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As if the election last week weren’t traumatic enough for Democrats, they are now being triggered anew by President-elect Donald Trump’s outside-the-box choices for posts in his incoming administration, including the likes of Elon Musk, Tulsi Gabbard, Vivek Ramaswamy, and perhaps especially Pete Hegseth.
Hegseth, 44, is a decorated veteran, bestselling author, and Fox News co-host of Fox & Friends Weekend. Trump is backing him for Secretary of Defense, where Hegseth would oversee a budget of more than $800 billion, with about 1.3 million active-duty troops and another 1.4 million in the National Guard, Reserves, and civilian employees based worldwide.
“With Pete at the helm, America’s enemies are on notice — Our Military will be Great Again, and America will Never Back Down,” Trump said in a statement. “Nobody fights harder for the Troops, and Pete will be a courageous and patriotic champion of our ‘Peace through Strength’ policy.”
Democrat politicos are going apoplectic over the unorthodox selection. Wednesday on CNN’s Newsroom, regular commentator Van Jones, for example, called Trump’s pick of Hegseth “very alarming,” since the military is fine just the way it is:
I think if it’s not broke, don’t fix it. There’s the fiction that there’s something wrong with America’s military. What problem are you trying to solve? We have the most lethal, respected, the most feared military in the history of the world. There’s not even a number two. So the idea that our military, there’s something wrong with it, our generals are terrible, this is fiction. So when you start trying to solve nonexistent problems with the best fighting force in the world, you actually create problems.
The U.S. military today is shot through with diversity hires and LGBTQ advocates at the highest levels of leadership, who assert that the greatest existential threats to America are “white rage” and “climate change.” They have introduced DEI initiatives to try to instill racial division among the troops. They have sought to push conservatives – the biggest supporters of the military and the Constitution – out of service altogether. So of course Van Jones doesn’t think that a military shaped by progressive ideology needs fixing. But American patriots like Trump and Hegseth know better.
Jones went on to say disingenuously that there’s no “data or evidence that shows that having women involved in the military has made the military worse.” Women in the military isn’t the issue, and Jones knows it; the issue for conservatives is women on the front lines, in combat positions. Hegseth is firmly opposed to that – “Everything about men and women serving together makes the situation more complicated, and complication in combat, that means casualties are worse,” he said on The Shawn Ryan Show podcast. But the Left can’t admit it’s a problem because they can’t acknowledge there are differences between men and women. If they do, their entire gender-ideology house of cards will collapse.
Van Jones concluded, “I mean, this is a Fox News host who used to be in the military. If that’s the standard we’re going to be going with, I think it’s very alarming.”
Sure, it’s alarming for the Democrats because Trump’s choice of Hegseth signals 1) that Trump doesn’t trust anyone in the current military leadership, and 2) that he intends to bring a disrupter onboard who will clean house and take things in a different direction.
New York Democrat Congressman Dan Goldman shares Van Jones’ alarm; in fact, he was “shocked, truly” to hear of Trump’s SecDef nod. Goldman ranted on CNN,
This is exactly what we worry about and warned about Donald Trump, which is that he is going to appoint unqualified loyalists to shape this government into his own personal fiefdom and get revenge on generals and put essentially really unqualified people.
He went on to condescend that being Trump’s “biggest cheerleader on Fox News, the biggest cheerleading network” doesn’t make one qualified to be Secretary of Defense. It’s “very dangerous,” he added, to “have a Fox News host who has got his finger on the nuclear weapons.” More dangerous than having a warmongering Democrat’s finger on our nuclear weapons?
Sen. Elizabeth Warren too huffed about Hegseth, on social media:
A Fox & Friends weekend co-host is not qualified to be the Secretary of Defense. I lead the Senate military personnel panel. All three of my brothers served in uniform. I respect every one of our servicemembers. Donald Trump’s pick will make us less safe and must be rejected.
Does this fraud who exploited a fake Native American heritage really think that having siblings who served makes her more qualified than Hegseth, who earned two Bronze Stars and a Combat Infantryman Badge as an officer in Iraq and Afghanistan? Note how his jealous critics like Fauxcahontas try to diminish decorated veteran and Princeton graduate Hegseth as nothing more accomplished than a Fox News co-host.
Rep. Adam Smith of Washington, the ranking Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, frets that Hegseth “is not a person who is a serious enough policymaker, serious enough policy implementer, to do a successful job.” This begs the question: who ever said policymakers like Smith were doing a successful job? Maybe we need fewer career “policymakers” in D.C. and more young warriors with a fresh perspective.
Among the left-dominated media, the radicals at the failing New Republic came right out with a childish headline that reveals their desperation to drive the narrative about Hegseth: “Everyone Hates Trump’s New Defense Secretary.”
Not everyone hates Trumps’s new Defense Secretary, but the Left sure does, and the reason is, they fear him. They fear his commitment to the everyday American soldier and to Trump’s dreaded America First agenda. They don’t fear that he will bungle the job because of a lack of qualifications; they fear he will shake up the Deep State status quo and undo all their work to subvert the military.
Last June at a rally in Las Vegas, Trump encouraged his supporters to buy Hegseth’s book and vowed that if he won the Presidency, “The woke stuff will be gone within a period of 24 hours. I can tell you.”
That’s why the Left fears the idea of Pete Hegseth as SecDef. He is a warrior and a leader – not a soft D.C. bureaucrat – and an existential threat to a woke military, and that is why he is the right man for the job.
Check out Mark Tapson’s interview with Pete Hegseth at The Right Take podcast.
Follow Mark Tapson at Culture Warrior