Trump’s Proposed Defense Secretary: ‘We Should Not Have Women in Combat Roles’
Photo via screenshot of CNN
Donald Trump has spent the past week unveiling his list of bad names you forgot, and yesterday he made one of his most concerning appointments yet, naming Fox News commentator Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense. You may know the name from the time he almost killed someone on live TV while proving he doesn’t know how to throw an axe.
Good thing now Hegseth will just have the nuke codes instead of an ax.
— Ron Filipkowski (@ronfilipkowski.bsky.social) November 12, 2024 at 6:40 PM
Just last week, Trump’s proposed Secretary of Defense said that women should not be fighting next to men in the United States military, meaning that Trump and his sycophants knew full-well what they were doing selecting this braindead idiot to lead the most powerful military in the world.
Pete Hegseth 5 days ago: “I’m straight up just saying we should not have women in combat roles.”
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.bsky.social) November 12, 2024 at 7:50 PM
This is some dark stuff. While the basic principle of taking people away from America’s imperial ambitions is good in the long-run, what this evinces is a full-throated paternalistic vision of a military that already has a sexual assault problem, and most sexual assaults are not officially reported to the Department of Defense. Under Hegseth’s command where he is clearly more focused on marginalizing American women than America’s enemies, that crisis is likely to only get worse. Add in the fact that he has hours of cable news time proving the man has very little substantive activity happening between his ears, and the classic stereotype of an ignorant, valueless and bigoted American is what Hegseth wants to make the entire military into.
Whether he gets through the Senate confirmation hearings is to be determined, and statements like these make the political calculations for Republican Congressmen a lot more difficult knowing that the GOP has forever branded themselves as the party whose animating principle is their hatred of women. If Trump had nominated this schmuck in 2016, it’s difficult to see how he would make it through Senate confirmation for such an important position treasured by the Republican Party. However, it is 2024 and America is in a very different place, and whether this manifestly unqualified bigot gets confirmed as Defense Secretary will say a lot about how far America has fallen this decade.