Pete Hegseth is, by every measure, an abysmal nominee to run the American military. The Army National Guard veteran and former Fox News commentator has no experience managing enormous, complex organizations like the Pentagon and would, as secretary of Defense, be in charge of an $850 billion budget and 3 million active-duty and civilian personnel. His spotty professional record includes having been asked to step down from two nonprofit veterans’ groups whose budgets he reportedly ran into the ground. Questions about his personal behavior abound: He has been accused of rape (he reached a civil settlement with his accuser in 2017) and has a reported habit of excessive drinking, including while on the job and to the point of incapacitation in public. He has defended waterboarding and torture, advocated on behalf of alleged war criminals, and as recently as November he declared, “I’m straight up just saying that we should not have women in combat roles.” Even Republicans haven’t been able to find much good to say about him. “If it were a secret ballot,” one moderate senator told me, “I don’t think he’d be confirmed.”
But the battle for his confirmation will not be secret; it will be glaringly public, with televised hearings of the Senate Armed Services Committee scheduled for Tuesday. It is the first serious test of Donald Trump’s newly invigorated strongman model of governance and of whether he can continue to bend the Republican Party to his will even as Hegseth breaks procedural precedents, including skirting a vetting process designed to protect national security. It is also a window into the influence that Trump’s heavy, Elon Musk, is exerting across Washington by threatening to bankroll primary challenges of anyone who defies Trump. And Hegseth’s nomination is a measure of just how strenuously Democrats are planning to fight back, at a moment when they are powerless to stop the Republicans in Congress and are second-guessing past resistance efforts that have been retrospectively cast as failures. Trump has singled out Hegseth as the figure he cares most about pushing through, his next administration’s big opening number, showcasing what he hopes will be his own party’s submission to his whims and the Democrats’ humiliating impotence in the face of his authority.
The Armed Services Committee is not one that has historically been the venue for explosive partisan warfare. “The thing to understand about it,” said one staffer, “is that it’s designed to have hearings about defense policy, draft the defense bill every year, and is sort of bipartisan.” But Hegseth is all but certain to cleave the group into partisan camps. His nomination has put an uncomfortable spotlight on Republican senators who might be persuaded to vote against his nomination, especially on Iowa’s Joni Ernst, a staunch Republican who is respected by her Democratic colleagues for her commitment to the committee’s work.
A survivor of sexual assault and domestic violence, Ernst has been an ally of Democrat Kirsten Gillibrand, another committee member, in the ongoing fight to address sexual assault and harassment in the military. She has worked with Elizabeth Warren, also on the committee, on a law that directs the Department of Defense to protect servicemembers from blast overpressure and traumatic brain injury. A combat veteran whose daughter is a West Point graduate, she has been a fierce advocate for women in the military. Ernst herself would have been a logical candidate for Trump’s secretary of Defense. “She probably would have gotten 90 votes,” one staffer to a senator on the committee speculated, noting that she “would have been probably far more effective at the job, since she’d actually know how to do it and people would actually listen to her.”
Instead, Trump has put her in an excruciating position. A woman who was deployed as a commanding officer in Kuwait during the Iraq War is caught between holding on to her seat and selling out her own history of service on behalf of a nominee who has called men “more capable.” As one senator told me, “Joni Ernst is going to be made to eat the shit sandwich in public. She is going to be made to vote for somebody who thinks what she did is dumb or wrong.”
After a first meeting with Hegseth in December, Ernst suggested that she had not been persuaded to support him. But a few days later, Hegseth met with her again, as well as with the Republican Party’s remaining “moderates,” Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski, and suddenly began talking about how women are, contrary to his earlier statements, “some of our greatest warriors.” Ernst, who is up for reelection in 2026, described their second interview as “encouraging.” In November, a senior Trump adviser told ABC News that the president’s message to Republican lawmakers was “If you are on the wrong side of the vote, you’re buying yourself a primary” and that “there’s a guy named Elon Musk who is going to finance it.” Ernst’s receptivity to Hegseth came in the same days that Musk visited Capitol Hill with Vivek Ramaswamy and crowed about keeping “naughty” and “nice” lists of Republican lawmakers. “The Musk money, that’s real,” said one Senate aide, describing the bind that Republicans are in.
As a member of Armed Services, a potential “no” vote from Ernst on the committee would kill the nomination and leave her uniquely exposed. Ernst could play the game of voting Hegseth out of committee and then joining a group of others — perhaps including Collins and/or Murkowski — in voting fruitlessly against him while the rest of their party secures his confirmation. But it’s unclear what that would win her except ire from both sides.
Meanwhile, Republicans associated with the wing of the party led by former Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, a clique that wants an aggressive military front against Vladimir Putin and has defended the Pentagon’s purview, may be uncomfortable with Hegseth on ideological grounds and have butted heads with him in the past. In public remarks in his role as a media personality, Hegseth has called McConnell “foolish,” referred to Collins and Murkowski as “part of the captured class,” and even needled the Republican chair of Armed Services, Mississippi’s Roger Wicker, for wanting to increase the defense budget. But unless a big enough group of anti-Hegseth Republicans decide to hold hands and jump together, it’s unlikely that any one of them would stand as a lone pillar whose “no” vote would doom the nomination.
In the face of these dynamics, the Democrats, who are expected to vote against Hegseth, have their own tortured calculations to make. At least one Senate aide cautioned that Democrats on the committee would do well not to go after Hegseth simply as unqualified, given the enthusiasm of the American people for outsiders who could be brought in to clean up bloated and dysfunctional institutions, including the Pentagon. “There is a case for an outsider to fix a Pentagon that everyone understands can’t pass an audit,” the aide said. “I think most Americans are like, ‘How do we spend as much money as this?’” Democrats have defended institutions and norms against the Trumpian onslaught in a way that may have been counterproductive for a nation that is fed up with much about government and the elite class of powerful people who’ve been in charge of it for so long. “We cannot be the defenders of the status quo at the Pentagon,” said one Senate aide. “We can’t say, ‘You must give us the same person you’ve always given us.’ The problem is not that you don’t have this line on your résumé. The problem is that the thin lines you do have, you were bad at them.”
“I don’t expect any candidate to check every single box,” said Senator Mark Kelly, retired astronaut and Navy captain who is on the committee. “But he doesn’t seem to check any boxes.”
Hegseth has so far failed to abide by procedure when it comes to his nomination. Ordinarily, within a few weeks of being named, a nominee and his team fill out paperwork: questionnaires about professional and personal history, meant to cover ethics queries and potential conflicts of interest. The FBI puts together a file on the candidate, which is then presented to the chair and ranking member of the committee, and sometimes, but not always, shared with other committee members. Typically, a nominee meets first with the committee chair, then the ranking member from the minority party, then other members of the committee, before moving outward toward other important senators. Hegseth has done barely any of this.
Senate Armed Service Committee members have only just been presented with the initial tranche of questionnaires, and Wicker and the committee’s ranking Democrat, Rhode Island’s Jack Reed, were only shown the FBI file on Friday night, a scant four days before the hearing. The delay in the FBI file is particularly disconcerting given the various allegations of personal and professional misconduct that have plagued Hegseth’s nomination; what’s more, several of his former colleagues have told reporters that they were not even contacted by the FBI, putting in question how thorough the investigation was. Back in December, even Republicans were emphasizing the importance of the report, with Senator Thom Tillis telling Politico, “I’ve encouraged all the nominees, number one, be out front on the FBI background check, and you want that information shared at least with committee members.”
Though Hegseth held meetings with Republican senators in November and December, he met with only one Democrat, Pennsylvania’s John Fetterman, who does not even serve on the committee responsible for vetting his nomination. Democrats on Armed Services told me that they had received a request for a meeting from Hegseth’s team in the final days before the holiday break, and when they responded with multiple suggested times for the first days of January, they received no response. A week before the hearing, Hegseth’s team was offering some committee Democrats meeting times beginning on January 15 — the day after the hearing — and others opportunities to talk the week of Trump’s inauguration on January 20, about the time that the full Senate would be asked to vote on his confirmation. Reed met with Hegseth for the first time on January 9, five days before the hearing, and afterwards expressed his continued concern about the nominee’s readiness for the job, noting that the conversation “raised more questions than it answered.”
Simply ghosting the minority members of the Armed Services Committee was described to me as “appalling” and “unprecedented” by members and their staffers, especially since many of them were having conversations in the same time period with other Trump nominees, including Doug Burgum, Tulsi Gabbard, Sean Duffy, and Lee Zeldin. “A reminder that these background checks are not designed to be punitive,” one Senate aide told me. “They’re to ensure that a nominee can’t be leveraged or blackmailed. We’re not writing a burn book, we’re advising and consenting.”
“I just want to know if he can do the job,” said Senator Tammy Duckworth, a committee member and combat veteran who lost both her legs when her Black Hawk helicopter was shot down over Iraq in 2004. “Maybe he has hidden talents that he’s not telling people about. Maybe he’s led an organization larger than a 40-man platoon, which is I believe the largest unit that he’s ever been in charge of. Maybe he has successfully led an organization with a budget of around $800 billion. I don’t know. From what I’ve seen, he has led two partisan political groups, veterans’ organizations, both of which said that he mismanaged their finances, but maybe he’s run a Boeing or a Northrop Grumman and I just don’t know about it. Because from what I can tell, the manager of your local Applebee’s has more experience managing a bigger budget and more personnel than Pete Hegseth. And I don’t want that person in charge of the DOD.”
Then there’s the question of the rape allegations, which Hegseth has denied. “Why are we asking anything else about this guy?” another senator remarked to me. “It’s like if somebody walked in and said, ‘I’m a child molester,’ we would say, ‘Actually, I’m not even going to ask to look at your financials. I’m kind of done here.’” His own mother wrote him an email during his 2017 divorce in which she castigated him for being the kind of guy who “belittles, lies, cheats, sleeps around and uses women for his own power and ego.” (She has since recanted and chided the media for having published her correspondence.)
“We have to try to cover all the bases,” said Kelly, “because there is a lot there. It’s not only the management issues. It’s the accusations of sexual assault and the sexual harassment, but also being significantly intoxicated in front of his employees, the stuff he’s written about in his books about women in combat, about transgender members of the military — his tattoos! Why does he have all these tattoos associated with white supremacist organizations? There’s a lot that I think we’re owed an explanation on.”
Some Democrats retain the wan hope that they can persuade a Republican or two to actually defeat Hegseth’s nomination, and they worry that coming in ablaze will impede those efforts. Winning, said several staffers from offices less inclined to light Hegseth up, would mean not leaning in on the rape allegations and instead creating space to oppose him on grounds that Republicans can also oppose him on. Instead of giving Fox News the woke-mob martyrdom its audience craves, they say they can highlight his financial mismanagement and lack of relevant experience.
Many Democrats are still spooked by the election results. They saw Trump successfully turn the narrative of the January 6 riot on its head and feel social and podcast media are dominated by the right. These Democrats have concluded that their messaging is simply not getting through to voters, and that it’s best to let Republicans fight amongst themselves and allow the American people to see exactly what their rule has wrought. “I don’t think there’s any winning in being the first to be offended,” one aide told me. “Republicans have control of everything; they have to own it. It’s not about playing nice institutionally. It’s about picking our spots. Republicans own the media landscape. They can make every good intention sound bad.” A different aide to a different senator put it this way: “There’s a real concern that the more we yell about how they’re breaking things, the less people hear it. So there is definitely a strategy to make these Republicans solely responsible.”
But, they went on, “not at the risk of not making people aware of what they’re doing. We need to be able to do both, I just don’t think we’ve figured out how yet.” As another aide argued to me, “I think you have to go all in. Because if we’re not going to make the case for what Republicans are willing to vote for, and how far they will go for Trump, who else will? The case against Hegseth in particular is so clear.” And yet another staffer told me, “The only thing we can do is make it really uncomfortable for Republicans to vote for someone who is this unqualified.”
Some committee members are already going hard: Mazie Hirono has said that she hasn’t even tried to meet with Hegseth, since she only wants to hear from Trump’s nominees in public, on the record. The week before the hearing, Warren released a 33-page letter to Hegseth that concludes, in part, “I am deeply concerned by the many ways in which your behavior and rhetoric indicates that you are unfit to lead the Department of Defense. One Republican operative described you as ‘perhaps one of the least qualified picks for Secretary of Defense that we’ve seen.’” And as Democrats planned to gather for a strategy session on Monday night, committee aides said they would not be surprised if senators who are not known for their combativeness, including Kelly and the newly elected Elissa Slotkin, a former CIA analyst who did three tours in Iraq, get tough on Hegseth.
But everyone is aware that this is not 2017 anymore, when many Democrats — including senators on the Armed Services Committee — put up fireworks displays of resistance to Trump’s nominees. And Hegseth is an exceptionally well-trained media personality who is genuinely good on television, which will give him an edge on Tuesday. (Staffers from multiple Senate offices told me that he should have been named the Pentagon’s press secretary, not its leader.)
So much of the strategizing on the part of the right and the left comes down to how you understand what happened in November. Much of the Democratic self-analysis has entailed the absorption of the most defeatist narrative: that they got wiped out, that Trump and MAGA are wildly popular and aligned with what Americans really want, that they have no control over anything.
But in fact, half the electorate voted for a candidate who’d been on the ballot for less than four months, and for progressive policy initiatives on reproductive health care, minimum wage, and paid sick leave. Instead of acting like they have the advantage on multiple issues and lost a very narrow popular vote in an era of anti-incumbent fervor with a doddering and unpopular president in the White House, many Democrats have spent the postelection period cowering, which threatens to turn their helplessness into a self-fulfilling prophecy. Recall that when Trump won the White House but got walloped in the popular vote in 2016, he still cast his victory as a massive historic win. Trump understands the possibility of cementing power by performing power. And the Hegseth nomination — so weak on the merits, so vulnerable to so many lines of attack — is shaping up to be one of his boldest performances yet, an exercise in domination not only of his party and the opposition, but the government itself.
