Photo: Andrew Harnik Associated Press This week, the Wall Street Journal revealed that Donald Trump’s transition team is reportedly working on a draft executive order to review the evaluation of officers to make it easier to shelve or retire early those who do not follow Trumpism’s ideological lines.
Fabien Deglise
Published at 0:00 Analysis
- United States
From the weekend morning lineup on Fox News to… leading the world’s greatest military power.
This week, U.S. President-elect Donald Trump continued his pattern of surprising appointments by naming ultraconservative news network host Pete Hegseth as his next government’s defense secretary.
An ally of the populist and a mouthpiece for Trumpism on Fox News, this former National Guard officer is preparing to bring unwavering loyalty to the next president into the Pentagon itself, while contributing to the increased politicization of the country's armed forces. A worrying cocktail given that the Republican has, on several occasions during his campaign, threatened to use American military forces, both to carry out his plan for mass expulsions of immigrants and to silence his political opponents.
“Pete Hegseth does not have the kind of experience that one would expect to find to occupy this complex position within the cabinet,” summarizes in an interview the professor of political science and specialist in national security Peter Feaver, reached at Duke University, in North Carolina. His most notable defense accomplishment so far has been convincing Donald Trump in 2019 to pardon military personnel convicted of war crimes [in Iraq and Afghanistan].”
He adds: “That’s the kind of action that an outsider, an advocate, can take. But the defense secretary is supposed to be the guardian of civilian control over the military and, along with the president and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, should help set the tone for military professionalism.”
“Weird!” That's the word used by former Republican Representative Adam Kinzinger, who has become a vocal critic of Donald Trump's authoritarian excesses, to describe Pete Hegseth's arrival at the head of the Pentagon. On CNN Wednesday, the populist's former national security adviser, John Bolton, went further, speaking of an appointment based on “submission” rather than loyalty and referring to the first heads of the billionaire's next government as “jack-of-all-trades” who will agree to carry out the priorities listed by the president-elect during the election campaign.
At 44, Pete Hegseth is preparing to take over the massive Defense Department, with its colossal $850 billion budget and 3.4 million soldiers and civilian employees. And he’s going to do it with a clear plan: rid the military of “wokeness” by tackling the diversity policies that have been implemented in recent years.
“We need to fire the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,” Pete Hegseth said, referring to Gen. Charles Brown, during an interview last week on the conservative podcast The Shawn Ryan Show. The Fox News political commentator reiterated his usual attacks on equity and inclusion, “woke bullshit,” according to him, which should justify this dismissal.
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“Pete Hegseth also made it clear that he believed women were more of a liability than an asset to the military,” summarizes Kris Klein Hernández, a historian specializing in American social issues, contacted this week at Connecticut College in New London. In his book War on Warriors: Behind the Betrayal of the Men Who Keep us Free (War on Warriors: Behind the Betrayal of the Men Who Keep us Free, freely translated), quoted by the president-elect at the time of his nomination, Pete Hegseth speaks in fact of a military that has “lowered the standards” to allow women in. He believes that their participation in combat has made the military “not more effective,” “not more deadly,” but “more complicated.”
“If women can no longer serve in the military, that will eliminate a facet of their full participation in citizenship under a Trump administration, which could also attack their reproductive rights,” adds Klein Hernández.
This week, the Wall Street Journal revealed that Donald Trump’s transition team is reportedly working on a draft executive order to overhaul the evaluation of officers to make it easier to shelve or retire early those who do not follow Trumpist ideological lines. This reform would also aim to create a climate of tension conducive to bringing the military into line with the directives of the American executive branch, which Donald Trump has promised to strengthen.
“This nomination is designed to disrupt the institution and align it with the new administration’s political views, both on military and social issues,” David Oakley, director of the Institute for National and Global Security at the University of South Florida, said in an interview. “And partisanship is a concern for many military professionals, and it should be a concern for citizens, including those who share the same political views [as the next U.S. president].”
“Donald Trump has repeatedly promised to use his constitutional powers to deport people who are in the United States illegally,” Feaver said. “He has broad powers to do so, and that includes assets under the day-to-day control of the defense secretary.” »
« He also made it clear that he intended to violate the law Posse Comitatusof 1878 [which protects Americans from the use of the military as a force for civil order], adds Kris Klein Hernández. I try to be optimistic that a Donald Trump emboldened by victory will not be more authoritarian. But as a historian, I have to admit that looking at his resume, his policies, and his way of governing mostly suggests that abuse of power is always a possibility.”
Troubling appointments
Donald Trump’s perilous choice to head the Pentagon accompanies a series of other nominations that have, all week, sown astonishment on the American political scene. On Wednesday, John Bolton, former national security adviser, demanded that the FBI launch investigations into two of them: Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence and Matt Gaetz as attorney general. The former has been the mouthpiece of Russian propaganda in recent years, thus leaving a threat to national security, according to Mr. Bolton. The second is the subject of several investigations for sexual misconduct, drug use and corruption.
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“Until a few hours ago, I would have said [Gabbard] was the worst Cabinet appointment in recent American history,” Bolton said Wednesday. “But since Matt Gaetz was appointed [attorney general], he’s the one who’s taken the lead on that.”
The arrival of Pete Hegseth as Pentagon chief adds another marker on the road to authoritarianism that Donald Trump could take in his second term, after he praised Nazi leader Adolf Hitler’s army for its loyalty. Ironically, Donald Trump’s comments about docile generals in the pay of an uncontested leader were reported by General Mark Milley, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and John Kelly, former White House chief of staff, during the election campaign. Donald Trump, not yet elected, was described by both military officers as a fascist.
The Secretary of Defense in his next administration is already setting the tone: in his book published this summer, he called for the department to revert to its pre-1947 name, the War Department.