Pete Hegseth is a good choice to be Donald Trump’s Secretary of Defense, for a number of reasons; more on that in a bit. Hegseth’s nomination was hit with accusations early on, but he has been slowly gaining ground in the likely vote count regardless.
Trump named Hegseth his pick for Defense Secretary on Nov. 12, a week after the election. Days later, Hegseth came under fire amid accusations of past sexual misconduct. An unidentified woman accused Hegseth of sexual assault in a Monterey, California, hotel room in 2017.
Hegseth claimed the sexual encounter was consensual and prosecutors declined to file charges. Hegseth and the accuser reached a confidential financial settlement in 2023.
His nomination has been argued over and hit a few snags; the Washington mill has spit out a fascinating new rumor that new Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD), has assured President-elect Trump that Pete Hegseth will have the votes for his nomination to be confirmed in the Senate, according to the CBS News report linked above:
Senate Majority Leader John Thune has privately told President-elect Donald Trump that he believes Pete Hegseth will have the votes to be confirmed as Secretary of Defense, according to three sources.
When asked for comment, a spokesman for Thune would only tell CBS News, “Two things we don’t discuss publicly: Whip counts and private conversations with the president.”
The new Senate Majority Leader in an interview with “Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan” promised a fair process but expressed more caution.
“I think these are nominees who are new enough, they’ve been going around and conducting their meetings, which I think, frankly, have gone very well, but they still have to make their case in front of the committee. And, you know, we don’t know all the information about some of these nominees.”
If this is true – there’s no way of knowing that for sure – then the Defense Department will have a new boss, and one better than the old boss.
Here’s the thing: Pete Hegseth may well be precisely the medicine that our troubled armed forces need right now, once all the Senate confirmation squabbling is over.
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Why? Because he’s been there, done that, and has the t-shirt. When Donald Trump, after winning the election, started naming his proposed cabinet picks and tagged Hegseth as SecDef, the usual suspects in the legacy media and the left (but I repeat myself) started squawking that Trump picked a “Fox News host” to run the defense department, but that’s a canard. Oh, yes, Pete Hegseth worked for Fox News; but he was also a U.S. Army officer, a combat leader with tours in Afghanistan and Iraq. He’s smelled the smoke, he’s faced dangerous times in foreign places and has a pretty good idea of what needs to be done to restore our armed forces to be once more a warfighting force.
Today’s news may well be just a product of the Washington rumor mill. We can hope it’s not. There is a lot to be done in setting Washington to rights; all of Trump’s cabinet picks are going to have to take a lot of initiative in getting their own houses in order, and they can only count on two years to get a lot done.
This nomination should go through. Let’s hope it does.
