Stonewalling questions about his sexual behavior and excessive drinking as “anonymous smears,” the Fox host charmed the Senate Armed Services Committee’s GOP majority into submission.
Secretary of defense nominee Pete Hegseth at a Senate Armed Services confirmation hearing on January 14.(Andrew Harnik / Getty Images)
Iowa GOP Senator Joni Ernst got elected in 2014 promising that her past as a hog-castrating farm woman meant she was qualified to cut pork in Washington. She promised to “make ’em squeal.”
At Tuesday’s Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on the utterly unqualified Pete Hegseth’s nomination to be defense secretary, the 23-year military veteran seemed to have lost her own… ovaries? (Sorry, there’s no good female equivalent.) Clearly, threats to primary Ernst, who started out skeptical of Hegseth’s nomination, worked. She put aside her long-standing concerns about the rights of women in the military and her work to combat sexual abuse and harassment against them (Hegseth stands credibly accused of both), and gave the Fox host a warm welcome.
Ernst asked him softball questions, quoted an Iowa leader who’d worked with Hegseth testifying to his integrity, and overall looked nothing like the strong advocate for military women she’s always been.
That was the only slight surprise in Tuesday’s hearings. All the other Republican senators were worshipful toward Hegseth, praising his promises to combat “woke” in the military, fight (nonexistent) “quotas” for women and people of color, and ignoring the many claims about his alleged sexual behavior and his drinking on the job that concern Democrats—and have, in the past, bothered at least a few Republicans. Including Ernst.
GOP Senator Markwayne Mullins put it colorfully. After Virginia Democrat Tim Kaine grilled Hegseth on his well-documented history of adultery—”Can you so casually cheat on a second wife and cheat on the mother of a child that had been born two months before?” he asked—Mullins retorted: “Senator Kaine, or I guess I better use the senator from Virginia, starts bringing up the fact that ‘what if you showed up drunk to your job?’ How many senators have shown up drunk to vote at night?… How many senators have gotten a divorce for cheating?”
Essentially, Mullins’s defense of Hegseth is that the United States Senate is full of drunken, cheating bastards. And it just might work.
What was most remarkable about Hegseth’s hearing performance was not that he backtracked on some of his previous stances, especially his oft-stated opposition to women serving in combat roles. It was his consistency on some of his other terrible past stances, especially his opposition to “wokeness” in the military. And Republicans on the committee lapped it up.
Hegseth repeatedly scorched the Pentagon’s alleged “woke” policies and promised that Trump will issue “new lawful orders” based on “readiness, accountability, standards and lethality.” He added: “The troops will rejoice” when woke policies are ended.
Asked about his past denunciation of Geneva Convention protocols on the treatment of enemy combatants, Hegseth, a torture defender, declared those conventions “burdensome.”
“What an America-first national security policy is not going to do,” Hegseth told the committee, “is hand its prerogatives over to international bodies that make decisions about how our men and women make decisions on the battlefield.”
When Democratic Senator Mazie Hirono asked Hegseth if he’d obey Trump’s “unlawful” orders, like his demand that soldiers shoot protesters “in the legs” during Black Lives Matter actions in June 2020, Hegseth essentially said yes.
With a hostile incoming administration, a massive infrastructure of courts and judges waiting to turn “freedom of speech” into a nostalgic memory, and legacy newsrooms rapidly abandoning their responsibility to produce accurate, fact-based reporting, independent media has its work cut out for itself.
At The Nation, we’re steeling ourselves for an uphill battle as we fight to uphold truth, transparency, and intellectual freedom—and we can’t do it alone.
This month, every gift The Nation receives through December 31 will be doubled, up to $75,000. If we hit the full match, we start 2025 with $150,000 in the bank to fund political commentary and analysis, deep-diving reporting, incisive media criticism, and the team that makes it all possible.
As other news organizations muffle their dissent or soften their approach, The Nation remains dedicated to speaking truth to power, engaging in patriotic dissent, and empowering our readers to fight for justice and equality. As an independent publication, we’re not beholden to stakeholders, corporate investors, or government influence. Our allegiance is to facts and transparency, to honoring our abolitionist roots, to the principles of justice and equality—and to you, our readers.
In the weeks and months ahead, the work of free and independent journalists will matter more than ever before. People will need access to accurate reporting, critical analysis, and deepened understanding of the issues they care about, from climate change and immigration to reproductive justice and political authoritarianism.
By standing with The Nation now, you’re investing not just in independent journalism grounded in truth, but also in the possibilities that truth will create.
The possibility of a galvanized public. Of a more just society. Of meaningful change, and a more radical, liberated tomorrow.
In solidarity and in action,
The Editors, The Nation
“I saw 50 Secret Service agents get injured by rioters trying to jump over the fence,” Hegseth said, “set a church on fire and destroy a statue. Chaos.” And when Senator Elissa Slotkin asked if “there are some orders that could be given by the commander in chief that could violate the US Constitution?” he essentially answered no.
“I reject the premise that President Trump is gonna be giving illegal orders,” he told Slotkin.
Asked if he would continue a Pentagon policy allowing military women to travel for abortion, if they’re located in a state that restricts their rights, Hegseth didn’t hesitate: “I don’t believe in the federal government paying for travel for abortion.”
And he promised that servicemembers expelled for refusing the “experimental” Covid vaccine, during the pandemic, would be reinstated with back pay, “and an apology.”
Hegseth-worshipping Alaska Senator Dan Sullivan accused Democrats who opposed the nominee of “extremism.” Hegseth proudly broadcast his own extremism.
Republicans loved his performance. Democrats did not. Our opposition party members were more spineful than many of us expected. But I’m not sure that matters.
When Democrats asked for “true or false” answers to questions about excessive drinking and sexual abuse and harassment, Hegseth refused to give them. “Anonymous smears,” he answered repeatedly and robotically, like a rehearsed witness taking the Fifth Amendment. Tim Kaine and later Arizona Senator Mark Kelly noted that they are mostly not anonymous, to senators anyway; apparently, some accusers have met with lawmakers or allowed their names to be used, privately, in the investigative process. I personally felt like that should have been a bigger deal, pushed by Democrats, during the hearing.
Jane Mayer in The New Yorker reported that both Ernst and supposedly “moderate” GOP Senator Susan Collins of Maine refused to meet with the woman who accused Hegseth of raping her. Collins insisted, essentially, that the woman go public to the Armed Services Committee, of which she is not a member.
I understand why victims of sexual assault won’t come forward publicly—look at the example of Brett Kavanaugh’s accuser Christine Blasey Ford, who had to go into hiding. But if any of his former Fox or veterans’ group colleagues would make themselves public, that could maybe change the trajectory here.
Get unlimited access: $9.50 for six months.
Nonpartisan veterans’ advocate Paul Rieckoff tried to reassure despairing Hegseth opponents on Xitter: “We’ve got days before a possible vote. Maybe longer. The FBI report has not been shared and did not go far enough. There are brave voices that still may want to be heard. And anything can happen. None of this is normal or inevitable.”
“If it were a secret ballot,” one moderate GOP senator told New York’s Rebecca Traister, “I don’t think he’d be confirmed.”
But it’s not a secret ballot. And he will almost certainly be confirmed.
Joan WalshTwitterJoan Walsh, a national affairs correspondent for The Nation, is a coproducer of The Sit-In: Harry Belafonte Hosts The Tonight Show and the author of What’s the Matter With White People? Finding Our Way in the Next America. Her new book (with Nick Hanauer and Donald Cohen) is Corporate Bullsh*t: Exposing the Lies and Half-Truths That Protect Profit, Power and Wealth In America.