Mark this date on your calendar, December 1, 2025. It’s the beginning of a countdown to the End Of Pete Hegseth, a saga which we are all dying to see the final culmination of. Hegseth is custom tailor-made for one role and one alone, in the opinion of journalist David Rothkopf, and that is as Trump’s fall guy. Think about it and it will make perfect sense to you, as it does Rothkopf: Trump needs a fall guy for illegal deaths at sea from the boat attacks and the starting of an illegal war with Venezuela — which is connected to the attacks and still impending. Both these affairs have already incited the MAGA base and that will only escalate. Who better to be the fall guy when Trump needs one than Hegseth? It’s too pat and too perfect for Trump to pass up so he won’t. The only question now is: When?
In the months since assuming his role, Hegseth has been a serial disaster. Some of his greatest hits have included revealing sensitive information about battle plans on a messaging app, alienating many of his own staff to the point that’ve left their posts, banning Defense Department employees from speaking at think tanks in other forums where they could interact with experts and, infamously, convening top military brass to Quantico for a lecture on why they should not have beards.
Oh, and he also happily signed off on President Trump’s efforts to deploy the U.S. military to locations in U.S. cities.
Another place, of course, where massive military assets have been deployed has been the Caribbean, notably off the coast of Venezuela. Never mind that there was neither a war nor a threat to U.S. national security anywhere in the vicinity; Trump has been aching to invade somewhere since before he took office. Greenland, Canada and Panama had all been on the list at one time or another. Hegseth has been happy to play along.
When that plan grew to include sinking small speedboats that were alleged, without evidence, to be carrying drugs, Hegseth was all for it. (Trump, Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Co. have created an elaborate argument that somehow the boats are part of a massive “narco-terrorist” operation linked to Venezuela’s president Nicolas Maduro, and demand military intervention.) Others, including the combatant commander of the U.S. Southern Command, were not. He quit.
Hegseth, like the White House, has been proudly boasting about the military prowess involved in our war against these powerboats, never mind that it pits relatively tiny vessels against the full might of the U.S. Navy—including a carrier battle group led by the most advanced aircraft carrier in the world, the USS Gerald R. Ford.
The Washington Post has reported Hegseth was so hands-on with these attacks—which have claimed over 80 lives—that when overhead surveillance images following an early strike revealed survivors amid the wreckage, he gave the order to “kill them all.”
The order, and the murders that followed, are precisely the kind of illegal action Democratic lawmakers had warned that U.S. military officers were obligated by law and their oaths not to follow.
The extrajudicial murders are the bridge too far. Even Trump has tacitly admitted this. Republicans began to join in the call to investigate this travesty and see if Hegseth actually had issued the order. Trump has denied, in an interview on Air Force One, that this was the case, but the article goes on to say that Trump “indicated that he wouldn’t have issued the order in question either.”
So Hegseth’s master has now reached the point where he realizes that he’s going to have to make some changes. Trump probably reached that point clear back at the SignalGate scandal but again, it wasn’t the right time to bop Hegseth because it would have been an admission of a failure on Trump’s part to properly choose a Secretary of Defense.
Now what Trump needs to do is figure out a way to finesse the situation so that Hegseth leaves and Trump looks good.
Trump has reportedly considered letting Hegseth go several times over the past year, dating back to the leak of battle intelligence via that Signal group chat with a journalist. Further screw-ups or mounting blowback from the boat attack campaign could very likely lead to a change of leadership atop the Pentagon.
It seems reasonable to anticipate that, given the severity of the crimes involved—and it is important to note that even prior to the “kill them all” order, the attacks on the boats were themselves probably unjustifiable violations of the law—it is almost certain that the heat on Hegseth is indeed going to increase.
Venezuela may end up being the wild card in all this. First of all, will the illegal war even start? Will Venezuela end up being invaded? And will the America First base go crazy if and when that happens? We don’t know at this juncture. But two things are certain: Hegseth will screw up again, like the night following the day. And when he does, if that coincides with Trump needing a fall guy, then I predict Hegseth will be gone.
At this juncture, with the latest screw up of “kill them all,” Hegseth is on borrowed time. I think his departure is more a question of “when” not if. Trump is predictable and he’s thrown a lot of people under the bus who didn’t think they would ever find themselves there, most recently Marjorie Taylor Greene. Hegseth will not be immune once Trump finds the right rationalization for how Hegseth has screwed up and why he needs to go. Just watch.
It probably was Trump’s idea anyway. The whole thing was Trump’ idea, wasn’t it? He has wanted to oust Maduro since 2017, Mcmaster, and later Mattis, strongly advised against it. But Trump got frustrated with sanctions, and in his second term, as well understand, NOBODY tells Trump what to do and what not to do.
An epoch for the EOPH (End Of Pete Hegseth) perhaps. The dominos are beginning to be perturbed, in this shaky house of cards; which will, hopefully, trigger shortly. Once initiated, it cannot be trumped, in its catastrophic implosion.