Hegseth did not impress; that's fine with GOP

By Michelle Goldberg / The New York Times

A telling moment in the supremely depressing Senate confirmation hearing Tuesdat for Pete Hegseth, the Fox News personality who is Donald Trump’s pick for defense secretary, came right at the beginning, when former Sen. Norm Coleman introduced him.

“Four years ago, President Biden’s nominee, Lloyd Austin, a good and honorable man, received 97 votes on the floor of the Senate,” said Coleman, R-Minn., “and we went through the debacle of the Afghanistan withdrawal, Putin invaded Ukraine, the Houthis endangered our shipping lanes” and America was insufficiently supportive of Israel. The implication seemed to be that, since good and honorable had failed, it was time to try something else.

Hegseth is something else. As has been widely reported, in 2020 he paid off a woman who filed a police report accusing him of sexual assault. (He insists they had consensual sex.) As Jane Mayer reported in The New Yorker, Hegseth “was forced to step down by both of the two nonprofit advocacy groups that he ran — Veterans for Freedom and Concerned Veterans for America — in the face of serious allegations of financial mismanagement, sexual impropriety and personal misconduct.” His own mother wrote, in an email obtained by The New York Times, that he “belittles, lies, cheats, sleeps around and uses women for his own power and ego.” (She has since disavowed that message.)

But this is Trump’s America; abusing and degrading women is obviously not disqualifying for high office. As Democratic Senate aides told New York magazine’s Rebecca Traister, success in the hearings “would mean not leaning in on the rape allegations and instead creating space to oppose him on grounds that Republicans can also oppose him on.” Much of the hearing Tuesday seemed to involve a search for those grounds, but it’s not clear they exist.

https://www.heraldnet.com/opinion/goldberg-hegseth-did-not-impress-thats-fine-with-gop/