Off to Trump 2.0

In the eight days since the election of 2024, Donald Trump (DJT hereinafter) has flexed his flabby brain and looks to be installing what will be both a kakistocracy and a plutocracy to replace our existing government. My phone pings almost hourly with a parade of incompetent clowns who DJT proposes to put in a cabinet of total Trump loyalists, sycophants to the core. How to write about this is dismayingly hard but I decided that it needed the same approach as eating en elephant (yeah, I know, horrible example). That is, one bite at a time.

Because I am a retired Navy O-6 (who spent 4 years in the Army Reserve before going on active duty in the Navy), my first bite is the idea of Pete Hegseth as nominee for the Secretary of Defense. He has impressive education credentials, a BA from Princeton and an MPP from Harvard. He joined the Minnesota National Guard as an infantry officer and is a combat veteran of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. So far, in my book, nothing extraordinary. It is his right-wing nationalism that I find concerning

Hegseth worked for several organizations, including Concerned Veterans for America (funded by the Koch brothers) that worked to privatize healthcare for veterans. The privatization trope has risen many times to imply that private corporations can do things better and more inexpensively than the government. Before his work with that organization, he worked at Vets for Freedom, which advocated for more boots on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan (he left this in 2012).

After an unsuccessful attempt to gain a Senate seat from Minnesota in 2012, he found his present home with (wait for it) Fox News. He found his footing here in an environment that is generally fact-free and passes off opinion as news. His opinions are legion and scary. Pardon war criminals from Iraq and Afghanistan (he proselytized for this on-air while privately lobbying DJT to do exactly this, according to The Daily Beast and CNN. Bomb Iranian cultural sites because weapons are hidden there. Criticize students because they are more concerned about climate change than radical Islam. Insist that the Omicron Covid variant was nothing but a political ploy by Democrats (hint from an experienced infectious disease doc – viruses do not give a shit about politics). Return your degree to Harvard because universities are too “woke” (woke is the universal epithet from MAGA for anything they despise).

Hegseth is aligned strongly with Christian nationalism and has expressed support for the current Israeli regime. He dislikes the concept of diversity, inclusion, and equity and has has said “The dumbest phrase on planet Earth is in the military is, ‘our diversity is our strength.” Perhaps to this ID physician, the weirdest thing said by this Ivy-educated nitwit was in 2019 when he said, that he never washes his hands and can’t remember washing them once in the past 10 years: “Germs are not a real thing. I can’t see them.” So much for medical progress.

We’ll leave aside his personal life; you can Google it easily. What does Pete Hegseth stand for? From what I can see, Christian nationalism and patriarchy are high on his list. Dangerous thinking is also high on his list. He could do much to disestablish all that the American military has held dear for the last 250 years and politicize it so that it becomes nothing more that Trump’s Praetorian Guard. After that comment about handwashing, let’s see if that notorious germaphobe, the bloated DJT, shakes hands with this character.