Donald Trump says he stands behind Pete Hegseth, our entirely unqualified secretary of defense, a former Fox News weekend morning-show clown and future Brylcreem model who is in the habit of treating sensitive military information as though it were knitting-circle gossip. Hegseth has chatted about upcoming military actions with everyone and his brother—literally, his brother, as well as his wife—through an app that is in and of itself not sufficiently secure but which is even more insecure when it is being handled by tech-illiterate doofuses (and the Trump administration is full of these) who, in a related instance, accidentally copied the editor of The Atlantic on the conversation.
The president says he has complete confidence in Hegseth. So, he’s probably cooked.
No, it’s not a great time for former Fox News personalities serving in top-level positions—which is a damned weird thing to write! Janette Nesheiwat, a former Fox News contributor nominated as surgeon general for some reason, “falsified, misled, selectively omitted, or lied about her medical education, board certifications, and military experience,” according to Anthony Clark, an independent journalist and former staffer on the House Oversight Committee. Short version: Nesheiwat has said and written things that implied she was a student at University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, where she was never enrolled, and/or American University, which does not have a medical school but is a too-cute way of saying “American University … of the Caribbean,” the for-profit medical school—unrelated to the university in Washington, D.C.—from which her degree actually comes.
There is more reporting to be done, but Clark seems to have the goods.
You can probably guess where this will all lead.
The usual people are making the expected noises: “None of this is based in reality,” Hegseth said about the chat scandal, though the facts of the case—the reality—are not in dispute. “Fake news,” press secretary Karoline Leavitt said about an NPR report alleging that Trump is thinking about dumping Hegseth. One suspects she’ll be the last to know. But if you work for the Trump administration, Trump has thought about firing you at least once before his second Diet Coke of the day.
Of course, there’s more.
Our secretary of homeland security, dog-murdering goofball cosplay enthusiast Kristi Noem, who is not a former television personality but who seems to be positioning herself for a future in show business, is having a little trouble with security here in the homeland, having managed to get herself robbed of a purse containing $3,000 in cash, among other sundries, at a restaurant in Washington. The gold Rolex Daytona she wore to pose in front of Salvadoran gangsters appears to be safe.
Florida man Dan Bongino, who insists that “taxation is theft” in spite of the fact that he spent almost the entirety of his career firmly attached to the taxpayers’ teat as a government employee of one kind or another, finally made it to the FBI when he was appointed deputy director. Ever eager to demonstrate what a tough guy he is, Bongino stepped onto the mat with an FBI trainer, got his ass kicked, and then took to social media to denounce the New York Times for reporting that he’d been injured in the ass-kicking. The New York Times had not yet reported the fact, but Bongino successfully made the non-story into a non-non-story. Like many of his colleagues in the administration, Bongino got onto Trump’s radar as a Fox News guy, and, like many of his colleagues, he is not really qualified for the job to which he was appointed and is not very good at it.
Bongino has made some innovations: He has a multiagent bodyguard team to watch over him, something no previous deputy director has felt necessary. He also spends a great deal of time behaving like an idiot child on social media.
There are a couple of good people left in government. Jerome Powell, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, was never a game-show host and seems to know what he is doing. Trump is endeavoring mightily to fire him, and worldwide financial markets are micturating voluminously and from a great height on U.S. stocks and the dollar. What are the markets saying? Approximately: “Well, hell. This dumbass apparently means it.”
Meanwhile, there is the vice president, J.D. Vance, who may have actually bored the pope to death.
Sweet release!
Pope Francis’ occasional heresies (Was the pope Catholic?) may necessitate the briefest taste of purgatory, but I suspect a lot of Americans will look back on the holy father’s timing as being pretty solid.
The rest of us will have to live under the wisdom of the median American voter for a little while longer.
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