Everyone Hates Trump’s New Defense Secretary

Pete Hegseth’s nomination as Donald Trump’s secretary of defense has left many scratching their heads, trying to figure out what on earth qualifies the Fox & Friends host to lead the Pentagon and command 1.3 million active-duty troops.

While Hegseth does have military experience, previously serving as an infantry officer in the Army National Guard in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantánamo Bay, he has nowhere near the expertise traditionally required for the role of Defense Department head.

For example, current Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin served in the military for 41 years, holding several high-ranking positions as commanding general of U.S. forces in Iraq, the army’s vice chief of staff, and commander of U.S. Central Command, which is responsible for all military operations in the Middle East.

Hegseth’s lack of experience isn’t the only reason he would be considered unsuitable for the position. He recently claimed that his orders to guard Joe Biden’s inauguration were revoked after he was “deemed an extremist” due to a tattoo of a Jerusalem Cross on his chest.

Hegseth failed to mention that he also has a corresponding “Deus Volt” tattoo on his arm, a Latin phrase that means “God Wills It” and a white supremacist slogan. Twelve national guard members were reportedly removed from Biden’s inauguration detail after making extremist statements, and according to Hegseth’s own admission, he was one of them.

So it’s not surprising his appointment seems to have left many across the political spectrum unimpressed.

Former Fox & Friends co-host Gretchen Carlson seemed simply confused by her former colleague’s appointment.

“From silly diner interviews on Weekend Fox and Friends to Secretary of Defense? I never thought I’d say I’m stunned about any pick after the election but nominating Pete Hegseth for this incredibly important role? Yes he’s a veteran … and?” she wrote Tuesday in a post on X.

Democratic Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren also aired her frustration with the appointment. “A Fox & Friends weekend co-host is not qualified to be the Secretary of Defense,” she wrote on X. “I lead the Senate military personnel panel. All three of my brothers served in uniform. I respect every one of our servicemembers. Donald Trump’s pick will make us less safe and must be rejected.”

Former Republican Representative Adam Kinzinger put it bluntly. “Wow. Trump picking Pete Hegseth is the most hilariously predictably stupid thing,” he wrote on X.

Alyssa Farrah Griffin, a former Trump White House aide and current co-host on The View posted that she wasn’t concerned by his lack of military experience but his “lack of policy experience & a lack of Pentagon experience.”

“I’m for a disrupter at the Pentagon but you can’t disrupt an agency you’re not familiar with the inner workings of. The most likely outcome is he’ll be outmaneuvered at every turn by top Pentagon brass,” Griffin added in a separate post.

Upon hearing that Hegseth had been appointed, Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski, a Republican, simply said, “Wow.”

In the end, it seems like the president-elect appointed Hegseth because he is a faithful Trump acolyte, and well, he’s on Trump’s favorite television network.

Eric Edelman, who previously served as the Pentagon’s top policy official under George Bush, told Politico that Trump “puts the highest value on loyalty.”

“It appears that one of the main criteria that’s being used is, how well do people defend Donald Trump on television?” Edelman said.

Kinzinger agreed. “Obviously it’s weird, and there’s only one reason he’s doing it, because he’s on Fox News, and you know, that’s what Donald Trump picks based on,” Kinzinger said on CNN Tuesday.

South Dakota Senator John Thune will replace Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell as the chamber’s Republican caucus leader.

Thune won by a margin of five points, securing 25 votes to helm the party. Thune is, in many ways, a natural successor for the role. He has served as the Senate Republican whip since 2019, and has practically managed the Senate floor since McConnell suffered a concussion in 2023.

“I am extremely honored to have earned the support of my colleagues to lead the Senate in the 119th Congress, and I am beyond proud of the work we have done to secure our majority and the White House,” Thune said in a statement after the vote. “This Republican team is united behind President Trump’s agenda, and our work starts today.”

Thune was also the popular choice among Senate Republicans, with colleagues describing him as affable, well liked, and humble, according to The Hill.

But regardless of the plain logistics of Thune’s win, his ascension to the top of Senate GOP leadership serves as an interesting start to Donald Trump’s second term, marking the possibility that the upper chamber will remain an independent entity separate from the president-elect’s whims. Thune is an establishment conservative and longtime McConnell ally who has not always seen eye to eye with Trump. Thune won in two rounds of voting, despite an aggressive lobbying campaign by some of Trump’s key allies, including Elon Musk, Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Vivek Ramaswamy, and Charlie Kirk, who claimed Florida Senator Rick Scott would be a better alternative for the MAGA administration.

“Without Rick Scott, the entire Trump reform agenda wobbly,” Kennedy Jr. posted on X last week, responding to a rant by Carlson in which he claimed that Thune and the other man in the race, Texas Senator John Cornyn, “hate Trump and what he ran on.”

Ultimately, the Scott campaign rubbed some Republicans the wrong way, driving a deeper intraparty rift between neoconservatives and Trump’s far-right base. But the secret ballot vote ensured total privacy for a group of senators, many of whom are unthreatened by reelection odds until 2028 or later, to side for or against Trump’s candidate.

Still, Thune passed a Trumpian litmus test Sunday night, quickly bending the knee to the chief Republican’s unusual demand that whoever won the position unequivocally agree to recess appointments and thwart the appointment of Democratic judges.

This story has been updated.

President-elect Donald Trump does not appear to be interested in assuaging any concerns about a total pursuit of power.

Speaking before the House Republican Conference on Wednesday, the 78-year-old soon-to-be forty-seventh president openly joked about running for a third term, telling the crowd that they could “figure something else out.”

“I suspect I won’t be running again unless you say he’s so good we got to figure something else out,” Trump said while laughing, according to the Associated Press’s Farnoush Amiri.

That would, of course, be a flagrant violation of the Constitution, which has stipulated since 1951—after President Franklin D. Roosevelt served a whopping four terms—that presidents cannot be elected for more than two terms. Previously, the two-term limit had been an unofficial precedent set by George Washington.

“No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice,” states the Twenty-Second Amendment. “And no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of the President more than once.”

But it’s not the first time that Trump has hinted he’d be open to skirting the ironclad rule. At a National Rifle Association convention earlier this year, Trump likened his future running the country to Roosevelt’s tenure.

“You know, FDR 16 years—almost 16 years—he was four terms. I don’t know, are we going to be considered three-term? Or two-term?” Trump said, allowing some people in the gun-loving crowd to cheer “three” in response, according to Politico.

Trump also floated the idea on the campaign trail in 2020, before he lost to President Joe Biden, bizarrely claiming he was entitled to a “redo” of his first term due to an FBI counterintelligence investigation that had examined Russia’s efforts to thwart the 2016 election. (That investigation found that Trump interacted with individuals with direct ties to the Russian government and that the foreign power had meddled in the U.S. election in an effort to aid Trump and hurt then–Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.)

Luckily, the process of repealing or changing an amendment likely won’t change anytime soon, even with a Republican trifecta at the federal level, as it requires overwhelming public support. As outlined in Article 5 of the Constitution, any such change requires at least two-thirds of the Senate and the House to agree on the modification, with that change then requiring ratification by a minimum of three-quarters of states in the nation.

A second approach to repealing the term-limiting amendment could be via a constitutional convention, though two-thirds of states would need to support the motion to have one at all, and any proposed changes to an amendment would still require ratification by three-fourths of the states.

The Trump transition team continues to spell out exactly how they’ll destroy the Justice Department—starting with kicking out anyone who isn’t completely and mindlessly devoted to pushing their agenda.

Mark Paoletta, a conservative lawyer heading Trump’s transition, on Wednesday used X as a bully pulpit to threaten Justice Department lawyers.

“Career DOJ lawyers must be fully committed to implementing President Trump’s policies or they should leave or be fired,” the Trump aide wrote in a lengthy post on X. “If the president wants to deport illegal aliens, secure the border, ban race-based ‘affirmative action’ and DEI, investigate antisemitism, halt Big Tech censorship, grant pardons and commutations to Jan 6th defendants, he has every right to expect that these perfectly lawful policies are implemented, and it is absolutely unacceptable for career employees to seek to thwart this policy agenda.”

Paoletta went on to name two times in which he essentially accused Justice Department lawyers of treason. He alleged that DOJ lawyers were “too busy” to handle a case regarding “racial discrimination” toward white and Asian applicants at Yale, and blocked an investigation into a Covid-19 nursing home deaths cover-up in New York under then-Governor Andrew Cuomo. “The Deep State should not be allowed to subvert the will of the American people,” wrote Paoletta.

Top Republican strategist Cleta Mitchell, who infamously helped Trump pressure Georgia officials to “find” the necessary votes for him to win the 2020 election, chimed in too. “Every lawyer in the Voting Section and likely in the Civil Rights Division needs to be terminated. They are not supportive of Pres Trump or MAGA,” Mitchell replied on X. “There has to be a reckoning. These are leftwing activists who have come from and should return to their leftwing organizations.”

Republicans at every level are going mask-off, preparing themselves for what may be a sweeping, McCarthy-like witch hunt for this so-called “enemy within.” Justice Department lawyers will have to kiss the ring or risk being fired.

Only hours after Donald Trump was elected president, the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement put gears in motion to expand its surveillance capabilities, likely in anticipation of the president-elect’s promise for the largest deportation scheme in history. 

ICE published a Request for Information on November 6 seeking information about expanding its Intensive Supervision Appearance Program, or ISAP, part of the government’s Alternatives to Detention program, according to Wired. 

Currently, ISAP monitors around 200,000 undocumented immigrants using a combination of ankle monitors, GPS tracking smart watches, and apps that use biometric facial recognition software. 

ICE’s current contractor for ISAP, B.I. Incorporated, is owned by private prison company Geo Group, which was the single biggest winner in the stock market the day after Trump was elected. Geo Group’s $2.4 billion contract with ICE is set to expire next year.  

But ICE’s Request for Information stated that it isn’t a request for proposals from vendors that can provide the tools for ISAP. Rather, it’s a way for the company to signal its anticipated needs in the coming months, “thereby delivering capabilities faster” and encouraging competition among potential vendors. 

The posting sought industry information about monitoring devices, as well as other services that would aid in Trump’s plan to rip 20 million immigrants out of their homes and communities. As of 2022, there were only 11 million undocumented immigrants in the country, but Trump has said that he intends to also remove immigrants who have obtained temporary protected status. There are roughly 860,000 people in the U.S. under temporary protected status.

One request was for information about “participant coordination services,” meaning physical space, staff, and administrative capabilities for monitoring large numbers of people. The posting also requested information about “community services,” including legal assistance, therapeutic and psychosocial support, medical services, food, and clothing. 

While the details of Trump’s “bloody” deportation scheme are unclear, they do involve camps for staging deportations. 

ICE was already planning to expand ISAP’s parent program before Trump won. In a 2023 notice, ICE said that Alternatives to Detention would be rebranded and expanded to monitor every single nondetained person awaiting a court hearing or deportation—around 5.7 million people, according to the agency. 

If ICE is actually able to expand its capabilities to monitor nearly six million people, it will have increased its capacity by 3,000 percent, according to Wired. The potential industry boom already has private prison owners sniffing the air. In an earnings call last week, Geo Group’s CEO George Zoley called a second Trump administration “an unprecedented opportunity.”

While the private prison industry stands to make billions off Trump’s deportation plans, it’s worth noting that ripping millions of workers out of the country will crater the economy. 

Last week, Trump said he would have “no choice” but to carry out the mass deportations he promised on the campaign trail. “It’s not a question of a price tag. It’s not—really, we have no choice. When people have killed and murdered, when drug lords have destroyed countries, and now they’re going to go back to those countries because they’re not staying here. There is no price tag,” he said.

Donald Trump’s lawyer Alina Habba said she would consider a possible appointment from the president-elect to be White House press secretary “very seriously.”

Mediaite reported Tuesday that Habba was a top candidate for the position, citing four sources. On Fox News Tuesday night, Sean Hannity asked if there was any truth to the report, and initially, she tried to deflect.

“I’d leave it to the president and three people that are on my board of directors: That’s Luke, Chloe, and Parker, my children,” Habba said. “Everybody’ll know in time.”

Hannity pressed further, asking if there were any “discussions about it,” and Habba again deflected, pivoting to Trump’s “amazing Cabinet” and the work of his transition team. Hannity then directly asked what Habba would do if Trump asked her to serve in his administration.

“I am very loyal to President Trump. I would think about it. Very seriously,” Habba replied.

As one of Trump’s attorneys, Habba is known for making excuses for Trump’s behavior during his trials in the past year, as well as making very noticeable mistakes in court. One day during Trump’s E. Jean Carroll defamation trial, she was reprimanded 12 times by the judge in the case.

If Trump chooses her as his press secretary, though, her obfuscation and willingness to explain away Trump’s rash actions would probably be an asset in the role. The job entails a lot of spin in presenting what the president wants to the American public and media, and painting Trump in a good light is where she excels. In addition, she would make history if Trump selects her as the first ever Arab American, and first Iraqi American press secretary.

Professional MAGA content creators somehow think that they have a realistic chance of landing a senior role in President-elect Donald Trump’s upcoming Cabinet. 

Politico is reporting that the content creators—some of whom have no professional political experience whatsoever—have been bolstered by the website “Nominees for the People,” Robert F. Kennedy’s genius idea to publicly crowdsource and vote on names for Cabinet nominations. Alt-right grifter Charlie Kirk leads votes for secretary of education, while former Dirty Jobs host Mike Rowe leads Labor Department votes. The beggars, however, have much lower profiles.

Content creator Melissa Rein Lively has already put “Future Trump White House Press Secretary” in her Instagram bio. “I’m a hair away from the White House. I do think I’m going to get it,” said Lively, who gained fame after destroying a Covid-19 mask stand at Target in 2020 while going on an unhinged rant. “My sphere of influence goes far beyond people who are paper pushers on the Trump campaign. I work with billionaires. My clients are—I can’t even name who I work with. They own half of Palm Beach.”

Lively even moved to a luxury resort in Palm Beach to really concentrate on getting the nomination. “I’m telling you right now, I’m not leaving here without that press secretary gig,” she told Politico. She later explained that she’d take “any senior role in the press office, but I think press secretary is best fit.” Lively is now calling reports of attorney Alinna Habba as front-runner for press secretary “fake news” on her Instagram story.

Similarly to Lively, failed North Carolina superintendent candidate Michele Morrow is taking votes she received on RFK Jr.’s website for “Education Administration” as an actual, official nomination for the position. “Let’s help get Michele to Washington where she can fight to save our children in North Carolina and beyond!” she posted in third person from her own X account. Morrow gained prominence for calling for the public execution of former President Barack Obama and President Joe Biden. 

Influencer Breanna Morello, whose Instagram bio boasts she “quit Fox Corp over the Covid vaccine mandate,” said she had to “respectfully decline” the nominations for White House press secretary because she wants to stay in Florida with her dogs. She’d accept if she could do it from Mar-a-Lago.

The Trump team isn’t taking these nominations as seriously as their most extreme fans are. “People are begging at this point,” a Trump campaign source told Politico. “These maniacs are actually filming videos saying how honored they are. It is nuts. Holding a position in this administration will require more than fifty Instagram stories of you dining on tuna tartare at Mar-a-Lago.”

These “maniacs” are the most loyal part of Trump’s base, the heart and soul of the MAGA movement. The Trump campaign—with its proximity to QAnon and its general conspiracizing—has created a safe space for them to be completely delusional. Now, they have to deal with the results.

Donald Trump voters are having a shocking bout of buyer’s remorse now that their candidate is slated for a second term.

On Election Day and in the hours following, searches for “how to change my vote” spiked in states that the president-elect won, according to Google analytics. The searches first surged the morning of Election Day before declining the day afterward. Interest in the phrase was not short-lived, though, with numbers climbing again on Monday—just shy of a week out from the election—and continuing to grow throughout the week. The apparent change of heart comes after Trump allies had admitted Project 2025 was the plan all along, and after women and girls became the target of an overtly misogynistic, far-right campaign claiming ownership of their bodies.

The search became so popular that it hit 100, according to Google Trends, which registers searched phrases on a scale of 0 to 100, with 100 indicating the peak popularity for a term.

Some of the states that Trump won by the biggest margins, such as Iowa, generated the highest number of state-by-state queries for the term. Those searches were concentrated around the Des Moines-Ames, Cedar Rapids-Waterlook-Iowa City, and Dubuque areas in the Hawkeye State, which already had a large portion of votes for Vice President Kamala Harris, according to Virginia news outlet WAVY. It is not clear, though, whether Trump or Harris supporters were hoping to change their vote.

It should be common knowledge that citizens cannot change their vote once they’ve dropped it into the ballot box, but the data points to an alarming number of Americans who apparently have no awareness of the legitimacy and finite nature of their vote.

Special counsel Jack Smith is throwing in the towel.

The prosecutor who oversaw President-elect Donald Trump’s January 6 case and his Mar-a-Lago classified documents case is planning to finish his work and quit the office before Inauguration Day, The New York Times reported Wednesday.

Trump had promised to fire Smith “within two seconds” of being sworn in as the country’s forty-seventh president.

“We got immunity at the Supreme Court. It’s so easy. I would fire him within two seconds. He’ll be one of the first things addressed,” Trump told the Hugh Hewitt Show in October, adding his intentions to sue Smith.

Smith worked for two years on outstandingly complex cases against the former president, but actually translating them into trials proved even more difficult. Trump’s legal team employed practically every tactic to slow-roll the cases until a general election that made the whole effort moot (Justice Department policy prevents a sitting president from being prosecuted for crimes).

Before leaving the post, regulation requires that Smith file a report summarizing the investigation and his team’s decisions, though it’s unclear how quickly he will be able to do so. If he manages to finish it within President Joe Biden’s term, the document will likely become public, leaving a historic black mark on Trump’s legacy before his second administration begins. But if Smith fails to do so, the fate of such a document would remain unknown.

Smith has become a favorite target of the MAGA party, which frames him as the figurehead behind Democratic efforts to destroy Trump.

In October, Smith released an eye-opening report related to Trump’s January 6 case that included revelations about Trump’s behavior ahead of and on January 6. The report outlined what Smith described as Trump’s “private criminal conduct.”

“At its core, the defendant’s scheme was a private one,” prosecutors wrote in the massive motion. “He extensively used private actors and his campaign infrastructure to attempt to overturn the election results and operated in a private capacity as a candidate for office.”

But Smith’s efforts to make Trump face legal consequences were cut off at the legs in July, when the Supreme Court ruled 6–3 to expand a president’s immunity and redefine what constitutes an “official act,” effectively deciding that Trump could not be held accountable for some of his behavior with regard to attempting to overturn the 2020 presidential election results.

Donald Trump has appointed Fox & Friends co-host Pete Hegseth as secretary of defense—and he’s one of the worst choices yet.

“Pete is tough, smart and a true believer in America First,” Trump said in a statement Tuesday night. “With Pete at the helm, America’s enemies are on notice—Our military will be Great Again, and America will Never Back Down.”

While Hegseth is a veteran of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, he is significantly less experienced than a traditional pick to head the Department of Defense. Hegseth once called the very same Iraq War that Trump and JD Vance just spent weeks pretending to critique “an example of what we got right, when we got it right.”

He will now run the Pentagon and command 1.3 million active-duty troops. Or maybe fewer: Just last week, Hegseth said, “I’m straight up just saying, we should not have women in combat roles.

“It hasn’t made us more effective. Hasn’t made us more lethal. Has made fighting more complicated,” he explained. “Our institutions don’t have to incentivize that in places where traditionally—not traditionally, over history—men in those positions are more capable.”

Hegseth doesn’t seem to want anyone but white men to be in the military. In his 2024 book The War on Warriors, Hegseth painted the military as anti-white and suffering from a “long-term infection of radical left wing social justice policies.”

He wrote that “affirmative action posts have skyrocketed, with ‘firsts’ being the most important factor in filling new commanders. We will not stop until trans-lesbian Black females run everything!”

Trump seemed to echo many of Hegseth’s complaints on the campaign trail, with his own ramblings about “woke” military leadership.

Hegseth has repeatedly fearmongered about the spread of Islam in the United States, both as a contributor to Fox News and in his 2020 book, American Crusade.

“Just like the Christian crusaders who pushed back the Muslim hordes in the twelfth century, American Crusaders will need to muster the same courage against Islamists today,” Hegseth wrote in his book.

“Islamists—and even mainstream Muslims—use aggressive tactics to exploit American ‘tolerance’ as utter weakness in order to achieve accommodations that would never otherwise be tolerated,” he wrote. “I’m not talking about on the battlefield, I’m talking about in our classrooms, city councils, and social media.”

Hegseth has also complained about Muslim birth rates in states such as Michigan, which has the largest Arab population in the country. He pushed fears about the “integration” of Muslims into American society and has lamented France’s changing “demography” in the wake of the Syrian refugee crisis, which he compared to an invasion.

“Next to the communist Chinese and their global ambitions, Islamism is the most dangerous threat to freedom in the world. It cannot be negotiated with, coexisted with, or understood; it must be exposed, marginalized, and crushed,” he wrote in American Crusade.

Unsurprisingly, Hegseth is a big supporter of “proud Islamophobe” Laura Loomer.

Although he graduated from Princeton University, Hegseth has criticized elite universities. “I have a new rule, the more elite the university and advanced a graduate is, the dumber they are,” Hegseth said on an episode of Fox News’s The Five. “If you went to an Ivy League, prove that you have any common sense at all.”

Hegseth has claimed that he sent his degree from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government back.

Maybe he’s right. In 2019 Hegseth, laughed on air about not washing his hands for 10 years, saying, “Germs are not a real thing. I can’t see them, therefore, they are not real.”

This story has been updated.