen that statement,” Cain said. “Can you please quote where that comes from, that he’d like to deport American citizens?”

“He said it in the Oval Office; he said he wants to go for homegrowns next, people born and raised in the United States—” Frost said, before Cain interrupted him. 

“Do you have anything? Do you have anything beside your word on that?” Cain said. “I’ve not seen, I’ve not seen that, so. Beyond your word, do you have a source of that? I would love to see that clip or that transcript of him saying he wants to deport American citizens.”

“There is a clip online; I encourage people to just google ‘Donald Trump homegrown,’” Frost said.

Crucially, the instance Frost cited wasn’t the first time Trump made a remark about deporting U.S. citizens to foreign prisons: The president had said in March that he loved the idea, and in February, he said he’d deport U.S. citizens to El Salvador “in a heartbeat.” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt confirmed that the president was enthusiastic about the idea and was looking into “legal pathways.” Spoiler alert: There are none.  

During his meeting with Bukele, Trump had flat-out said that he’d asked Attorney General Pam Bondi to look into the legality. So it’s a little less than plausible that Cain, who hosts his own show on Fox News every weekday, hasn’t heard about the president’s pitch to deport U.S. citizens. 

Online, some theorized that Cain was simply attempting to demonstrate his aptitude for Defense, as the Pentagon may be preparing to undergo some reshuffling …

… while others pointed out how ridiculous it was to pretend not to know about a story his own news agency covered. 

Republican Representative Derrick Van Orden seems to think Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s time serving in the Army National Guard justifies leaking national security information over text, not once but twice.

“I don’t want to hear from any healthy American that was of fighting age on 9/11 who did not join the military and deploy to combat talking shit about @PeteHegseth,” Van Orden wrote on X Monday. “You had your chance to serve our Nation when She needed you and you did not. Stand down, the Warriors will take it from here.”

A “warrior” would probably know better than to share sensitive information about a U.S. military attack in multiple group chats or bring along his spouse to classified meetings with foreign military officials. People aren’t mad at the 44-year-old defense secretary because they haven’t served in the military; they’re mad because he’s causing utter chaos as the Pentagon’s lead and putting the country’s national security at risk while he’s at it.

But Van Orden is a staunch Trump loyalist, and he’ll clearly use whatever weird excuse he can come up with to defend the president’s wildly inexperienced defense secretary, even as other GOP members begin to to turn on him.

“The military should always pride itself on operational security. If the reports are true, the secretary of defense has failed at operational security, and that is unacceptable,” Republican Representative Don Bacon told Axios about Hegseth Monday. X users in Van Orden’s comments shared similar concerns.

“​​I served 13 years … then after 9/11 came back in and did another 9 years including 3 Iraq tours,” podcast host Fred Wellman wrote, in response to Van Orden. “I am a Ranger qualified having gone to the school and graduated unlike Pete. He’s a piece of shit. He is endangering our troops lives and you are too for defending the indefensible. Also … get f*cked with this ‘Warriors’ bullshit. You aren’t a warrior … you’re an asshole who talks and talks.”