Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth Have the Same Enemies

Opinion|Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth Have the Same Enemies

I can never decide whether “embattled” or “beleaguered” is the preferred adjective to describe a cabinet secretary pick whose confirmation chances appear to be vanishing. But with Donald Trump reportedly shopping around for backup candidates to run the Pentagon in his new administration, let’s just say that Pete Hegseth, Trump’s original choice for defense secretary, is officially embattled, as well as beleaguered. And we can throw in a “besieged,” too.

The irony of the situation is that Hegseth, a former Fox News host and combat veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan with two Bronze Stars and (here’s his problem) multiple allegations of sexual and managerial misconduct to his name, is in fact aligned with the once and future president in one critical respect. He is more concerned about domestic enemies than foreign ones, and he is willing to break rules to defeat them — even the rules his potential job requires him to uphold.

Throughout his latest presidential campaign, Trump repeatedly warned Americans about “the enemy within,” an amorphous collection of left-wing ideologues whom he said pose a greater danger to the country than Russia or China. Sometimes he was specific, calling out Democratic politicians like Nancy Pelosi and Adam Schiff. At other moments he spoke broadly of “radical left lunatics” and “very smart, very vicious people.”

Hegseth invokes the same concept in his recent book, “The War on Warriors.” He is eager to wage war against that enemy within. Hegseth believes that the battle has already been joined — and that his side is losing.

“America today is in a cold civil war,” Hegseth asserts in the book, which was published in June. “Our soul is under attack by a confederacy of radicals.” While his generation was fighting wars abroad, Hegseth writes, “we allowed America’s domestic enemies at home to gobble up cultural, political and spiritual territory.”

If Hegseth somehow manages to win confirmation as secretary of defense, he’ll seek to take that terrain back. And “The War on Warriors” shows the convictions he would bring to the effort. If Hegseth doesn’t make it through, his worldview will still matter, if only because it neatly fills in the details of Trump’s own vision, and his certitude that even the military, one of the few remaining trusted institutions in American life, must be disrupted and remade.