Op-Ed: Anything Goes, but Pete Hegseth May Go First By Aubrey Sarvis

Springtime in Trump’s Washington is a mad, mad, mad world, one without humor, subtlety, or joy.  Washington is now a dangerous and chaotic place to work and live. Just ask the senator from Alaska, Lisa Murkowski, who has been among the few Republican senators with the courage to respectfully disagree with President Trump and vote against him when she believed he was wrong.

The Alaska Daily News first reported that while speaking in Anchorage this week Senator Murkowski told a startled audience, “We are all afraid.” The context involved her colleagues in the U. S. Senate and the President of the United States.  After a few moments of silence and reflection, the senator elaborated, “It’s quite a statement.  But we are in a time and a place where I have not been here before. I’ll tell you, I’m oftentimes very anxious myself about using my voice, because retaliation is real.  And that’s not fair.”

In a few words, the senator went to the crux of what is happening in our nation’s capital and none of it is flattering to our unstable president, nor to many of Murkowski’s spineless senate colleagues.

Most of the madness and chaos and fear of the last 100 days began with and remains with our fickle president who flips and flops and is incapable of being honest and trusting the American people with the truth.  I fear the president cannot trust himself with painful truths, something as elementary and factual as the Electoral College results of the Biden-Trump 2020 election.

Long before Donald Trump’s 2020 defeat and brazen scheme to remain in office, lying was the essence of Donald Trump’s character. Lying remains a cornerstone of how he manages, controls, and manipulates. President Trump admits he operates pretty much by instinct, acknowledging there is no overarching comprehensive plan in place. How he runs our country of 340 million people is mostly by the seat of his pants, and much of it is raw, offensive, often vulgar, and invariably presented as factual on social media.

So of course, lying and vulgarity are now part and parcel of business throughout Trump world, especially among those who serve at his beck and call or are out to curry favor with our transactional president.  No surprise that among the first causalities in this Trump White House are truth and integrity.

Lies and liars consume a great deal of attention and time.  Working for a serial liar is demanding, demeaning, and exhausting.  Constantly the handmaidens show the needy boss how much they believe in his enterprise. Shamelessly some throw in “genius” and, “Wow, Mr. President!” This is about performance, demonstrating fierce loyalty.  These toadies were not hired for their credentials, high IQs, or remarkable achievements.  No Lincoln or Roosevelt team of rivals here.

You can catch several of them performing in the president’s staged press conferences in the ostentatious, redecorated gilded oval office. There, the not so esteemed and clueless Attorney General Pam Bondi on cue ignores the subject of due process, a man’s right to be heard in court before he is deported.  Instead, Attorney General Bondi glibly asserts the United States is powerless to facilitate an imprisoned Maryland man’s return to the United States.  The mighty United States and our all-powerful president cannot spring a man from a flea bag prison in a third-rate country. Really?  Need more? Watch Stephen Miller, the president’s deputy chief of staff, tell a whopper regarding Supreme Court language refusing to lift a lower court’s order directing the Administration to ‘facilitate” the return of a Maryland man jailed in El Salvador so he can be heard in a United States court.  Rushing in to foolishly play lawyer, non-lawyer Miller declared a White House legal setback was in fact a victory for the president.  Some victory, when the highest court in the land agrees with the lower court directing the White House to comply forthwith.

Trump itches for an immigration court showdown, lying and stalling to deflect and focus on “immigration” rather than his disastrous and costly on and off again tariff fights against most of the world that has cost American trillions of dollars in just a few weeks. Of course, Trump would prefer a noble fight between a dangerous immigrant and a heroic president battling the courts and overeducated liberal judges to keep America safe from a notorious gang member who robs our good men and does unspeakable bad things to our fine women.

The president picked this cabinet. This is his best and brightest.  Unfortunately, they are also the folks who will guide and advise him when we face the next military threat to our security and well-being. They will be front and center managing any Russian-Iran-Chinese nuclear crisis.

The president’s favorite in his cabinet is the smug Pete Hegseth who has been tap dancing since he was nominated for and became Secretary of Defense, a critically important post for which Mr. Hegseth is uniquely unqualified for by intellect, temperament, experience, and judgement.  Beware of the “warrior” who promotes his patriotism, bravery, and brand on and in the clothes he wears.  The Hegseth wardrobe includes a bright stylized U. S. flag handkerchief, folded inside his front jacket pocket; a U.S. flag stitched on his socks, and the colors of our flag for the inside lining of his tightly tailored suit jacket. This is the same preening defense secretary who, according to The Washington Post, recently ordered a make-up studio near his office in the Pentagon be upgraded for his many TV appearances, but the secretary’s aides were quick to insist he does his own make-up.  On that, I believe him. I suspect Mr. Hegseth does his make-up very well; he has had years of practice.

However, I do not believe Mr. Hegseth when he repeatedly lies and denies he put classified information about an upcoming dangerous military operation on the commercial Signal chat platform. We already know from whom and where Hegseth received that Yemen intelligence about Houthi targets.  We know the reckless secretary’s actions could have put service members under him in harm’s way.

This is not just another Hegseth “rookie” mistake. He is now the leader of the most powerful military in the world, and he is exercising the judgement of a whining junior officer.  I fear the entitled Hegseth expects a waiver from any rule or regulation that gets in his way or his priorities.  This Signal Gate began with Hegseth determined to get around a Pentagon prohibition on cell phone use in his area of the building, a prohibition deemed necessary to protect our security and nation’s secrets.

Secretary Hegseth who served twenty-years of duty retired a major.  When asked about that rank, Hegseth pointed to generals who didn’t know how to fight and lead in war, and Pentagon lawyers in air-condition offices who wouldn’t let him shine in combat for his not attainting a much higher rank.  He played the victim card, blaming others, just as he is doing today, fingering his hand-picked aides and MAGA appointees in the Pentagon out to get him.

Secretary Hegseth fails to grasp that a warrior’s responsibility is to protect the men and women who serve under his command, not use them as props to show off before friends and family on a commercial chat platform. An investigation has been requested by the Senate Armed Services Committee.  If it is a thorough investigation, Mr. Hegseth’s lying, and conduct will be exposed and neither President Trump nor his Defense Secretary will be able to withstand the heat. Mr. Hegseth will have to go.

Secretary Hegseth serves under a reckless president who craves attention and blames others. They have a lot in common.  In a passage from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby one might easily substitute the president and the secretary for Tom and Daisy:

They were careless people, Tom and

Daisy – they smashed up things and

creatures and then retreated into

their money or their vast carelessness

or whatever it was that kept them

together, and let other people clean up

the mess they had made.

 

Aubrey Sarvis is an Army veteran and retired lawyer.