It's All Collapsing for Congressional Republicans

The isolation from reality is going to make for a rude awakening for Republicans

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On Sunday night, the shocking — but not surprising — news broke that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth shared secret war plans on a Signal chat with friends and family. From the New York Times:

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth shared detailed information about forthcoming strikes in Yemen on March 15 in a private Signal group chat that included his wife, brother and personal lawyer, according to four people with knowledge of the chat.

Some of those people said that the information Mr. Hegseth shared on the Signal chat included the flight schedules for the F/A-18 Hornets targeting the Houthis in Yemen — essentially the same attack plans that he shared on a separate Signal chat the same day that mistakenly included the editor of The Atlantic.

Mr. Hegseth’s wife, Jennifer, a former Fox News producer, is not a Defense Department employee, but she has traveled with him overseas and drawn criticism for accompanying her husband to sensitive meetings with foreign leaders.

Hegseth’s Pentagon is in disarray. Don’t take it from me. Take it from a longtime Hegseth aide who wrote a scathing op-ed in Politico, which begins like this:

It’s been a month of total chaos at the Pentagon. From leaks of sensitive operational plans to mass firings, the dysfunction is now a major distraction for the president — who deserves better from his senior leadership.

President Donald Trump has a strong record of holding his top officials to account. Given that, it’s hard to see Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth remaining in his role for much longer.

The latest flashpoint is a near collapse inside the Pentagon’s top ranks. On Friday, Hegseth fired three of his most loyal senior staffers — senior adviser Dan Caldwell, deputy chief of staff Darin Selnick and Colin Carroll, chief of staff to the deputy secretary of Defense. In the aftermath, Defense Department officials working for Hegseth tried to smear the aides anonymously to reporters, claiming they were fired for leaking sensitive information as part of an investigation ordered earlier this month.

Yet none of this is true.

Hegseth has now been busted (not accused, but busted) sharing top-secret military plans on two separate Signal chats. The ones he shared with his friends and family was on his personal cell phone, which you can be assured the Russians, Iranians and Chinese have long ago hacked.

Of course, in MAGA world, getting caught doing something illegal is cause for victimhood. The real criminals, you see, are the ones who blew the whistle and ran to the media because they are “disgruntled.”

You could have seen Hegseth’s self-martyrdom coming from a mile away and, appropriately, he delivered his Pete on the cross routine with a straight face at the White House Easter Egg Roll yesterday:

What a big surprise that a few leakers get fired and suddenly a bunch of hit pieces come out from the same media that peddled the Russia hoax, won't give back their Pulitzers, they got Pulitzers for a bunch of lies ... This is what the media does. They take anonymous sources from disgruntled former employees and then they try to slash and burn people and ruin their reputations."

You would have thought Hegseth would have learned his lesson the last time he scolded a reporter for writing about him disseminating military plans on a Signal chat. That journalist, Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic, promptly produced screenshots of the plans. How long before screenshots appear of this most recent leak?

Predictably, the White House doubled down on defending the indefensible. White House press secretary trotted herself out on Fox News to accuse “the entire Pentagon” of working against “the war fighter.” Here’s Leavitt:

“This is what happens when the entire Pentagon is working against you and working against the monumental change that you are trying to implement. Secretary Hegseth was nominated for this position because he is standing up for the war fighter — the men and women in uniform who are putting their lives on the line to protect our country and our homeland. And unfortunately, there have been people at that building who don’t like the change the secretary is trying to bring, so they are leaking and they are lying to the mainstream media.”

Let that sink in: a woman who has never served, speaking on behalf of a president who has consistently denigrated servicemen and women as “suckers and losers,” is accusing the United States military of working against… the United States military.

Then, Trump got in on the action himself, defending Hegseth at the Easter Egg Roll. “It’s just fake news,” he announced. “You know, he was put there to get rid of a lot of bad people, and that’s what he’s doing. You don’t always have friends when you do that.”

The “bad people” Hegseth got rid of? It appears they are the same people he brought in to the Pentagon, the Trump loyalists who ran to the press because they appeared to be so alarmed about Hegseth’s behavior and, as one of them put it, subversion of Trump’s own agenda.

It’s unclear what the president considers to be fake news because Hegseth has not actually denied that he disseminated the war plans to his wife, brother, personal lawyer and ten others from his private phone on a Signal chat.

Earlier this morning, Hegseth ran to his safe space: Fox News. In an interview with Brian Kilmede, who had earlier said that Hegseth decision to share intelligence on a personal phone could be part of a “learning curve” (do we really need on the job training when it comes to national security, Brian?), Hegseth said this of the media:

“They peddle old stuff. This is what it’s all about: trying to get at President Trump and his agenda.” He added, “I don’t have time for leakers. I don’t have time for the hoax press that peddles old stories from disgruntled employees.”

How’s that for a non-denial? It’s the media’s fault for writing about Hegseth’s intelligence breaches. Pay no attention to the actual substance of what is in the stories.

It is no surprise that Trump does not care about our national security. As I have long said, it does not really matter whether he was ever turned by the Soviets when he first visited Moscow in the 1980s, because he is certainly doing everything in his power to give Russia and our other foreign adversaries everything they have ever wanted now.

But what about Senate Republicans, the ones who voted to confirm Hegseth just a few months ago? You know, the ones stuck between a Trump-funded primary and a hard place?

Senator Roger Wicker, the chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, retired from the Air Force as a lieutenant colonel. In her bio, Senator Deb Fischer, who also sits on the committee, claims that “the first duty of Congress is to defend the nation” and that “she is committed to defending against growing threats to our homeland and our allies.” Senators Tom Cotton, Joni Ernst and others have used their military experience in their election campaigns over and over. These people practically go to third base with their American flag pins on a daily basis.

And yet, none of them has had the courage to say a word about what is a massive national security breach. Cotton, like the craven coward that he is, even joked that Trump won’t be taking staffing advice from Politico — as though Politico’s decision to publish an op-ed from a longtime Hegseth loyalist sounding the alarm about Hegseth’s behavior is more important than the underlying alarm bells themselves.

Owning the libs, you see, trumps everything. If Hegseth’s resignation will make the left happy, then, by God, Hegseth needs to stay — national security be damned.

Except that most voters don’t want to own the libs. They want to live in a country where our troops are not placed in harm’s way by careless national security officials. They want to live in a country where the Dow has not had the worst month since the Great Depression. They want to live in a country where trade policy is not making the cost of nearly everything higher. They want to live in a country where the chaos is not constantly ongoing.

The Republicans who know this are the ones in tough swing districts, like Rep. Don Bacon of Nebraska, who called on Hegseth to resign yesterday. Bacon, the chairman of a House Armed Services subcommittee, noted that, "If a Democrat did this we'd be demanding a scalp. I don't like hypocrisy. We should be Americans first when it comes to security.”

The rest are in the fetal position, hoping that Trump’s self-manufactured daily crises will blow over, that Trump miraculously turns around the economy he cratered, rehabilitates the incompetents he has put in positions of power and, most of all, start governing, rather than retaliating.

And they tell themselves fairy tales that were once the purview of conspiracy theorists but have now become standard fare on Capitol Hill.

The protests sweeping the country? Paid by George Soros.

The angry voters showing up at their town halls? Democratic shills.

The media covering Trump missteps? All a hoax.

The isolation from reality is going to make for a rude awakening for many of these Republicans next year — even the ones who have never had a tough race before. This is the kind of environment of which electoral waves are made.

And this time, Trump and Musk won’t bail them out. On the contrary, any help those two lend to them will only become fodder for their opponents.

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Further Reading:

Photo by Heber Galindo on Unsplash

The New York Times: Hegseth Said to Have Shared Attack Details in Second Signal Chat

Politico: Opinion | Former Top Pentagon Spokesperson Details ‘Month From Hell’ Inside the Agency

C-Span: @SecDef Hegseth on "Signal chat controversy"

The Atlantic: Here Are the Attack Plans That Trump’s Advisers Shared on Signal

Mediate: ‘They Are Lying!’ Karoline Leavitt Says ‘The Entire Pentagon is Working Against’ Pete Hegseth in Shocking Fox News Hit

The Wall Street Journal: Hegseth Faces Heat After New Signal Chat Emerges and Claim of Pentagon ‘Chaos’

NOTUS: Pete Hegseth Returns to His Confirmation Hearing Playbook: ‘I Haven’t Blinked’

Deb Fischer: Biography/About Deb

Politico: MAGA world rallies to Hegseth’s defense

The Wall Street Journal: From Fake Eyelashes to Care Bears, U.S.-Bound Goods Are Stuck in Tariff Limbo