We have said here for some time that when a cabinet member, or some other major player in Trump world, gets fired it will be Pete Hegseth. That prophecy has inched closer to fulfillment in the past few days. Hegseth’s aide, Elbridge Colby, “has gotten out ahead of the administration on several major foreign policy decisions,” according to Politico. Trump was asked in the cabinet meeting yesterday who made the decision regarding the freezing of aid to Ukraine. Trump’s reply was, “I don’t know. Why don’t you tell me?” which implies that the reporter knows more than Trump, and in point of fact, that’s one of the more intelligent comments to come out of the man’s mouth.
But pushback was swift. Colby is now elevated to a status of high scrutiny, whereas before yesterday he was hardly a household name. And that is bad news for Pete Hegseth, because Colby is acting on his own, the actual Secretary of Defense appears to be out of the loop with respect to the doings of his own department, and all this makes Trump look bad. And this is not the first time Hegseth has made Trump look bad. But it could be the last.
He [Colby] prompted last week’s decision, first reported by POLITICO, to halt shipments of some air defense missiles to Ukraine,which caught many Trump allies and lawmakers off guard. This week, President Donald Trump said he would reverse the decision to pause the weapons, but claimed he did not know who had approved it.
Colby also surprised top officials at the State Department and the National Security Council in June when he decided to review America’s submarine pact with Australia and the U.K.
“He is pissing off just about everyone I know inside the administration,” said one person familiar with the situation. “They all view him as the guy who’s going to make the U.S. do less in the world in general.”
And in conversations with defense counterparts from Britain and Japan in recent months, Colby’s hard-charging style has caused serious dustups.
“He has basically decided that he’s going to be the intellectual driving force behind a kind of neo-isolationism that believes that the United States should act more alone, that allies and friends are kind of encumbering,” said a person familiar with the Trump administration dynamics.
Colby has been described as a “loose cannon.” The way that this plays out is that Hegseth signed off on the decision to freeze aid to Ukraine. He didn’t mention this to Trump, which is a fireable offense. Hegseth might not have mentioned it because he didn’t know what he signed. That would be an outrageous statement to make about any other SECEF but it’s entirely plausible when it comes to Pete. So will Pete get canned by Trump over this?
As you heard the man say, it’s “out of bounds” when a “president does not know that something this major is happening.” I think you can take all this at face value: 1. Colby is running the show far beyond what his actual job description and authority is; 2. Hegseth is tuned out. Hegseth, of everybody in this misadministration, is over his head the most. He likely does not know the day to day doings at the Department Of Defense. And 3, Trump looked like a fool yesterday and Trump doesn’t like to be made the fool.
The only reason Hegseth is still there is because Trump doesn’t want to lose face or “give a scalp” to the media, which was the given rationale for why Hegseth didn’t get fired after SignalGate.
But, the transgressions mount up. And Trump has got to be wondering, “what’s next?” I think the real question here is: Can Trump find a graceful way to fire Hegseth? Or persuade Hegseth to resign? I truly believe that if Trump could fire Hegseth without looking bad that he would do so in a New York minute.
And I would be astonished if there weren’t people inside Trump world who have been discussing this very matter. Trump is notorious for blowing up at people who make him look bad. Back in the COVID era, Trump blew up at Jared Kushner in an epic rant that supposedly had Kushner reeling for days. The issue was Kushner putting together a drive-thru COVID testing program, like South Korea had at the time. Kushner flopped at that program. Bottom line, Kushner told Trump things were fine when they weren’t fine and made Trump look bad. That’s the unforgivable sin.
And Hegseth isn’t even family.
My take is that Trump did it, but it got such backlash that now he won’t admit it. He’d rather the underlings be blamed.
But consider this. Trump is at the top, just one or two levels above the person who did this, so he’s either guilty of doing it, or he’s guilty for not keeping control of the people immediately beneath him. Either way, he’s the responsible party.
are you kidding? trump is never responsible for anything unless he sees it as a positive, the he is solely responsible, all by himself.