On Wednesday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth delivered a defiant and aggressive testimony before the House Armed Services Committee.
While the testimony was billed as being about the Pentagon’s budget, it inevitably became about the War in Iran. During the testimony, Hegseth was sometimes outright belligerent. My colleague Holly Baxter said that he sounded increasingly deluded and desperate, hoping to win the support of the audience of one that is Donald Trump.
At one point, he gallingly said that “the biggest adversary we face at this point are the reckless, feckless and defeatist words of congressional Democrats and some Republicans.”
A few days ago, I hid under a table during the White House Correspondents’ Dinner as I saw Hegseth bolt out of the Washington Hilton after a shooter allegedly came to try and take out Trump. But here, he showed absolutely zero signs of trying to turn down the tone in the country.
“Choosing to call out Democrats and some Republicans as our greatest threat, amidst all the threats, including an act of war, shows you what a f***ng joke he is,” Rep. Pat Ryan of New York, a West Point graduate, told The Independent. “I asked them questions about six Americans that were killed, and he wouldn’t even answer in a straightforward way.”
Even Rep. Jen Kiggans (R-Va.), who represents the Navy-heavy Virginia Beach, grilled Hegseth about the dismissal of the Secretary of the Navy John Phelan.
But if Hegseth had a rough go at it at the House of Representatives, he will have an even tougher time before the Senate Armed Services Committee on Thursday.
There, he will have to face Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.), whom he has tried to punish for a video he put out with Democratic lawmakers saying U.S. servicemembers have a right to refuse illegal orders.
Members who are not on the committee will also be watching Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), who voted to confirm Hegseth, but has at times become more critical of the Trump administration while avoiding directly criticizing the president.
“I think that we need details,” Tillis told The Independent. We need to know what the strategic objectives are. What does success look like? What is the build-up for the budget request?”
And this is to say nothing of the Republicans who voted against his confirmation: Sens. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Susan Collins of Maine and Mitch McConnell of Kentucky. McConnell especially criticized the Pentagon.
This week, the usually taciturn McConnell put out an op-ed in The Washington Post criticizing the fact that the Pentagon has not spent $400 billion that the Senate set aside for Ukraine.
“Trump’s focus on ending the war is noble,” he said. “But the price and stability of peace matter. The Pentagon’s approach of withholding or slow-rolling support to Ukraine is in effect the same strategy President Joe Biden deployed.”
For someone like McConnell, the chairman of the Appropriations Committee’s subcommittee on military spending, this was a damning condemnation. McConnell did not mention Hegset,h but it was a clear message for him to get it together.
The Senate as a whole is more hawkish than the House, so Hegseth might not face as much criticism about the war in Iran itself as about his management of the war. And the Senate does not take kindly to people dictating what it cannot know.
A common trait of the Trump White House has been members of the administration avoiding accountability or congressional oversight and then immediately melting in front of a committee.
Homeland Security Kristi Noem avoided the Senate Judiciary Committee for months, only for Tillis and Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) to eviscerate her. A few days later, she was gone. In February, Attorney General Pam Bondi faced a round of tough questioning about files related to Jeffrey Epstein, giving an equally pugnacious performance. By April, she got the boot.
This isn’t to say that Hegseth will suffer the same fate as the ladies. But as more members lose patience with him and as Republicans want to find someone to blame other than Trump, he might be the next sacrificial lamb.
