No way on Pete Hegseth — Trump’s Defense Department nominee is not fit

Donald Trump’s defense secretary nominee Pete Hegseth, already under fire from revelations about his scant qualifications, is facing the heat of an in-depth New Yorker magazine piece detailing his drunken mismanagement of the organizations Vets for Freedom and Concerned Veterans for America.

The detailed evidence doesn’t just disqualify Hegseth, but disqualify him many times over along various tracks. America cannot have a drunken defense secretary who is incompetent and more interested in chasing women who do not want to be chased.

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From the perspective of pure managerial ability over what is by far the government’s largest department by budget and headcount, Hegseth is worse than merely unqualified. While some of his fellow cabinet picks simply lack much management experience, Hegseth has some, and it’s been dismal.

Not one but both right-wing veterans’ organizations — one with a tiny staff of fewer than 10 people — forced him out over the same series of management and financial impropriety concerns, several years apart, with employees giving consistent accounts of the same types of boorish and devil-may-care approach to management and spending.

If this was the case then, we shudder to imagine the man let loose on a department with close to 3 million employees and a budget exceeding $800 billion a year.

Then there’s the matter of the specifics of this mismanagement and his response to it. It wasn’t merely that Hegseth was terrible at organizing events or managing staff. He seems to have actively sought to use these positions for his personal gain, particularly to pursue women, including some who worked for him.

In fact, every sexual assault and harassment allegation that has so far emerged against him involves him being sloshed on the job, sometimes to the point of totally passing out, when he was supposed to be representing his organization.

In response to the most serious such allegation, that he sexually assaulted a woman after an event at a hotel in late 2017, Hegseth’s lawyer told the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer that the investigation had not been followed up by local law enforcement because the woman ostensibly had a prior instance making a false claim against someone. When Mayer checked this out, she quickly discovered that it wasn’t true.

Even Sen. Lindsey Graham, a loyal Trump doormat if there ever was one, has acknowledged that Hegseth would face a steep confirmation fight in the Senate. Hegseth should avoid himself the additional embarrassment and go the way of Matt Gaetz, who abandoned his hope of being attorney general.

One good thing to have come out of the bizarreness of some of Trump’s nominations thus far is the sense that the incoming president has overplayed his hand and even his own party isn’t going to give him carte blanche in the way he seems to have expected. The checks and balances are still here and should protect the Pentagon from a Secretary Hegseth.

If Hegseth chooses to stick it out, we hope that Senate Republicans and their Democratic counterparts prove that they’re not a subservient branch by really holding his and Trump’s nominees’ feet to the fire and engaging in their constitutionally-protected right to say “no thanks,” for the good of the country.