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Donald Trump said in his three-hour “weave” with Joe Rogan that one of the things he knows now that he didn’t know when entering the Oval Office the first time in 2017 is what people to hire for what posts. It was all new to him; he relied on advisors to help fill out positions, and he made some mistakes. It may turn out to be his most important lesson.
Our Douglas Andrews thoroughly covered Trump’s first cabinet picks yesterday, so I won’t unnecessarily retread any of that ground other than to say his early choices are encouraging.
One of the most exciting announcements in I don’t remember when is that Trump has tapped Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to lead the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE, an acronym that echoes Musk’s favorite cryptocurrency, Dogecoin). They’ll be tasked with actually doing something about Trump’s favorite bugaboo — waste, fraud, and abuse. There’s a whole lot more to it, and we’ll have further analysis tomorrow.
Which brings me to a few more significant Trump picks. John Ratcliffe, Trump’s former director of national intelligence, will lead the CIA. New York businessman Steven Witkoff will be special envoy to the Middle East. Former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee will serve as U.S. ambassador to Israel.
But the real splash came last night when Trump picked 44-year-old Pete Hegseth to serve as defense secretary and lead the nation’s largest federal department. The Pentagon’s budget last year was $850 billion.
“Who the f**k is this guy?” read Politico’s classy headline.
Well, he’s a decorated Army veteran with deployments to Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantanamo Bay. He has degrees from Princeton and Harvard. He’s still an officer in the Individual Ready Reserve, and he’s the former executive director of Vets for Freedom and Concerned Veterans for America. Oh, and he’s a Fox News host, which is, naturally, how most media stories present him.
Yes, Hegseth is certainly unconventional and an outsider. He doesn’t have the high rank or private defense industry credentials of previous secretaries of defense, and he’s taking predictable heat for being what some consider less than qualified. Then again, one of Trump’s core arguments is that the way things have been done needs to change. That includes picking guys like General James Mattis to head the Pentagon and General John Kelly to serve as White House chief of staff.
Hegseth will almost certainly be an upgrade over woke, vax-mandating, and AWOL Lloyd Austin.
Hegseth has made no bones about his view that the injection of left-wing ideology in the form of critical race theory and its manifestation in diversity, equity, and inclusion mandates is the primary problem with America’s war-fighting apparatus today. He’s right.
“The dumbest phrase on planet earth in the military is our diversity is our strength,” he declared earlier this month. He didn’t stop there.
“First of all, you’ve got to fire the chairman of the Joint Chiefs,” Hegseth said, referring to General Charles Brown. “Any general, admiral, whatever, that was involved in any of the DEI woke s**t has gotta go,” he continued. “Either you’re in for war-fighting, and that’s it — that’s the only litmus test we care about. You gotta get DEI and CRT out of military academies so you’re not training young officers to be baptized in this type of thinking.” There needs to be “an ethos change,” he explained. “There’s a reason people don’t want to serve — because they don’t trust that their senior leaders are going to have their best interests in mind in combat.”
Bingo.
In fact, speaking of firing generals, The Wall Street Journal reports, “The Trump transition team is considering a draft executive order that establishes a ‘warrior board’ of retired senior military personnel with the power to review three- and four-star officers and to recommend removals of any deemed unfit for leadership.”
When you sign up to serve in the Armed Forces, you write a blank check made payable to “The People of the United States of America” for an amount up to and including your life. Patriots aren’t going to do that just so left-wingers who hate the military can feel good about some dude in uniform wearing long hair and earrings and using the wrong pronouns. Mental illness disqualifies one from service because it undermines readiness. Left-wing social experimentation on the military has caused a recruitment and morale crisis.
If confirmed by the Republican Senate, Hegseth won’t have time to focus only on wokeness. He’ll immediately be confronted with the foreign policy disasters caused by Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, from wars in Ukraine and Israel to belligerence from Iran and China — the latter of which poses the most significant national security threat to the U.S. since the Soviet Union.
Projecting strength, though, is a key part of Trump’s strategy. “With Pete at the helm, America’s enemies are on notice — Our Military will be Great Again, and America will Never Back Down,” Trump said in a statement. “Nobody fights harder for the Troops, and Pete will be a courageous and patriotic champion of our ‘Peace through Strength’ policy.”
Refocusing the military on war-fighting and ditching the woke, er, crap is core to the strategy of projecting strength. Our global adversaries laugh at us for caring more about military abortions and guys getting their nails done than winning or, better yet, preventing wars. Time will tell if Hegseth is the right guy for the job or if he is in over his head. I, for one, certainly don’t fault Trump for thinking outside the Beltway with his pick.
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