It remains one of the second Trump administration’s greatest mysteries: How does Pete Hegseth still have his job?
In any previous version of the American executive branch, a scandal as stupid and potentially damaging as Signalgate and its various secondary tendrils would see the Defense Secretary to the door within figurative seconds — and that came after Hegseth reportedly stopped DoD shipments of weapons to Ukraine without getting authorization from or even telling the White House about it. According to CNN, that is what happened in February, and has now happened again.
On Tuesday, the president was asked by reporters about a pause in shipments last week, and who authorized it. “I don’t know,” said the man who never met a daily briefing he couldn’t completely ignore. “Why don’t you tell me?”
CNN has five sources confirming that Hegseth stopped the shipments without any say-so from on high. What’s more, the US special envoy to Ukraine retired General Keith Kellogg didn’t hear about it beforehand; neither did Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who you might remember is also the president’s National Security Advisor after Signalgate’s only casualty Michael Waltz stepped down/was fired. Per CNN, they “learned about it from press reports.” Relatable.
The easiest answer to that question, of why this apparently rogue SecDef remains at his post, is that admitting failure — or any mistake, really, no matter how small or large — is anathema in TrumpWorld. Resigning would mean accepting the basic facts of the story, and Trump’s one true innovation in politics has been that you can simply say those facts are wrong and the exact opposite is the case and move on, and consequences will almost certainly fail to materialize.
Still, this doesn’t totally address the situation; in his first administration, Cabinet secretaries cycled through their jobs in droves. He had two Secretaries of State, three of Defense (if we include some “acting” tenures), two of the Interior, two of Energy, three attorneys general, and so on; most didn’t leave because of some specific scandal, of course, but in general the people who work for Donald Trump eventually either get entirely sick of him or piss him off enough to want to go hide in some bushes. One might imagine that “made a major foreign policy decision without presidential sign-off, then did it again a few months later” would be the sort of thing that rolls this particular boulder into that familiar lake, but alas, here we are, closing in on half a year since the inauguration, with an almost entirely intact Cabinet.
“The President has full confidence in the Secretary of Defense,” said White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, in a statement. One can only assume that if that changes, we’ll all hear about it long before he does.
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