This is an adapted excerpt from the Jan. 14 episode of “All In with Chris Hayes.
I want you to mentally bracket out for a second the very serious allegation of sexual assault against Pete Hegseth, the man Donald Trump wants to be his defense secretary.
Yes, it is an allegation born of a police report filed after his accuser went to the emergency room seeking a rape kit. Yes, Hegseth denies that allegation and says he had consensual, extramarital sex with his accuser — and made an undisclosed payment to her to settle the matter.
Hegseth said he made that payment to “protect” his family and his job. The local district attorney declined to file charges in the case, saying “no charges were supported by proof beyond a reasonable doubt.”
There is no universe in which Hegseth’s resume gets into the “let’s interview him” pile.
But for a moment, just forget that. Pretend none of it happened. Instead, imagine the process of sorting through resumes for a candidate to run the Pentagon, one of the most important jobs in the United States. A job that oversees the nation’s largest single workforce. A job that starts and ends with keeping Americans safe.
There is no universe in which Hegseth’s resume gets into the “let’s interview him” pile. He is manifestly unqualified for virtually any government job, much less the one he’s nominated for, something he demonstrated frequently in his Senate confirmation hearing Tuesday.
So what did this guy do to deserve such an important job? He did serve in the National Guard and was deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan — like hundreds of thousands of other Americans.
He also ran the Republican-linked group Vets for Freedom and, according to reporting from The New Yorker, ran up such massive debts that the group’s board had to save the organization by merging it with another nonprofit and stripping Hegseth of his responsibilities as its leader.
In response to questions from The New Yorker, Tim Parlatore, a lawyer for Hegseth, provided the outlet with a statement he said came from “an advisor” to Hegseth:
“We’re not going to comment on outlandish claims laundered through The New Yorker by a petty and jealous disgruntled former associate of Mr. Hegseth’s. Get back to us when you try your first attempt at actual journalism.”
Hegseth then went on to run a Koch Brothers-backed, right-wing group, Concerned Vets for America. But a few years later, again according to The New Yorker, was forced to step aside amid allegations of open drunkenness, sexist behavior and financial mismanagement, allegations Hegseth has repeatedly denied.
Look, lots of political activists, including those on the right, have built huge nonprofits from small beginnings. Hegseth is not one of them. He took two organizations that were arguably custom-built for him and seemingly drove them into the ground so hard that both groups distanced themselves from him.
That is the sum total of his career qualifications. That, and the fact he’s a Fox News weekend host that Trump likes to look at — and no shade at cable news hosts, but I wouldn’t just be picking them at random to run the U.S. military.
Republicans have shown they’re fine with putting manifestly unqualified, intentionally unqualified, people into these important positions. They don’t have to, there are plenty of Trump-supporting officials who would qualified to run the Pentagon. But if they’re willing to do this, if they’re willing to put someone this manifestly unqualified in charge of the Pentagon with the United States armed forces on the line, there is no limit to how abject they will be in their pursuit of Trump. Keep that in mind if and when something terrible happens. We have already been through this once with Covid. We saw that who runs the government really matters, it’s a matter of life and death. And now they want to put a guy who shouldn’t have made it past the first cut of resumes to run the most powerful military that’s ever existed in the history of human civilization. We have already been through this once with Covid. We saw that who runs the government really matters, it’s a matter of life and death. The irony of all of this is that MAGA Republicans keep pretending that DEI and diversity hires of women, people of color and LGBTQ people are filling the government with unqualified officials. They did it again in Tuesday’s hearing, displaying a poster that suggested DEI has killed military standards — a poster in which Republicans misspelled the word “military” as “miltary.” All while Hegseth sat there, enjoying the perverse Republican version of affirmative action for lackluster associates of Trump. It was a gross, indeed, dangerous hypocrisy that got called out Tuesday by one of the most decorated veterans in Congress, Sen. Tammy Duckworth of Illinois: “How can we ask these warriors to train and perform to the absolute highest standards when you are asking us to lower the standards to make you the secretary of defense simply because you are buddies with our president-elect?” Duckworth asked. Allison Detzel contributed.
Chris Hayes hosts “All In with Chris Hayes” at 8 p.m. ET Tuesday through Friday on MS NOW. He is the editor-at-large at The Nation. A former fellow at Harvard University’s Edmond J. Safra Foundation Center for Ethics, Hayes was a Bernard Schwartz Fellow at the New America Foundation. His latest book is “The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource” (Penguin Press).
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