Trump Ponders Replacing Loser with Bigger Loser
Photo by Matt Johnson from Omaha, Nebraska, United States, CC BY 2.0
Pete Hegseth, man who famously nearly killed someone with an axe live on Fox News and who recently said that women should not serve in combat roles, is struggling to make it through the Republican Senate’s pre-screening process for presidential cabinet nominees. The GOP has already told Trump that credibly accused sex criminal Matt Gaetz is a bridge too far for them as Attorney General, and from the start, Hegseth also looked to be a similarly tough sell as Secretary of Defense. Republican Senator Joni Ernst, a former commanding officer of the 1168th Transportation Company in Kuwait and the 185th Combat Sustainment Support Battalion at Camp Dodge, has some, shall we say, obvious hangups with a manchild who couldn’t lace her boots.
It certainly doesn’t help that Ernst herself is being floated as a possible replacement should Hegseth’s nomination get pulled, and so Trump has begun to consider potential backups for what seems to be the inevitable jettisoning of Pete Hegseth from polite society yet again in his miserable and abusive life (allegations of being miserable and abusive are per his own mother in a letter she wrote to him).
Because Trump can never ever have someone more impressive than he is stand next to him, lest his scheme become obvious to even the smoothest of brains, that means that Ron DeSantis still has a career in Republican politics. Everyone looks better standing next to pudding fingers Ron and his many shoe lifts, and Trump is reportedly thinking that if he cannot humiliate the military by forcing it to march under the banner of a Fox News dumbfuck, he can still try to humiliate it with a fundamentally humiliating person. Per The Wall Street Journal:
President-elect Donald Trump is considering Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis as a possible replacement for Pete Hegseth, his pick to run the Pentagon, according to people familiar with the discussions, amid Republican senators’ concerns over mounting allegations about the former Fox News host’s personal life.…
The discussions are in their early stages, one of the people said, adding that Trump has floated DeSantis’s name in casual conversations with guests at Mar-a-Lago, his private Florida club.
Trump could decide not to choose DeSantis and select another replacement, if Hegseth’s nomination falls apart, the people said. Another potential defense-secretary candidate who has been discussed by Trump allies, according to people familiar with the matter, is Elbridge Colby, a former Pentagon official and ally of Vice President-elect JD Vance. Trump is also considering Sen. Joni Ernst (R., Iowa) for the job, some of the people said.
DeSantis served as a Navy lawyer in Iraq and Guantanamo Bay, and while he is not exactly the spitting image of someone who would be leading the Pentagon, he has proven he can help talk its way out of trouble. Given the amount of trouble Trump plans to cause and how much he would like to purge the military of anyone who is not a loyalist, a schlub like DeSantis who knows his way around a military courtroom can be a very useful tool.
On the surface, it seems absurd that Trump would want someone who reeks of the stench of losing as much as DeSantis does, but if you think about it, there’s a lot of sense in this decision. DeSantis tried to take on Trump and got obliterated, and he doesn’t even have the brightest political future of anyone in his state anymore as the Marco Rubio revival is in full swing at Secretary of State. Right now there’s a mad scramble for the remaining scraps of power in Trumpland, and DeSantis has to take anything he can get. He’s a loser who has proven he cannot do it on his own, which is the exact type of person Trump looks for in a lackey. With Rudy Giuliani out of money thanks to Trump, the incoming president needs a new punching bag, and what better person to suffer all of Trump’s indignities than the guy who’s as familiar with them as anyone?