With Matt Gaetz forced to pull his own nomination for attorney general, savvy Washington observers call it a win for norms. “I think it shows that Donald Trump cannot get anything he wants,” said a law professor in Politico the morning after. Yes, well, too bad that not getting what he wants has never taught Trump a lesson about anything. In fact, Trump’s typical response to being denied what he wants is even more outrageous demands.
He respects that reaction in others, which is why he’s collected this Suicide Squad of Cabinet nominees—almost all of whom have a record of failing upward in one way or another—in the first place. For the members of this new administration, favor-trading is their most obvious skill and slick morals the defining character trait. In a normal situation, these things would be blots on a résumé. In the Trump world, consequence-free bad behavior is the résumé. Hell, given the propensity of Trump administrations to become a snakepit, it’s also a survival skill.
The Gaetz withdrawal elevated Pam Bondi, the former Florida attorney general who fits in this pattern as well. Her tryout took place in 2013, when she took in a tidy $23,000 campaign donation from Trump, not six days after she announced that her office was “reviewing allegations” of fraud against Trump University—a review that coincidentally resulted in no further comment or action. She’s an old hand at sliding within the greasy gears of Trumpworld.
But if Gaetz and Bondi represent the acolyte capable of taking the average guignol and making it grand as fuck, Trump’s abiding interest in promoting the most corrupt and unfit is most clear in the case of Pete Hegseth, a surprise pick to run the Department of Defense who is likely unfamiliar to most Americans. He’s a steady fixture on Fox News’s Fox & Friends, the in-flight geek show on Trump’s Air Force One, but you’d be forgiven if you’d missed him—he’s not featured during the week, he’s on the weekend show that you probably didn’t know existed.
He’s also now fighting off a sexual assault scandal that is absolutely not a surprise, at least to me.
The last time I saw Hegseth was in 2019. We were friendly from having crossed paths in cable news greenrooms over the years, and I was wooing him for a glossy magazine piece. He was clearly interested in the attention, perhaps in more ways than one. Fox News wound up nixing my proposed profile, and that was wise. Even on the set of Fox & Friends, he’s a loose cannon eager to provoke (throwing axes with dangerous abandon, bragging about his refusal to wash his hands). He was considerably looser after martinis and bourbon. I was stone-cold sober. The hug goodbye lingered; his emphasis on how good it was to see me left me with a buzzy sense of unexpressed energy.
Now we know his hands can get very dirty. In 2017, a woman identified as Jane Doe made a police report that described Hegseth committing sexual assault. There are some superficial similarities to my evening (the drinks, the flirting, the slippery nature of a late-night boozy chat). Of course, the broad outlines of that interaction are overly familiar to any woman who’s ever had a friendly conversation with a man convinced that his self-assessed attractiveness and charisma (and maybe enough drinks) will slip him under the iron gate of “no.” If women told friends about these things every time they fell short of assault, we’d never shut up about anything else. According to reports, in fact, Hegseth’s nomination is already very much on the minds of the Pentagon’s women. Said one unnamed Pentagon official to CNN, “I imagine there is already profound fear and anxiety among women in uniform.”
Hegseth later agreed to pay Doe an undisclosed sum in exchange for a nondisclosure agreement. In the police report, he copped to almost every untoward detail of her story with the important exception of locking her in his hotel room and taking her phone. He insisted to police that Doe was cognizant of what was happening and that, in his opinion, the contact was “always” consensual and she was “comfortable” with it. In an amazing bit of unintentional and evocative honesty, he granted that the woman showed “early signs of regret” before leaving.
I suspect that Hegseth would sincerely swear on a stack of Trump-branded Bibles that—in the crudest terms—“she wanted it” or “was asking for it,” both of which mean something very different from consent. I can believe he feels blameless. For men like Hegseth and Donald Trump, “consent” is a meaningless term. Why does one need consent for taking what’s already yours?
Hegseth appears to believe that male sexual aggression is more than acceptable behavior; it’s to be celebrated. Writing about Trump’s refusal to back down from the “grab her by the pussy” footage, he lauded Trump for “not playing by the rules of a game that was stacked against him—and against all patriotic Americans.” That unironic (and, OK, historically supported) merging of American values and victimizing women also makes sense of what Hegseth told a hotel employee who was called to break up a loud argument by the hotel pool between him and Jane Doe shortly before they wound up in his hotel room. According to the employee, a “heavily intoxicated” Hegseth yelled that “he had freedom of speech.”
Prior reporting surfaced the nondisclosure agreement; it barely dented MAGAworld’s enthusiasm for Hegseth. His attorney framed the whole thing as an attempt at “blackmail” Hegseth settled only because he might be targeted by the #MeToo movement and lose his job at Fox News. You know, consequences. As of this writing, the scuttlebutt in the news transom suggests that Hegseth’s footing might not be as firm as it was from the off. Perhaps the police report will embolden his critics and weaken his support from the Trump team.
Gaetz’s departure from the scene may, for some, suggest a reassertion of norms, a breaking wave of backlash that might sweep Hegseth’s nomination away with the Florida sex pest. I’ll be happy to be proven wrong, but I think not. Hegseth might survive based on the same reasons that Trumpworld has been hitherto unmoved by protests (made on both the right and left) that Hegseth is singularly unqualified to run the Pentagon—the country’s largest employer, a nation within a nation with its own mail delivery service, judicial code, legal system, and health care delivery apparatus. Seizing what others would deny you or say you don’t deserve is the whole point of Trumpism. Hegseth’s sexual misconduct isn’t a drawback to be judged against his lickspittle loyalty, it’s an essential part of the audition.
