Two weeks ago, Sen. Dan Sullivan said Pete Hegseth was a “strong” nominee for Secretary of Defense. “I’ve been focused on the policies that I’m quite confident he will focus on and implement,” Sullivan explained. Last week, he described that as getting “back to the core mission of the Department of Defense: That’s lethality, that’s winning wars, that’s peace through strength.”
That’s an especially sensible focus for someone who served 30 years in the U.S. Marine Corps and Reserves. But the reason President-elect Donald Trump nominated Hegseth is that the two men share a conspiracy laden concern about “the enemy within” and the threat they think it poses to the country.
At the moment, it appears Hegseth’s nomination will be withdrawn. His scandalous history of alleged sexual assault and drunkenness has Trump looking for a possible replacement.
But even a morally sound individual expressing the views published in his 2020 book titled “American Crusade” makes him absolutely unfit to be a civilian leader of America’s military.
“Our future existence as sons and daughters of freedom requires the satisfaction of a single paramount objective: the categorical defeat of the Left,” Hegseth wrote on page 2. “America cannot, and will not, survive otherwise.”
In his paranoid perception, “leftists…represent the soul of the modern Democratic Party…literally hate the foundational ideals of America” and “are not reformable.”
He goes on to argue that they’ve “marked” real Americans “for annihilation.” And while emphatically stating he’s not “advocating any sort of violence,” he reminded readers that their cause “is why the Second Amendment exists.” And advised them “If you don’t own a gun, buy one. Train to use it. And then buy more.”
That’s the kind of Defense Secretary Trump wished he had in 2020 when protestors filled Lafayette Square and, according to then-Defense Secretary Mark Esper, asked “Can’t you just shoot them? Just shoot them in the legs or something?”
Even if Hegseth’s nomination is withdrawn, Sullivan doesn’t deserve a pass for making believe Trump made a good choice to fill one of the most important cabinet positions in the administration. Especially because he just nominated another loyal conspiracist to head the FBI.
“We will go and find the conspirators — not just in government, but in the media,” Kash Patel said a year ago on Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast. And he meant “the people in the media who lied about American citizens to help Joe Biden rig presidential elections.”
In his 2023 book titled “Government Gangsters,” Patel claimed the so-called deep state is run by unelected officials who “disregard objectivity, weaponize the law, spread disinformation, spurn fairness, or even violate their oaths of office for political and personal gain, all at the expense of equal justice and American national security.”
Alyssa Farah, Stephanie Grisham and Cassidy Hutchinson are among those he listed as “Members of the Executive Branch Deep State.” All three women worked for Republican congressmen before taking positions in the Trump White House. Like others on the list, their offense was providing credible and damaging testimony against Trump to the House Select Committee that investigated the Jan. 6 insurrection.
Trump’s current nominee for attorney general is also prepared to serve his vengeful agenda. In 2020, Pam Bondi defended his unfounded claims of voter fraud in Pennsylvania. After he was indicted for his schemes to overturn that election, she told Sean Hannity that the prosecutors and investigators at the Department of Justice “will be investigated” when “Republicans take back the White House.”
Trump telegraphed all of this.
“Either the deep state destroys America, or we destroy the deep state,” he said at his first campaign rally in March 2023.
Last November, he pledged to “root out the communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.” Two months ago, he used almost identical language before saying “Those people are more dangerous — the enemy from within — than Russia and China and other people.”
Like the rest of us, Sullivan was duly warned. But with one insincere exception during the past eight years, he’s pretended there’s nothing unusual about Trump’s erratic and often divisive behavior. And that’s not a coping strategy he learned while serving in the military.
• Rich Moniak is a Juneau resident and retired civil engineer with more than 25 years of experience working in the public sector. Columns, My Turns and Letters to the Editor represent the view of the author, not the view of the Juneau Empire. Have something to say? Here’s how to submit a My Turn or letter.
