Hegseth Considers Army Secretary Accused of Horrific Abuse

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has his eyes on his next Army secretary, and true to form, the leading candidate’s résumé includes credible domestic abuse allegations.

Sean Parnell, the Pentagon’s chief spokesperson, Hegseth’s senior adviser, and a two-time failed congressional candidate, has been pushing his own name for the job for a while. Hegseth is apparently considering it, The Hill reported Thursday, even with the accusations against Parnell.

After losing his bid for Pennsylvania’s 17th congressional district in 2020, Parnell decided to run again for the state’s open Senate seat in 2022. But he ended his campaign after losing a custody battle over domestic violence allegations. Panell’s wife testified that he had choked her, strangled her, and verbally and physically abused their children. The judge ruled that there was “credible evidence” for the abuse allegations, though Parnell denied them.

Parnell’s potential nomination comes after months of tension between Hegseth and current Army Secretary Dan Driscoll over the defense secretary’s quest to purge senior military officials and remake the Department of Defense in his own image. Driscoll is expected to leave the Pentagon as soon as Labor Day.

Driscoll is a close ally and friend to Vice President JD Vance and until recently was at the top of the list of names to replace Hegseth, should the defense secretary end up on President Trump’s bad side. Parnell, on the other hand, is likely to make Hegseth’s grip on the armed forces all the more absolute.

“Mr. Parnell has a deep bench of supporters throughout the Administration and has worked tirelessly to enable cultural change and accountability in the Pentagon,” a Pentagon official with knowledge of Hegseth’s decision-making process told The Hill. “Leveraging his extensive combat and executive experience, he will bring the accountability, change, and engaged transformational leadership the Army so desperately needs at this time.”

Parnell’s potential rise in Hegseth’s Defense Department adds his name to the growing list of men who have recently been accused of sexual assault or misconduct while they were in positions of power in Washington. That list includes Cory Mills, Max Miller, Matt Gaetz, Tony Gonzales, Eric Swalwell, and Jimmy Gomez.

Even Georgia Republicans have grown worried about Representative Mike Collins’s staffing choices.

A former staffer for the memeing Georgia lawmaker—24-year-old Preston Parra—shared Ku Klux Klan and Nazi images to his personal social media account over the summer, including a swastika comprised of the word “twink” and an image of himself clad in a KKK uniform, the hood gripped in his hand. In other posts made in June and July, Parra repeatedly used a racial slur to refer to Black people, and posted the phrase “White Power.”

Parra interned for Collins for a couple of months in 2024 before he was tapped to work as a contractor for Collins’s leadership PAC, reported The Washington Post Thursday.

A self-described political provocateur and “twink fascist,” Parra’s consulting website bills him as a political operative who can access more than 70 million followers through an “elite influencer network” for Republican causes. The website also displays multiple images of Parra next to Donald Trump, and highlights his work as a 2024 Trump surrogate.

In an interview with the Post, Parra claimed that the KKK image was artificially generated, and framed most of his posts as “satirical.” He also said that Collins was not aware of his personal X account, as it was set to private while he worked for the congressman.

“What, is there supposed to be some kind of CIA background check?” Parra told the Post.

He added that he does not identify as a white supremacist because “it goes against his religion and he has a Colombian father,” according to the Post.

“I do think that the white race contributes more to the world,” he said.

However, Parra had more derogatory remarks toward the Post’s coverage following publication.

“Let a n--ga build his twink fascist regime,” Parra wrote on X, sharing a screenshot of the article (though he wrote out the slur).

Several Republicans who spoke with the newspaper said they had become concerned by the climate surrounding the Senate hopeful.

“In the South, we have a saying: You lay down with dogs, you get up with fleas,” Debbie Dooley, an original Tea Party organizer and conservative advocate in Georgia, told the Post. “Well, Mike Collins has got a lot of fleas on him.”

Collins has faced scrutiny over his own social media habits, as well. His endless pursuit of viral moments has spurred some questionable moments, including posts that were called racist and antisemitic.

The 59-year-old also has yet to address his son-in-law’s white supremacist social media posts, as reported by CNN last month. Collins’s November rival, Democratic U.S. Senator Jon Ossoff, has argued that Collins’s silence on the issue should be “disqualifying” for a candidate seeking higher office.

Steve Bannon’s attempt to erase his criminal indictment for refusing to testify before the House’s January 6 committee was shot down by a federal judge appointed by Donald Trump himself. 

U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols on Wednesday ruled that Justice Department prosecutors didn’t have a sufficient explanation for why Bannon’s indictment should be dismissed, though he gave the government the ability to submit its request again. In February,  U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro said in the court filing requesting the dismissal that it would be in “in the interests of justice,” without elaborating further. 

In April, the Supreme Court threw out a lower court ruling upholding Bannon’s conviction, which opened the door for a trial court to dismiss the case against him. Bannon served a four-month prison sentence in 2024 for defying the House committee’s subpoena, so getting his conviction dismissed would be largely symbolic. 

Bannon fought his 2022 conviction for two years, trying to cite executive privilege as the reason for defying the congressional subpoena, even though he hadn’t been a Trump administration employee for two years prior to the 2021 Capitol insurrection. He was released just in time for the 2024 election but hasn’t been a part of the White House this time around, continuing to be a conservative commentator on his radio show. For now, he still has a criminal record. 

Donald Trump’s so-called renovations to the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts have done more harm than good—even his lawyers think so.

In a court filing Wednesday, Ohio Representative Joyce Beatty, the Democratic lawmaker mounting the legal challenge to Trump’s changes to the prestigious theater, said that the president’s lawyers had declined to defend him from accusations that he’d already marred the building.

“Tellingly, Defendants do not dispute that their prior efforts to emblazon the building with President Trump’s name may have irrevocably damaged the center’s historic marble facade,” Beatty’s lawyers wrote.

Trump’s lawyers suggested in a court filing Monday that if the administration was not allowed to proceed with the $250 million renovation project—including tacking the president’s name to the facade—the building would have to be demolished. Beatty’s lawyers called out the thinly veiled threat.

“In plain English, Defendants have not-so-subtly said: ‘What a nice Kennedy Center you have here. What a shame should something happen to it,’” Beatty’s lawyers wrote. “This is a breathtaking assault on the rule of law. It is delusional. And it must stop.”

In her filing, Beatty’s lawyers also pointed out that Trump’s overhaul of the prestigious national theater has only hastened its demise. The Kennedy Center is on track to fall $100 million short of its profit goal this year, and the shortfall can be directly tied to Trump changing the institution’s name. The center expects to miss its budget target by 70 percent and its contributed revenue by 25 percent, a projected $23 million deficit.

Earlier this month, the board voted again to close the center for two years so that it can renovate the building in Trump’s image. Now Beatty has asked a federal judge to once again keep Trump’s name off another man’s memorial.

On Wednesday night, the Department of Education posted a video to X comparing President Trump to Adolf Hitler, and then deleted it following massive backlash. 

The video was a clip from the 2017 film Darkest Hour about Winston Churchill during World War II, and has Gary Oldman playing Churchill shouting, “You cannot reason with a tiger when your head is in its mouth!” Oldman’s character was talking about Hitler in the scene, but the department’s clip followed the line with techno music over a montage of President Trump, implying that he’s the tiger. The post carried the tagline, “No one does it like us,” followed by a tiger emoji. 

The post quickly attracted attention and a community note explaining the movie reference, with X users mocking and attacking the Department of Education account for comparing Trump to Hitler. One X account, @rokhannacycle, pointed out that the video appeared to be a ripoff of a Tiger Woods video from TikTok. 

The Trump administration regularly posts flippant, offensive memes on its social media accounts, sometimes incorporating white supremacist and white nationalist tropes. The Department of Homeland Security in particular regularly evokes neo-Nazi allusions to push the administration’s mass deportation policy. 

White House staffer Kaelan Dorr has pushed the edgy meme strategy, or “banger memes” as the White House X account describes it. It’s not clear in this case whether the communications staffer behind the post wanted Trump to look cool like a tiger and missed the context, or actually wanted to positively compare the president to Hitler. With this administration, unfortunately either is possible.