There’s a version of this country where replacing the Secretary of Defense with a Fox News host would be treated as a national emergency. We don’t live there anymore. We’ve adjusted.
Lloyd Austin spent 41 years in the Army. Rose to four-star general. Top U.S. commander in Iraq. Head of Central Command. Vice Chief of Staff of the Army. Multiple Distinguished Service Awards. Silver Star. When he was nominated as the first Black Secretary of Defense, the Senate confirmed him 93 to 2. Ninety-three to two. In the current Senate.
But that was the old way of doing things. Credentials. Experience. The boring stuff.
Trump campaigned on no new wars, which is why he renamed the Department of Defense the Department of War and then, of course, set about starting some. The chess metaphor writes itself. The rest of us are just watching the board.
Pete Hegseth has white supremacist tattoos. That’s not an interpretation. That’s a description. He also hosted a weekend show on Fox News, which in the current framework qualifies as relevant national security experience. He was confirmed by the thinnest possible margin. The Vice President broke the tie.
Let me put this the way it deserves to be put.
Imagine you need a pilot for a 747 with 330 million people on board. You have two options. The first has logged 40,000 flight hours, commanded operations on three continents, and has been vetted by everyone who has ever sat in that cockpit. The second is really good at Microsoft Flight Simulator and has strong opinions about it.
We went with the second guy. We handed him the controls of the United States Department of Defense and said, good luck, the nukes are in the second drawer.
The people defending this will tell you credentials are elitist. That the old guard was captured by globalists, or the deep state, or whatever noun is pulling duty this week. They’ll tell you Austin was part of a system that failed us. Maybe some of that is even true. Institutions calcify. Generals aren’t always right.
But there’s a difference between reforming a system and burning the qualification requirements because your guy didn’t have any. One of those is policy. The other is what happens when you’d rather feel something than fix something.
Lloyd Austin knew where every American base in the world was. He’d been to most of them. He’d sent people to die at some of them and carried that. You can agree or disagree with his decisions. That’s legitimate. But you cannot look at what replaced him and call it an upgrade with a straight face.
We went with Microsoft Flight Simulator with a drinking problem.
Last week, a TMZ reporter assigned to the Pentagon ... and that sentence alone should stop you cold ... asked Secretary Hegseth whether ordering the bombings in Iran gave him a physical thrill. That’s the question. That’s the room we’re in now.
That’s who has the controls.