In theory, this should come as no surprise. Both Hegseth and Trump said explicitly at the start of the President’s second term that their plan for the Defense Department was to focus on what Trump called “the enemy from within.” But, then again, Trump also said—again and again and again—that he would never embroil the U.S. military in a costly open-ended war in the Middle East. His jarring evolution has come so swiftly and unexpectedly that Hegseth, and many others in what was formerly Trump’s “America First” coalition, have had a hard time adjusting to the new imperialist stylings of their leader. Even the propagandists have not fully rewritten their scripts, as was pointed out in advance of Hegseth’s address, when his staff handed out a new hundred-and-forty-four-page “field manual” to the troops that consisted of four Hegseth speeches and a foreword from the President announcing, “As your Commander-in-Chief, I will not ask you to fight dumb Wars.”
But he has, and it is not going well. Since the conflict began, in February, Iran has humiliated the United States by asserting control over the Strait of Hormuz, the global economy has been thrown into turmoil, billions of dollars in damage has been caused to U.S. military bases across the Middle East, and critical American stocks of air-defense weapons and other munitions have been depleted at alarming rates.
At such a moment, with barely a month until midterm elections in which the deep unpopularity of the war and growing alarm over its economic and national-security consequences have led to a strong backlash against Republican candidates, there has rarely been worse timing for such a speech. It seemed about as politically ill-advised as Trump’s decision to travel to a truck-manufacturing plant in Texas, on Thursday, which inevitably invited voters to remember that the price of diesel fuel to drive those trucks just hit the highest level ever recorded—$6.53 per gallon, on September 21st—as a result of the war with Iran that Trump’s Secretary of Defense insists is not happening.
A few weeks ago, Senator Thom Tillis, the North Carolina Republican who had delivered a key vote for Hegseth’s confirmation last year, despite qualms about his fitness for office, urged Trump to fire Hegseth. “I have never witnessed more inept management of the brave men and women who serve our country,” Tillis posted on X, after Hegseth forced out the Secretary of the Army. “He is intimidated by competence and retreats to ginning up culture wars instead of soberly attending to the vital work of our national defense and the health and well-being of our fighting force.”
Soon after, another Republican, the Kentucky congressman Thomas Massie, filed formal articles of impeachment against Hegseth in the House of Representatives. The chamber’s rules would have required a vote to be held within forty-eight hours of the resolution’s filing, but the G.O.P. leadership seemed worried enough about the vote count that Speaker Mike Johnson abruptly cancelled the House’s remaining business before the midterm elections and sent members into recess early instead. Writing in the American Conservative on “Why a Hegseth impeachment terrifies the G.O.P.,” a former aide to the Republican senator Josh Hawley compared Johnson’s maneuver to King Charles I dissolving the English Parliament in 1626 rather than have it vote to impeach his favored courtier, the much-hated Duke of Buckingham. (It didn’t go over so well for Charles, whose disputes with Parliament ultimately ended with the English Civil War and his beheading for treason.)
Massie may not have had the votes (yet) to force Hegseth’s removal, but these high-profile breaches are indicative of a broad and notably bipartisan disgust on Capitol Hill with Trump’s Pentagon chief. “That a Republican member of Congress was the one who filed the impeachment is, I think, illustrative of how much concern there is and how much Republicans in the Senate who consented to the ratification of somebody obviously unqualified of the job are looking to repent of that choice,” Kori Schake, a former senior official in Bush’s Pentagon who now serves as director of foreign- and defense-policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, told me.
