CNN —
Pete Hegseth could hardly be more suited to be Donald Trump’s secretary of Defense – even though he’d surely be deemed unqualified by any conventional president.
The former Fox News anchor slugged it out with Democrats in one of the ugliest Cabinet confirmation hearings in recent administrations on Tuesday.
In the process, he created a blueprint for how the president-elect’s most provocative picks can handle their own hearings – including Pam Bondi – his backup choice for attorney general, who steps up on Wednesday.
By the end of Tuesday, Joni Ernst, the Iowa Republican senator who expressed early reservations about Hegseth, announced she would back his confirmation in a victory for Trump.
On the substance, Hegseth was wobbly.
He was all at sea over the geopolitics of East Asia, one of the world’s most dangerous maritime hotspots, had no answers on how Trump would end the war in Ukraine and said very little about Middle East threats to US security.
And Hegseth fueled fears about Trump treating his power as unlimited. He refused to say whether he’d order troops to shoot protesters if the president-elect told him to and wouldn’t rule out invasion forces to take over Greenland and the Panama Canal in line with Trump’s expansionism.
But Trump prefers performance to details. He likes subordinates who praise and defend him. And Hegseth mirrored his mentor by lashing out against diversity programs in the military, dismissed allegations about his personal life and excessive drinking as “smears” and wouldn’t apologize for past inflammatory statements.
With his stomach for the partisan fight, apparent lukewarm regard for the Geneva Conventions and contempt for Washington power structures, he was the perfect avatar for the tear-it-all down second term that Trump craves. And Hegseth, an Iraq and Afghanistan war veteran, posed as a “change agent” with “dust on my boots” who was ready to give the Pentagon a rigorous shake. In this mission, he’s joining working-class populists in the MAGA movement who want to take a hatchet to a government they think has gone “woke” and failed them.
Democrats came out swinging hard at Hegseth, highlighting his controversial background, arguing he was utterly unfit and lacked experience to run the world’s most lethal military and the military industrial complex.
“I have voted in favor of all your predecessors, including those in the first Trump administration,” Jack Reed, the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, told Hegseth. “Unfortunately, you lack the character and composure and competence to hold the position of Secretary of Defense.”
Such a character indictment from a senator as steeped in military matters as Reed might have squelched most nominations.
But Trump has reason to be cheerful. Before Christmas, Hegseth seemed in deep trouble as scandal swirled. Yet Republicans universally embraced him at the hearing. Ernst, who had faced a conservative media onslaught over her previous skepticism of Hegseth and threats of a primary challenge, told WHO Radio in Des Moines on Tuesday: “He was adequately able to answer all of my questions.” She added: “I will be supporting President Trump’s pick for Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth.”
Her decision does not automatically eliminate a primary challenge, an Ernst adviser told CNN’s Jeff Zeleny, but makes it far more difficult to criticize and confront the senator.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune pledged to get Hegseth’s nomination on the floor quickly if it’s reported out of the committee, which Ernst’s support makes nearly certain.
Hegseth’s combativeness and fealty to Trumpism energized Republicans in his defense, suggesting that might be the best strategy for other controversial picks like Kash Patel for the FBI and Kristi Noem for the Department of Homeland Security. The South Dakota governor’s hearing has been moved until Friday over a delayed background check.
The most extraordinary moment of the hearing came when the normally genial Virginia Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine dressed down Hegseth over alcohol use and his personal life. The former Fox anchor has denied a sexual assault allegation in which he was not charged. He had previously said the encounter was consensual. But Kaine said, “You have admitted that you had sex while you were married to wife two after you just had fathered a child by wife three.” Kaine asked whether Hegseth could be trusted to uphold his oath to the Constitution if he couldn’t be faithful to his wife. Hegseth protested that he’d been “completely exonerated” and “completely cleared” and said he wasn’t a “perfect” person but was now reformed.
The plan seemed to be to use allegations of sexual misconduct and excessive workplace drinking, all of which Hegseth has denied, to the same effect as those that ended Sen. John Tower’s hopes of becoming President George H.W. Bush’s Defense secretary.
But 2025 is not 1989, and the standards of a previous age have given way to a Republican Party that long since absolved Trump’s personal, political and legal transgressions and – Gaetz aside – seems keen to extend tolerance toward his nominees.
Several other Democrats took turns to press Hegseth over his past opposition to women serving in combat. Hegseth insisted he wasn’t being sexist but argued that standards had been lowered to reach a threshold of women in combat units. “That makes the combat more difficult for everybody,” he said.
Warren presses Hegseth on his ‘nomination conversion’
02:53 – Source: CNN
But Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren accused Hegseth of having a “confirmation conversion” by softening his position on the issue in the days since he was picked for the Pentagon job. New York Democratic Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand accused Hegseth of denigrating women, moms, LGBTQ service personnel and Democrats in the ranks.
These are important questions. But this was also political territory on which Hegseth seemed happy to fight. He was more than ready to get a jump on the culture war Trump has picked him to wage against establishment generals and Pentagon diversity programs.
Hegseth appeared most uncomfortable on vital policy details, national security issues and matters of the law, which are directly pertinent to the job he hopes to hold. Democrats – including Illinois Sen. Tammy Duckworth, Hawaii Sen. Mazie Hirono and Michigan Sen. Elissa Slotkin – were most effective at highlighting the vulnerabilities of the nomination while probing such areas.
Duckworth asked Hegseth to name at least one close US ally in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations and how many countries were involved. Hegseth started to talk about South Korea, Japan and Australia – none of which are in the 10-member organization that includes two critical US treaty allies, including Thailand and the Philippines.
Hirono asked Hegseth whether he would “carry out an order from President Trump to seize Greenland, a territory of our NATO ally Denmark, by force, or would you comply with an order to take over the Panama Canal?” He replied with a non-sequitur, saying that Trump won “77 million votes to be the lawful commander-in-chief.”
Slotkin has only been a senator for about a week. But the former US representative and CIA analyst, who did three tours in Iraq, came up with some of the most effective Democratic questions. She asked whether he would “stand in the breach” and push back if Trump gave him an illegal order. “I reject the premise that President Trump would be giving any illegal orders,” Hegseth said.
Republicans defended Hegseth by lauding his combat experience and accusing Democrats of hypocrisy.
“There’s a lot of talk going about, talking about qualifications. … But there’s a lot of senators here I wouldn’t have on my board, because there is no qualifications – except your age and you got to be living in the state and you’re a citizen of the United States – to be a senator,” said Sen. Markwayne Mullin from Oklahoma.
Collins presses GOP senator on accusation he made defending Hegseth
00:48 – Source: CNN
Montana Sen. Tim Sheehy, another newcomer on the committee after being elected last fall, asked Hegseth about the diameter of an M4A1 round, how many rounds fit into an M4 rifle and how many pushups he could do. “Right there, you’re representing qualifications that show you understand what the warfighter deals with every single day on the battlefield,” the retired Navy SEAL told Hegseth. “You understand what happens on the front line where our troops will be.”
It’s great that a potential secretary of Defense is close to the troops. And Hegseth’s status as an “out-of-the-box nominee” – in the words of one of his sponsors, former Minnesota Sen. Norm Coleman – is faithful to Trump’s successful outsider mystique. Vice President-elect JD Vance wrote on X that the US hadn’t won a war in three decades, had a recruitment crisis and that “Hegseth is assuredly NOT more of the same, and that’s good!”
But Pentagon chiefs are not just required to understand guns and the infantry. They have to be consummate diplomats steeped in policy who are able to defuse dangerous standoffs that could tip into wars. And they need to be able to go toe-to-toe with grizzled Russian and Chinese defense supremos with years of experience. It’s also important for them to brief a president on whether he’s obeying the law.
Leon Panetta, a Democrat who served as Defense secretary, White House chief of staff and CIA director, told CNN’s Dana Bash that it was a “close call” whether Hegseth should win confirmation. “The primary question that (senators) are going to have to be able to arrive at a judgment is whether … he can be trusted to tell the truth, because as secretary of Defense, your primary role is to tell the truth to the president, to the Congress to the American people.”
There’s little such introspection among many of the Republican senators who, because of their majority in the chamber, will decide Hegseth’s fate. That’s not surprising since the GOP seems increasingly keen to avoid crossing their new president – who, in nine years in politics, has constantly redefined conventional notions of who is qualified for the highest office.
