The following is a lightly edited transcript of the April 22 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.
Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
President Trump’s defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, is imploding again. New reporting shows he shared more highly sensitive data on a private Signal chat. One report says that the White House has formally started the search for a replacement for Hegseth—and a former chief Pentagon official tore into Hegseth’s tenure, calling it a “full-blown meltdown.” That latter development prompted a furious response from Donald Trump Jr., who declared that former chief spokesperson “exiled” from the Trump movement. Other MAGA figures raged at Hegseth’s opponents as well. Yet such bullying and threats aren’t working. The first Republican, Congressman Don Bacon, has basically called for Hegseth to step down. We think MAGA isn’t thinking this one through. It’s plainly obvious that Hegseth is profoundly incompetent and utterly unfit for this job. So go ahead, defend him all you want—you will only be defending something much worse later. We’re gaming all of this out with Juliette Kayyem, a former national security official in the Obama administration who’s been commenting shrewdly on this whole mess all along. Juliette, thanks for coming back on.
Juliette Kayyem: Thanks for having me.
Sargent: OK. The New York Times reports that Pete Hegseth shared details of coming strikes in Yemen in a private Signal chat that included his brother, personal lawyer, and wife. Trump propagandists have shrugged this off, claiming no classified data was shared—but in this case, the data included combat flight schedules and other similar data to what The Atlantic reported on recently. Juliette, can you take us through this new report and why it’s so devastating to Hegseth?
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.
The first round was crazy because they had added Jeff Goldberg, the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, where I’m a contributing writer. This most recent drop clearly is coming in the context of a complete meltdown at the Pentagon. It follows the firing of senior leaders around Secretary Hegseth—including chief spokesperson, deputy chief of staff, a whole bunch of senior people, MAGA people—who look like they lost in what’s an internal battle within the secretary’s office. Basically you just have an office that is on fire and disassociated from reality, and someone leaked or disclosed to The New York Times that there was a second set of Signal conversations.
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?
Kayyem: No, because Hegseth was unqualified to run the Pentagon. The Republican senators knew he was unqualified. His Fox News colleagues were leaking information before he was confirmed about how unqualified he was in terms of temperament, in terms of substance abuse, in terms of relationships with women. And nobody listened. I feel very strongly he needs to be out.
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?
Kayyem: Well, we don’t know. There is some early reporting that they are looking for replacement. The White House may now have a sense of what these shoes to drop are. And let’s not forget one added piece: The Pentagon essentially hates him. In other words, the Joint Chiefs and others are not huge fans. The Trump White House can only purge so much. At some stage, you’re going to run out of capacity, and I think Hegseth is not long for this world.
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?
Kayyem: Yes, that’s exactly right. And you see this a little bit, or just starting right now, with the Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, who was at least a governor before she was appointed so had management experience but has been doing weird sexualized videos in front of prisoners in El Salvador and doesn’t seem to have a great management of the department’s equities. News is being reported today that her purse with $3,000 in cash was stolen at a D.C. restaurant—which is just not even funny because she is the secretary of Homeland Security.
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.
Can I just say one piece of this? We talk about process and qualifications with Hegseth. It’s also worth noting that his one military program—increased efforts against the Houthis—is a failure. So it’s not like he can say, Well, I’m a tough guy and I’m bombing the Houthis and everything. We’ve lost six major drones worth 30 million each. The passageway in the Suez is still dangerous. That effort that was discussed on Signal has not been successful.
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?
Kayyem: That’s exactly right. And let’s not forget Panama or the homeland, right? Pete Hegseth’s only major deployment so far has been the border. And last week, we lost three service members in a traffic fatality, but those things happen at deployments. And I don’t even know if Hegseth has mentioned it, but that’s what happens when you deploy lots of people for missions that they ought not to be in. So this warrior ethos is very tied to the anti–DEI, [the] effeminate, trans, ethnic purge that they have started in a variety of ways. Of the major leaders that Hegseth has gotten rid of at the Pentagon, 50 percent of them are women. Anyone who knows the Pentagon knows that we probably have about still 5 percent or 6 percent of senior leadership being women, so it’s disproportionately hitting women. This is hitting specifically in terms of the makeup of who’s in the room.
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?
Sargent: Yeah. Juliette, if I read you correctly, you’re saying that this supposedly hyper masculine super tough warrior ethos of Pete Hegseth is really all about winking and nodding at the world’s other bullies and strongmen and letting them do whatever the hell they want in their spheres of influence—and the warrior ethos and the MAGA strength comes in the form of MAGA imperialism over the weak in our sphere of influence.
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.
If you think this doesn’t matter, I would like to share with you the data on other countries and their citizens’ willingness to come to the U.S. It’s plummeting fast. This is just one data point that people like me follow. Tourism industry is 10 percent of America’s GDP. This is going to hurt. This is going to hurt. If you’re outside this country and you were thinking, Oh, that would be a fun place to visit, last year, you’re not thinking that anymore.
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.”
Kayyem: That’s right. Bacon has been incredibly realistic and also a voice for Republicans who might not want to be part of the insanity—but we need a senator to budge, and we need more than one. A number of them expressed reservations in the language of wimpiness but went along and voted for him. And we’ll see if there’s any movement. McConnell did not vote for him, but, for example, Susan Collins did.
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.
Kayyem: Yes. The only way this works without everyone looking like a hypocrite is if Hegseth resigns on his own. I don’t know what conversations are going on in that regard. He’s been pretty stubborn. Hegseth is surely aware of what other shoes are going to drop and whether he wants to get ahead of them. We know Hegseth’s history with alcoholism, with sexual harassment. We know his messy family life. We know he has no control of the Pentagon. And I raise those things just to say I have no idea what the shoe is, but I have no doubt that there’s lots of them.
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.
Kayyem: Thank you so much. Maybe one more time at his resignation.
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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