Transcript: MAGA Dope Pete Hegseth Implodes at Hearing, Exposing Trump
Hegseth (audio voiceover): All of these orders and what they’re sent there to do are public. They’re—
Slotkin (audio voiceover): OK, So say it. So say it. Yes or no.
Hegseth (audio voiceover): I’d like to.
Slotkin (audio voiceover): Please. Yes or no.
Hegseth (audio voiceover): As I’ve said time and time again through interruption, they’re there to protect law enforcement, ICE officers—
Slotkin: (audio voiceover): Do they have the ability to arrest—
Hegseth (audio voiceover): —who are trying to do their job, deporting illegals who were allowed in by the previous administration.
Slotkin (audio voiceover): OK. So they cannot arrest and detain citizens of the United States—the uniform military. Is that right?
Hegseth (audio voiceover): As we’ve stated, if necessary, in their own self-defense, they could temporarily detain and hand over to ICE. But there’s no arresting going on.
Sargent: So there, Hegseth ultimately answers the question at the very end, and it’s not a great answer. But that aside, here again, he plainly felt constrained from saying anything remotely reassuring to the public and Democrats. I think every one of those guys goes into these hearings terrified of Trump’s opinion. As you say, it’s the audience of one, but they really worry on a very profound level that he will see them as weak in some sense. And that is the one thing, the cardinal sin from MAGA. What did you think of that particular answer, Moira?
Donegan: Yeah, it was really striking for its almost peevish evasiveness. I think you’re right, Greg, that all of these Republican men are very, very conscious of what Donald Trump is thinking of them. I think that might be particularly top of mind for Pete Hegseth, who, of course, has been very embattled at the Defense Department—[which] seems to be hemorrhaging talent—and whom a lot of people seem to be circling above like vultures looking for that job. There’s a presumption that he is not long for the defense secretary spot. So he’s looking particularly to shore up the things about him that Donald Trump likes, which are the way he looks and the way he can project a quasi-sadistic masculine indifference to other kinds of authorities. He is a guy who looks like a G.I. Joe action figure and who wants to make the military into a site of great fearsomeness, of great power, of great ability to intimidate Donald Trump’s enemies, particularly domestically. And that’s what I think he set out to do in this hearing.
Sargent: So you had a good piece about all this using Trump’s sad military parade as a way into it. You argued that Trump is always thinking about how to come across as a dictator. You took care to point out that, in many ways, this is the real thing. Authoritarian rule is upon us, but spreading fear and terror through imagery is absolutely central to the Trump-MAGA project. Can you talk about that?
Donegan: Yeah. I think Donald Trump is a person with a great talent for the media. He, of course, came up in his second career as a reality television star, and he does have a peculiar genius—I do think you have to give him credit for this—for creating imagery that conveys the message that he wants to send about himself. And this has been a great characteristic of his presidency and his domination of American politics over the past decade: this fusion of the political and the aesthetic. He is very, very in command of images, or at least he tries to be. And one of the reasons I believe that he sent the military and the National Guard into Los Angeles to combat these, by all accounts, pretty mundane and not at all threatening protests against ICE activity is because he wanted images of protesters being intimidated by the military, by these armed men who were there on his behalf.
