“Death and destruction from the sky all day.” – Pete Hegseth
By Marc C. Johnson
Few things shock us any longer. This is, after all, The Age of Trump.
But the shockingly incompetent Pete Hegseth, the Secretary of Defense who will, one hopes, someday soon return to hosting a Fox News weekend show, did shock those in the Pentagon briefing room this morning, as Tom Nichols detailed in The Atlantic:
Most reporters are now accustomed to Hegseth’s drama-laden antics. But even by the low standards he has set, he managed to shock many of them when he cynically used the deaths of U.S. military personnel to air his own grievances with the press.
On Sunday morning (local time), an Iranian drone hit a makeshift operations center in Kuwait. The Pentagon says that six Americans are dead. Not only is this event a tragedy, but it also requires an explanation: The drone reportedly snuck through U.S. defenses without setting off any alerts, and struck a target that now seems to have been unduly vulnerable to aerial attack.
Every Hegseth press conference is about performance and hyperbole, but today he went way over the line
Rather than explain his understanding of why U.S. servicemen and at least one woman died in Donald Trump’s War Hegseth went off on the assembled journalists.
More from Tom Nichols:
The defense secretary, the man who is supposed to carry this news to the American public and mourn with them, instead whined about the unfairness of it all. “When a few drones get through or tragic things happen, it’s front-page news. I get it,” Hegseth told the reporters, military personnel, and civilians gathered this morning in the Pentagon. “The press only wants to make the president look bad, but try for once to report the reality. The terms of this war will be set by us at every step. As I said Monday, the mission is laser-focused.”
Here’s how The Independent reported Hegseth’s comments:
“This is what the fake news misses. We’ve taken control of Iran’s airspace and waterways without boots on the ground. We control their fate. But when a few drones get through or tragic things happen, it’s front page news,” Hegseth continued, appearing to refer to Sunday’s deadly attack on a U.S. command center in Kuwait.
Here’s the full Hegseth quote from the Pentagon transcript:
This is what the fake news misses. We’ve taken control of Iran’s airspace and waterways without boots on the ground. We control their fate. But when a few drones get through or tragic things happen, it’s front-page news.
I get it, the press only wants to make the president look bad – but try for once to report the reality. The terms of this war will be set by us at every step. As I said Monday, the mission is laser-focused, obliterate Iran’s missiles and drones and facilities that produce them, annihilate its navy and critical security infrastructure and sever their pathway to nuclear weapons.
But to Hegseth reporting on the death of members of the American military and trying to understand why they died is “fake news” that is “making the president look bad.”
And Hegseth wants journalists – most in the room were handpicked by him to be there – to “try for once to report the reality.”
Here’s the reality:
- Americans have died in an undeclared and undefined war
- Casualties in a war are front page news
- Despite the effort by Hegseth and others to claim everything is going swimmingly with their war of choice something did go wrong
- And if the mishandling of this deepening fiasco makes the president look bad perhaps Whiskey Tango Foxtrot Hegseth should look in the mirror while applying his daily smear of hair jell
It’s way beyond time to expect competence or accountability – see Kristi Noem – from the bloviating clowns of this administration.
But at least you are entitled to hear Hegseth mourn the dead he and Donald Trump sent into combat and not use them as a prop to count coup on journalists.
It takes courage and character to accept responsibility. Hegseth has neither.
As I read his disgusting remarks this afternoon my mind went back to the statement General Dwight Eisenhower prepared in the event the June 6, 1944 D-Day landings in Normandy during World War II went tragically wrong.
“Our landings in the Cherbourg-Havre area have failed to gain a satisfactory foothold and I have withdrawn the troops. My decision to attack at this time and place was based upon the best information available. The troops, the air and the Navy did all that Bravery and devotion to duty could do. If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt it is mine alone.”
Eisenhower wasn’t going to blame the press or anyone else for any failure that thankfully and historically did not happen.
That Ike was ready to take responsibility is something that a petty, ignorant man like Pete Hegseth will never understand and never do.
It’s difficult to be an optimist in today’s world and I’m not all that optimistic, but I do focus on realism and try to populate my writing with solid sourcing and not merely opinion. I write these pieces to offer a perspective based on history and particularly American political history since 1900.
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