President Trump announced the man he will nominate to be his Secretary of Defense—combat veteran Pete Hegseth.
This from therightscoop.com.
Here’s the announcement:
We the People would not have likely predicted this nomination, but many believe Hegseth is the right man to lead the Department of Defense and will not have any trouble getting through the Senate nomination process.
Hegseth’s nomination suggests a coming battle over social and personnel issues within the armed forces, historically one of the nation’s most diverse institutions. He has been among Trump’s most high-profile supporters to champion the cause of rolling back initiatives designed to promote diversity.
Throughout his campaign, Trump made a distinction between fighting generals and “woke” generals, vowing to fire the latter. Asked in a podcast interview with the “Shawn Ryan Show” published last week what he would do, Hegseth set a tone that looks ominous for senior Pentagon officials.
Pete Hegseth: How I will shake up the Pentagon…
Hegseth said:
First of all, you’ve got to fire the chairman of the Joint Chiefs [Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr.]..
Any general, any admiral, whatever [who was involved in diversity, equity and inclusion programs or woke s—] has got to go.
The breakneck speed of the Hegseth nomination also underscores the value Trump places on TV personalities who have used their platform to promote his agenda.
A person familiar with the conversations said:
On Thursday, the president-elect called Hegseth and asked whether he was interested in becoming the next defense secretary.
Hegseth immediately said “yes,” which then triggered Trump’s team to begin the formal vetting process.
On Monday, Hegseth was asked to fly to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida for a final round of meetings with Trump, during which the president-elect offered, and Hegseth accepted, the job. “It came together pretty quickly,” the person said.
In his statement announcing the nomination, Trump cited a book that Hegseth wrote: War on Warriors: Behind the Betrayal of the Men Who Keep Us Free—and its treatment of what the president-elect said was:
[A] left-wing betrayal of our warriors, and how we must return our military to meritocracy, lethality, accountability, and excellence.
The Princeton- and Harvard-educated Hegseth, who served as an Army infantryman in Iraq and Afghanistan as a member of the Minnesota National Guard, also played a role in episodes that roiled the Pentagon and involved Trump’s defiance of military norms during his first term in office.
Hegseth was a key player, for instance, in convincing the then-president to intervene in the war crimes cases of three U.S. service members in 2019.
That effort led to pardons for two Army officers, Mathew L. Golsteyn and Clint Lorance, in separate murder cases, and a redemption of sorts for Navy SEAL Edward Gallagher, who had seen his rank reduced after a military jury acquitted him of murder charges but found him guilty of posing for a photograph with a corpse.
Hegseth lobbied the president directly from his perch at Fox News, featuring the cases frequently and casting them as the malicious prosecution of war heroes.
Trump called Hegseth numerous times about the issue, officials familiar with the discussion said at the time. While some Trump administration officials celebrated the decisions, others worried they would set a bad precedent and damage U.S. relationships abroad.
Hegseth’s emergence as Trump’s pick raises the stakes for high-profile officers such as Brown, the former pilot who Dementia Joe selected as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Although it was Trump who tapped Brown to become Air Force chief of staff in 2020, positioning him to become the first African American officer to serve in that role, he gained notoriety for a video in which he spoke in emotional terms that year about the impact of the killing of George Floyd at the hands of Minnesota police and about his own experiences with race in the military.
In the podcast interview with Ryan, Hegseth said that firing Brown and other officials seen as being involved in diversity initiatives would be a step toward countering what he described as “socially correct garbage” in the military.
