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Pete Hegseth, who [checks Truth Social] is still the Secretary of Defense, woke up to some brutal headlines today.
In the wake of the revelation that he had gone around Pentagon protocols and had Signal installed on an office computer and the news that his chief of staff was resigning to become a part-time government employee, the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal dropped stories that suggest the end may be near for Hegseth.
Here’s the Journal headline: “Polygraph Threats, Leaks and Infighting: The Chaos Inside Hegseth’s Pentagon.”
The piece details how Hegseth, enraged by the leak that he was planning to give Elon Musk a briefing on war plans related to China, threatened several top Pentagon officials with a polygraph test to prove they had not done the leaking.
“I’ll hook you up to a f**king polygraph,” Hegseth allegedly told then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Chris Grady.
Not a great look!
The Post story paints a similar — and unflattering — portrait of Hegseth. This paragraph, in particular, is rough:
Defense officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity to be candid about the situation, have described Hegseth, 44, as paranoid and increasingly isolated. He is surrounded by only a small team of people whom he trusts and has become keenly focused on daily news coverage dissecting his missteps and decision-making.
Having been reporting on and observing politics for the last two-plus decades, I can tell you that this is how it looks near the end. An embattled political figure, driven to the point of distraction by all of the negative media coverage about him, bunkers in with only the people who tell him what he wants to hear.
That story very rarely ends well — for the person in Hegseth’s shoes that is.
Now, this is a whole new political world. Hegseth has been utterly defiant — publicly — in the face of the spate of negative stories. And Donald Trump likes fighters — people who don’t just wilt when the media horde comes for them.
So, maybe Hegseth survives! But man does it look bad for him at the moment.
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