Pete Hegseth Makes Over Half the Military Want to Quit Early

The Trump administration’s hyperpoliticized military environment apparently has thousands of active-duty military members looking toward the exit.

A survey by Common Defense Civic Engagement, a grassroots veterans organization, found that 53 percent of active-duty service members want to leave because their service is becoming more politicized.

Another 45 percent of polled respondents shared that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s policy changes and the ensuing instability had made them consider leaving their stations sooner rather than later.

The poll also found that 67 percent of active-duty respondents felt that the recent policy decisions affecting America’s military branches were being made for political gain rather than mission readiness.

“Veterans know what real leadership looks like: You take care of the people under your command and you keep politics out of the mission,” Jose Vasquez, a U.S. Army veteran and the executive director of Common Defense, told Military.com. “Right now, nearly eight in 10 veterans and military families say they’re being left behind, and active duty troops are telling us that politicization is pushing them toward the exit. That’s not a talking point; it’s a readiness crisis.”

The survey, which was conducted in September and released in October, reported that 50 percent of respondents disapproved of Donald Trump’s job as commander in chief. Those polled felt similarly about Hegseth, who received a 45 percent approval rating and a 50 percent disapproval rating.

The backlash was not as severe for uniformed senior military officials: 56 percent of polled military respondents said they approved of their commanders, while 27 percent reported said they did not approve of them.

Yet the potential personal divestment from America’s military branches could not come at a worse time, as tensions continue to rise between Washington and Iran. Trump disclosed Saturday that he had a “very good talk” with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and that he still plans to “take care of” one or two more targets in Iran, one of which involves a suspected nuclear site.

“We’ve had such a victory, and we’ll put it away very soon, one way or the other,” Trump said. “Either they’ll make a deal, or we’ll just end it.… The job we’ve done is amazing.”

President Donald Trump slammed his former personal lawyer Alina Habba Mildon’s pay-to-pardon scheme.

Speaking to reporters at a Mar-a-Lago Halloween Party Saturday, Trump gave a surprising rebuke of Mildon reportedly receiving a $50 million contract to secure a pardon for a billionaire family.

“I thought it was terrible. I told her, I said, ‘I don’t want her paid.’ I thought we had somebody speak to the people that did it, and she used her relationship to do that,” Trump said. “And it was far too much. You know, it’s one thing for a person to get paid legal fees, or whatever, she’s a lawyer—

“I thought it was totally obnoxious and outrageous, and it’s not acceptable, not acceptable—at all,” he said.

Mildon inked the lucrative deal with a company started by the daughter of Julio Herrera Velutini, a Venezuelan national who was looking for a presidential pardon. The New York Times reported last week that Trump was angered by the size of Mildon’s contract, and said that she should donate some of that money to his presidential library or another entity related to him.

Speaking to reporters Saturday, he claimed that she wasn’t the one he was expecting a donation from. “No, not her. I expect maybe the people—I don’t know, if anybody wants to make it,” Trump said, leaving the door open for anyone to fill his pockets.

It appears that Trump is less mad about the size of the payout than he is about the fact that he wasn’t cut in on the deal to begin with. I mean, he’s already openly admitted that he’s served up a pardon in return for political support.

Representative Haley Stevens’s friends and colleagues are concerned by her fiancé Jason Turkish’s alarming behavior surrounding the Democrat’s last-minute endorsement of Republican Senate candidate Mike Rogers.

Last week, with just days until the midterm election, Turkish, a Jewish Democrat, announced his intention to vote for Rogers. The disabilities and civil rights attorney claimed he was convinced that Democratic candidate Abdul El-Sayed’s criticism of Israel posed a threat to Jews in Michigan. 

After Stevens surprised everyone Sunday with her support for Rogers, her friends and colleagues have begun speaking out about what they consider Turkish’s concerning behavior, suggesting that he may have influenced her decision.

Former Michigan Governor Jim Blanchard told Gongwer News Service Sunday that Turkish had openly admonished Stevens ahead of her scheduled appearance at a Souls to the Polls event with El-Sayed and Representative Jim Clyburn—which she ultimately ditched to support Rogers.

“He was working her over. The way he was saying it was, ‘Everyone is disappointed in you, they did everything they could to help you and then immediately after you lose the primary, you endorsed him,’” Blanchard recounted from a dinner Thursday night. 

Blanchard said he’d defended Stevens for being a “team player.”

Turkish replied, “‘I know, but they’re really disappointed in her,’” the former governor recalled. 

Blanchard told GNS that Turkish was “all distraught” and “strung out” about El-Sayed. When the former governor raised his concerns to Stevens, she replied: “I’m fine.”

Blanchard described the sudden change in his longtime ally, saying several times, “This is not the Haley I know.”

“Something snapped in her. And it snapped in 24 hours,” he told GNS.

One of Stevens’s friends, Michigan University regent Jordan Acker, wrote on X Monday that he had become “deeply troubled” by Turkish’s behavior.

“I’ve heard serious concerns about his treatment of Haley’s staff, friends, and allies. My own experiences have only deepened those concerns,” he wrote. “It is painful to watch someone you care about go through something like this. It is even more painful to worry about the influence of those closest to her.”

Acker wrote that he’d been unable to contact Stevens in the wake of her controversy. “Her fiancé took her phone away,” he wrote on X. (Turkish denied the accusation, saying Stevens had simply turned off her phone.)

Former Stevens spokesperson Caitlin Legacki blamed Turkish for Stevens’s primary campaign failing. She claimed the couple got engaged in secret, and that Turkish began wielding outsize influence over the campaign. She accused him of bullying junior staffers and pressuring Stevens to be more vocal in defending Israel.

Former Representative Susan Wild, who said she’d known Stevens from coming up on Capitol Hill, also voiced concerns about Turkish following her friend’s sudden flip-flop.

“So many people in the Democratic Party have shown so much support to Haley over the years, and she has betrayed them all. If this is because of her new relationship (about which many of us were so happy for her after she lost the primary), all I can say is that any woman who abandons her friends when a new guy comes along is no friend at all,” Wild wrote on X Monday.

All of this is compounded by the fact that Stevens cannot muster any defense for her own defection. Her shameful endorsement of a MAGA Republican may yet prove to be a unifying moment for the Democratic Party. Her senseless defection has earned widespread condemnation from progressive and establishment Democrats alike, and El-Sayed’s campaign has seen a late funding surge.  

At a rally in Dubuque, Iowa, Sunday night, President Trump rambled about Republican Senate nominee Ashley Hinson’s weight before being interrupted by a protester.

“I knew Ashley for a long time, and she was a little bit heavier, OK?” Trump told the crowd. “She was. And she put herself—she knew what she was doing. She knew the weight that was on her—really, literally, the weight. And she knew the importance of what she was doing, and she went out—the old-fashioned way, too. Not with, you know, give me a shot.”

Then a protester decided to start heckling the president, who was annoyed.

“Don’t bother, they’re paid protesters, they go away quickly,” Trump said. “They’re like a gnat, they’re like a little fly.”

As the crowd booed and the protester was removed, Trump added, “There’s usually two or three of them per rally. They get paid $250. They’re paid by [George] Soros. And they’re losers.” He complained “that they always do it right in the middle of my punch line!”

The “punch line” was basically Trump praising Hinson for “putting herself in shape,” which is undoubtedly the most important thing to Iowa voters. Trump is holding these midterm rallies because even safe Republican Senate and House seats are in jeopardy thanks to his record-low popularity over the Iran war and struggling economy. These disasters are of his own making, and his rants aren’t reassuring the public, inviting hecklers even in deep-red sections of the country.

Hinson is polling almost dead even with her Democratic challenger, disability activist and Iowa state Representative Josh Turek. Iowans watching Trump’s rally likely won’t be voting Tuesday based on Hinson’s weight but on the large, unpopular, and incompetent president standing with her.

A federal judge on Monday tossed the Justice Department’s latest attempt to punish two former FBI officials who were involved in the Hunter Biden laptop investigation.

U.S. Magistrate Judge Zia M. Faruqui said that the government’s case was tantamount to “weaponization,” and slammed its error-riddled arguments as “slapdash,” according to MS NOW’s Ken Dilanian.

The DOJ attempted to prosecute former intelligence analyst Nikki Floris, who ran the intelligence division at the Washington Field Office, and Bradley Benavides, a former deputy assistant director for counterintelligence. Both were charged with lying to Congress regarding Biden’s laptop contents, and surrendered on arrest warrants last month.

“This does not feel like an investigation. It feels like a broken one-wish willow obsession,” Faruqui said, comparing the case to the hit horror blockbuster Obsession.

Faruqui noted that he was “deeply troubled by what has happened here in this case,” and that the government’s procedure “cannot be described as anything other than weaponization.”

“It was a rush to charge, and that was a mistake,” Faruqui said.

The laptop scandal began in December 2019, when a Wilmington, Delaware–area computer repair shop owner gave an abandoned laptop purportedly belonging to Biden to Donald Trump’s former personal attorney Rudy Giuliani. Giuliani then handed a copy of the laptop’s hard drive to local law enforcement, which handed over the contents to the FBI.

In the years that followed, Republicans leveraged the laptop’s myriad contents to escalate scrutiny and speculation surrounding the Biden family’s business dealings with Burisma, a Ukrainian natural gas and energy company.

Giuliani and Steve Bannon, Trump’s former chief strategist, insisted that the laptop contained evidence that the Biden family made millions of dollars after former President Joe Biden and a Burisma adviser held a meeting. (The New York Post, which ran the original story on its front page, later said that the contents of the laptop were mixed with fake material and that most of the data could not be verified.)

The alleged meeting became central to an impeachment probe against the elder Biden. Republicans claimed at the time that Biden had engaged in corruption, and had peddled the influence of his vice presidency to rake in cash.

Floris and Benavides briefed Republican lawmakers in 2020 about the contents of the laptop as part of a congressional investigation. Senator Chuck Grassley has since claimed that the pair gave the briefing in order to cast the probe as Russian disinformation.

But the entire laptop investigation fell apart in 2024 after its star witness, Alexander Smirnov, admitted the conspiracy was in fact Russian disinformation. Smirnov admitted to Justice Department prosecutors that “officials associated with Russian intelligence were involved” in fabricating the Hunter Biden narrative. In the ensuing fallout, Smirnov told investigators he was in contact with “four different [top] Russian officials,” two of whom were the “heads of the entities they represent.”

This story has been updated.