Can you smell the schadenfreude in the air?
Watching some of the worst people in the world get their comeuppance this week has been deeply satisfying. And the show isn’t over yet. While the midterms have wrapped up, the blame game is only just getting started, with Republicans desperate to find scapegoats for their shellacking.
He may be a big, strong, testosterone-obsessed warrior, but I suspect Pete Hegseth is panicking right now. When it comes to scapegoats, the defence secretary (or “war secretary” as he prefers to identify as) is an obvious choice. The disastrous US-Israeli war on Iran played a key role in the midterm upset, as even JD Vance has admitted , and Hegseth was one of its main architects.
The Democrats have already declared war on the former Fox News personality. “In the majority, one of the first things we’re going to do is run Pete Hegseth out of town,” Hakeem Jeffries announced at a campaign rally before the midterms.
It’s not just the Democrats; many of Hegseth’s peers are eager to give him the boot.
The outgoing Republican senator Thom Tillis told CBS News on Tuesday night that Hegseth has a “ reckoning ” coming. Meanwhile, the (also outgoing) Republican congressman Thomas Massie told Bloomberg News he will “definitely” reintroduce articles of impeachment against Hegseth next week. (Massie has already tried to impeach Hegseth for starting the war in Iran without congressional approval.)
In a Wednesday post on Twitter/X , Massie wrote: “There is one contingency in which I won’t reintroduce the articles of impeachment: Hegseth resigns.”
There is little chance that Hegseth will unilaterally decide to make a dignified exit. On Thursday, the defense secretary posted a longwinded video in which, after rambling about DEI and trans people, he asserted that he wasn’t going anywhere.
“A disgruntled, defeated congressman [aka Massie], along with all his Democrat allies, has also dropped sham articles of impeachment against yours truly, just like they tried against President Trump twice,” Hegseth said. “Didn’t work against President Trump, and it won’t work with me. You can rest assured of that.”
This little performance did not quieten his critics.
“@PeteHegseth, cabinet secretaries shouldn’t be wasting taxpayer dollars on campaign style videos,” Tillis wrote on social media in response. “This is about you: the incompetence you’ve displayed, the bad advice you’ve given to president, and your shameful and embarrassing episodes from firing our top generals to texting war plans to reporters.”
There have been rather a lot of shameful and embarrassing episodes in Hegseth’s career, haven’t there?
There are all the allegations about his previous drunk and disorderly conduct, for example. And the settlement he paid to a woman who accused him of raping her in 2017. And the time his own mother called him an “abuser of women”. (He’s denied any wrongdoing.) And the New Yorker’s report that, in 2015, Hegseth was accused of drunkenly chanting “Kill All Muslims! Kill All Muslims!” (Hegseth’s lawyer told the New Yorker that they weren’t going to comment on these “outlandish claims”.) And the time he accidentally sent top secret war plans in a Signal group chat that included a reporter from the Atlantic. And then, of course, there are all the alleged war crimes he’s responsible for.
Hegseth loves to rail against “DEI hires”, but imagine for a moment if a woman was texting classified information to the wrong people and battling scandal after scandal. There’s no way she’d still be heading up the Pentagon. As has been widely observed, Trump seems to like getting rid of his high-level female officials when they embarrass him, while holding on to his mediocre men.
Indeed, while the secretary of war may be on the defensive now, there’s always the depressing possibility that his sex – and his sycophancy towards the president – may end up saving him. Particularly as Trump is publicly standing by his man for the moment.
When asked on Wednesday if he was considering replacing Hegseth, Trump told reporters: “No, I think he’s doing a very good job.” Behind the scenes, of course, it could be a different story. NBC News reported on Wednesday that Trump has told some of his allies that he’s considering replacing the defense secretary.
But even if Hegseth is able to cling on to the sinking ship until it finally goes down, I take solace in the fact that he must be feeling very uncomfortable right now. And I am clinging on to hope that he will have a very public downfall.
This is, let’s not forget, a man who wanted to livestream an execution via firing squad. While that thankfully never happened, perhaps we’ll all get to watch a live stream of Hegseth getting fired.
Nancy Lacore was in the navy for 35 years before the three-star admiral was ousted by Hegseth without cause amid a broader purge. In response, she mounted a bid for Congress that made Hegseth’s incompetence a key talking point . At the time of writing, the race hasn’t been officially called, but it looks like she’s managed to flip a traditionally Republican seat. Wouldn’t it be poetic if she plays a part in firing Pete?
“Eighteen- to 29-year-old young white men with no college degrees swung 40 points to the Democrats, and I don’t think it’s all because they’re socialists,” the podcaster Tim Pool told Fox News . “I think it’s because many of them want to burn the Republican party down.” Go ahead, guys!
Part of Brand’s defence was the claim : “Not one of [the victims] resisted or screamed or even tried to leave.” Speaking after the trial, the victims’ commissioner for England and Wales, Claire Waxman, emphasized how dangerous these sorts of misconceptions about sexual assault are. “The idea that rape victims must scream, physically resist or immediately report an offence is a well-established rape myth, rooted in outdated and harmful assumptions about how victims are expected to behave,” she said. “Justice must be grounded in evidence, not misconceptions.”
Just when you think the US is getting a smidgen more sane, you see something like this .
Israeli militants killed five teenage students at al-Mughayyir school in the West Bank last academic year, one at the school gates. In response to parents being afraid to send their kids back to the classroom, the school has had to build bigger fences . Meanwhile, “settlers” continue their violent pogroms on the village, and far too many US politicians continue to excuse and enable this violence.
A Guardian investigation has found that groups such as Crunchy Moms (which has more than 490,000 members) are hives of anti-vaccine content and medical misinformation. Most alarmingly : Meta “appears to have helped spread such ideas by promoting Crunchy Moms into users’ feeds, even when they do not seek it out”.
While the midterms were on everyone’s mind this week, an alligator in North Carolina was just thinking about brunch. Surveillance cameras caught the creature strolling into the back of a bagel shop, startling the customers . The police were called and the gator was removed. The gator insists he did nothing wrong and is the victim of a schmear campaign.
Arwa Mahadwi is a Guardian columnist
