Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Juliette Kayyem: Thanks for having me.
Kayyem: It is inconceivable why the details of particular strikes, timing, location, anything of that operational detail should go outside the Pentagon at all. Even a normal mission like this, you wouldn’t even have the comms people at the White House on a minute-by-minute. So there’s a lot of Hegseth, I think, wanting to show off; I think there’s really no other explanation for it. I’ve got the details. And remember where he gets these details from? He’s getting them from the Joint Chiefs. These are the military heads of all the branches, who are obligated, of course, to get civilian approval—that’s Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense—of any operational deployment like this, which is against the Houthis.
Sargent: Speaking of these purges at the Pentagon, John Ullyot, a former chief Pentagon spokesperson, just published a piece in Politico that was crushing for Hegseth. It went through all of his failures, including the first round of stories about sharing classified info on a Signal chat and then the absurd efforts to cover that one up. I want to highlight, though, a particular line from Ullyot’s piece. It said this, “There are very likely more shoes to drop in short order, with even bigger bombshell stories coming this week, key Pentagon reporters have been telling sources privately.” Juliette, this is the thing I keep coming back to. Is there any planet on which this doesn’t get worse, much worse politically for Trump over time?
Sargent: Well, Donald Trump Jr. does not. Donald Trump Jr. erupted in fury over that op-ed from Ullyot. Trump Jr. said, “This guy is not America First. He’s out to subvert my father’s agenda. He’s officially exiled from our movement.” The thing is, John Ullyot is a staunch loyalist to Trump. His op-ed included all this absurd praise for Trump, as if packaging the truth about Hegseth with adulation of Trump might make it more likely that the audience of one would take it seriously. I guess we’re finding that that isn’t enough, right, Juliette?
Sargent: Really? That’s interesting. In other words, they can’t just go in and get rid of all the people that oppose Hegseth, right? That’s your point. You’d be really functionally gutting the place entirely because everybody hates him, right?
I want people to understand.... I know there’s this whole DOGE thing and efficiency and like only our people should survive. I just want to give a sense of the numbers because this was one of the best lessons I ever learned as a political appointee. When I went into one of the major departments, my cabinet secretary that I reported to said to me, You need to—in terms of engagement, listening, functionality, all the things that you want to do as a manager and a leader—just remember there are 287,000 of them, talking about the career staff, and only a hundred of us, in terms of political appointees. And that’s a pretty accurate distribution at most of the agencies. You can only lose an agency that needs to function so much, and the Pentagon needs to function.
Sargent: It’s funny you say that because Donald Trump himself defended Hegseth today by claiming it was all going just fine. I want to bring up one other thing, though. In addition to Donald Trump Jr., other MAGA figures have weighed in on behalf of Hegseth as well. Charlie Kirk tried to blame criticism of Hegseth on neocons and the woke. Here’s a quote from him, “The warrior ethos is ascendant. Pete Hegseth stands in the way of the neocons and the woke.” MAGA really thinks Hegseth is their guy—and I think what they really mean by this is that Hegseth is the guy who’s going to turn the Pentagon into a force for MAGA imperialism in the world. Can you talk about this idea of a warrior ethos? It’s a deeply sick concept that they’ve got when you consider it in the context of the threats to Greenland and the threats to annex Canada and so forth. They really think that they’ve got the guy who’s going to do this stuff if Trump orders it, right?
And then that aligns with a sense that is inconsistent with what Trump promised MAGA—but they just follow him wherever he goes—which is that America is too overextended. What Hegseth wants, to describe what the warrior ethic is, is he does not want an equal fight. He wants to use our military mission to punch down. So they hide from Russia and Ukraine. They’re going to totally, totally cave to China if, [or] when at this stage, it invades Taiwan. But the punching down is easy, and that’s basically their platform. Panama, Greenland, Canada—who’s even thinking of them as military equals?
Kayyem: That’s exactly right. This is not spheres of influence that you might imagine: How are we going to maneuver this post–Cold War era with the rise of China; Russia still being relevant, if only because it’s making itself relevant in Ukraine; and the United States? You’re not seeing any discussion or attempt by the U.S. to manage its spheres of influence, which would, of course, be Europe and other democracies. Instead, [it] views its influence in how it’s able to either acquire new lands or punch and criticize those who would be good allies in these spheres of influence. So it’s isolating us, of course, and making us no stronger. And it’s just a waste of time. It is hard to piss off the Canadians, and we’ve managed to do it.
Sargent: I think that’s absolutely right, but they would count that as a win because that’s who they are. Republican Congressman Don Bacon basically came out and called for Hegseth to be removed, calling the news of the new unsecured chat “totally unacceptable.” Bacon added, “I wouldn’t tolerate it if I was in charge.”
Sargent: Well, I think you’re going to start seeing more Republicans break when this madness gets worse. I want to close out with what I think is a dilemma for MAGA. So you’ve got Don Jr. You’ve got Charlie Kirk. You’ve got MAGA essentially telling MAGA nation that if you give in on Hegseth, you’re letting the enemy win—meaning you and me and liberals and people who care about competent governance—so that makes it harder for Trump to pull the plug on Hegseth. Yet at the same time, this guy is so catastrophically, monumentally, ridiculously incompetent that we’re just going to have more and more stories—making the whole thing look even more ridiculous over time, [with] wheels really coming off. How do they get out of that? They can’t pull the plug without being seen as capitulating to the enemy.
Sargent: And they don’t even have the routine available to them of saying that he’s going to resign because he’s become a distraction and blaming that on the liberal media, which has been a common go-to for Republicans for a long time. Because they’ve defined anything like that as capitulation to the enemy, they don’t even have that option. Juliette Kayyem, thank you so much for coming on with us. Good discussion.
Sargent: Sounds like a plan.
You’ve been listening to The Daily Blast with me, your host, Greg Sargent. The Daily Blast is a New Republic podcast and is produced by Riley Fessler and the DSR Network.
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