Tag: pentagon
Pete Hegseth

Hegseth Promotes Pentagon Religious Service Preaching God 'Anointed' Trump

U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, an Evangelical Christian whose religious tattoos drew scrutiny during his confirmation hearings, led a Christian prayer service in the Pentagon auditorium during official working hours on Wednesday. The event featured Secretary Hegseth's personal pastor from Tennessee, Brooks Potteiger, and included remarks describing President Donald Trump as “sovereignly appointed," according toThe New York Times.

"This morning at 9:00 AM the Office of the Secretary of Defense sent out what appears to be a building wide email to the entire Pentagon inviting everyone to a 'Christian prayer service and worship' in the Pentagon auditorium," wrote Fred Wellman, who writes "On Democracy" at Substack. Wellman is a graduate of West Point and the Harvard Kennedy School, an Army veteran of 22 years who served four combat tours, and a political consultant. "Not the chapel. The auditorium."

"This is a clear and direct violation by a Cabinet member of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment and is a direct violation of military norms, traditions, and regulations by the senior official of the entire military," Wellman alleged.

"The defense secretary said that attendance at the prayer service was voluntary," the Times added, "but encouraged the uniformed military personnel and civilian employees there to tell their co-workers about it."

Politico Pentagon and national security reporter Paul McLeary noted that there was even an official government email address on the invitation, "to RSVP to this 30 minute event in the middle of a workday."

The Atlantic's Tom Nichols, a retired U.S. Naval War College professor and expert on national security, added: "The RSVP is a nice touch, so that they know who's on board."

He also weighed in more broadly:

"Not sure of the constitutionality here - not a lawyer! - but years ago, one of the War Colleges used to do this with 'voluntary' Bible study opportunities that had the same kind of roster-taking, and that went away pronto after complaints and an investigation," Nichols wrote.

Last week, the Freedom From Religion Foundation published a report stating that Pastor Potteiger is "known for promoting Christian nationalist views," and claimed that Wednesday's event "is expected to be a monthly prayer gathering. According to Potteiger, the event will include Christian preaching, proselytizing and the recitation of the Lord’s Prayer — all within one of the most powerful institutions of the U.S. government."

“This is a blatant violation of the First Amendment and its proscription of religion in government,” FFRF Co-President Annie Laurie Gaylor said in a statement. “Assuming the pastor’s boast is true, these prayer meetings would not only exclude and marginalize the significant number of nonreligious and non-Christian service members, they will send the impermissible message that Christianity is the Pentagon’s preferred faith.”

"Turning the Pentagon into a church service during duty hours isn’t just inappropriate — it’s unconstitutional," FFRF also said. "We’ve sent a letter demanding an end to this blatant breach of the First Amendment."

In January, before he was confirmed, The Guardian reported that in "a series of newly unearthed podcasts, Pete Hegseth, Donald Trump’s pick for defense secretary, appears to endorse the theocratic and authoritarian doctrine of 'sphere sovereignty', a worldview derived from the extremist beliefs of Christian reconstructionism (CR) and espoused by churches aligned with far-right Idaho pastor Douglas Wilson."

Others are also blasting the decision to hold a Christian prayer service inside the Pentagon.

"Hegseth continues to propagate christian white nationalism, while undermining the separation of church and state and the norms of civil-military relations," wrote retired U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman, the former Director of European Affairs for the U.S. National Security Council, whose whistleblower efforts led to the first impeachment of Donald Trump.

"This is what Christian nationalism looks like: the government using its power to push religion from the top down, said Max Flugrath, Communications Director for Fair Fight Action.

In February, author Brian Kaylor, a Baptist minister with a Ph.D. in political communication, posted a video from a Pentagon town hall where Secretary Hegseth began his remarks by declaring, “All glory to God.”

Watch the video below or at this link.

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

Pete Hegseth

Amid Pentagon Chaos, Fox Hosts Stepping Away From Hegseth

Fox News’ biggest stars have stopped defending Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth amid the weeklong firestorm over their former colleague’s dysfunctional management of the Pentagon and his potentially illegal handling of classified information.

Three months after Vice President JD Vance broke a 50-50 Senate tie to install the historically underqualified Hegseth at the Pentagon, journalists routinely describe a department in “chaos.” Five top Hegseth aides have left the department since last Friday amid reports of “vicious rivalries,” and a “leadership vacuum.” Reporters further revealed that Hegseth had shared details about U.S. strikes in Yemen in a second unsecured Signal chat, potentially endangering U.S. service members, and had the app installed on his Pentagon computer.

Hegseth responded to his growing list of scandals with a combative Tuesday appearance on Fox & Friends, whose hosts defended his conduct.

But other Fox hosts have been silent, even after rallying to support Hegseth when his nomination came under fire and again following the first revelation of his use of Signal to share attack plans.

Fox’s evening lineup of The Ingraham Angle, Jesse Watters Primetime, Hannity, and Gutfeld! have ignored Hegseth’s struggles this week (a passing remark from guest Jimmy Failla to host Laura Ingraham was the only mention of the story on any of those shows). The Five, the Fox panel show which features Jesse Watters, Greg Gutfeld, Jeanine Pirro, and Dana Perino, also has not covered the subject.

Even Will Cain, who spent years sharing the couch with Hegseth as co-hosts of Fox & Friends’ weekend edition, hasn’t mentioned his former colleague’s name on his afternoon show this week. (He did not comment on Fox correspondent Kevin Corke’s report about the Signal story during Monday’s program.)

As Fox’s stars take a pass, full-throated defenses of Hegseth’s leadership are coming from the likes of MAGA stalwarts like Charlie Kirk, Benny Johnson, and Laura Loomer, while their corporate cousins at The Wall Street Journal editorial board savage his handling of the Pentagon.

Two explanations seem plausible for why Fox’s biggest stars have gone silent as their former colleague comes under fire:

  • They’ve decided that the best way to help Hegseth is to keep pretending the Signal story is over, hide other damning reports about his leadership from their viewers, and hope the firestorm dies out.
  • They think Hegseth’s performance is so bad and the stakes of his failure at the Defense Department are so high that they are unwilling to keep sticking their necks out for him.

Either way, this disaster was the predictable result of President Donald Trump putting a former Fox weekend host with little relevant experience in charge of the Pentagon. The secretary of defense oversees a massive budget and bureaucracy and has the authority under certain circumstances to launch nuclear weapons and end human civilization. The risks of handing the position over to someone because of their takes on TV are almost incalculably high.

Hegseth is currently struggling to manage the Pentagon when its biggest problem is a costly, ineffective, and apparently unending bombing campaign in Yemen. How will he respond if India and Pakistan start trading fire?

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.

Pete Hegseth

Why The Hegseth Debacle Was Inevitable

President Donald Trump’s second administration hasn’t yet hit the 100-day mark, but Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is already being routinely described as “embattled.” On Friday, Hegseth fired three of the top aides he had brought with him to the Pentagon amid an investigation into unauthorized leaks. Sunday brought two new body blows: News that Hegseth had shared details about U.S. strikes in Yemen in a second unsecured Signal chat — this one including his wife, brother, and personal lawyer — and a scathing op-ed from a former top Pentagon spokesperson who accused Hegseth of creating “total chaos” at the department.

It’s unnerving to see the management of the world’s most powerful military described as “a run of chaos that is unmatched in the recent history of the Defense Department,” or to read reports about how the internal dysfunction is leading some officials “to wonder how the Pentagon would function in a national security crisis.” Trump, however, is standing by Hegseth — apparently the only reporting that can get high-level figures removed in this administration is that of conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer.

Hegseth’s disastrous run at the Pentagon is entirely predictable, the natural result of elevating a co-host of Fox & Friends’ weekend edition to sixth in the line of succession because the president liked his Fox News hits.

Hegseth lacked anything resembling the traditional qualifications to lead the Defense Department. Other recent picks have leaned on their experience at the top levels of the military, the Pentagon bureaucracy, or congressional oversight of the department, but Hegseth had none of these — he led a platoon in the Army National Guard and oversaw small right-wing veterans organizations before joining Fox as a contributor in 2014. His elevation might nonetheless be explicable if he had unique personal virtues or strong outside-the-box ideas for how to manage the Pentagon, but he’s been dogged by reports of public drunkenness, sexual assault, and financial mismanagement, while his vision for the military seems to begin and end with the notion that it had become excessively “woke.”

What Hegseth had in spades was the one attribute Trump seems to value above all others — years of expressing sycophantic public support for the president on Fox. For Trump, a Fox obsessive who stocked both of his administrations with familiar faces from the network’s green rooms, that was enough.

Trump reportedly considered Hegseth to lead the Department of Veterans Affairs in his first term but ultimately retained him as an outside adviser — one whose counsel he took in offering clemency to several accused and convicted war criminals the Fox host boosted. But for his second time in the Oval Office, Trump tapped Hegseth to run the DOD.

Asking a Fox & Friends weekend host to oversee a massive bureaucracy with millions of military and civilian employees and a budget in the hundreds of billions is obviously stupid, and Hegseth’s nomination appeared to be in jeopardy amid a series of damning reports. But Trump’s MAGA media supporters decided to lay down a marker, threatening Republican senators with primary challenges if they did not support Hegseth’s confirmation, and he ultimately squeaked through as Vice President JD Vance voted to break the Senate’s 50-50 tie.

Hegseth’s actions in office quickly vindicated his critics and forced his defenders to scramble on his behalf. March’s revelation that Hegseth had shared detailed information about imminent U.S. military strikes over a commercial messaging app led to days of strained explanations from his former Fox colleagues and others in the MAGA media.

The response has been somewhat different following Sunday’s revelation of the second such set of messages. Some on Fox have offered defenses for Hegseth, while a Media Matters review found the network’s popular panel show The Five and evening hosts Laura Ingraham, Jesse Watters, and Sean Hannity have ignored the story on their programs. Other MAGA media figures have blamed the report on the “deep state,” with some suggesting that Hegseth has been targeted as part of a struggle within the Trump administration over Iran policy.

The defense secretary, meanwhile, has responded to the string of damning reports by leaning into what got him the job in the first place: He has publicly lashed out at his critics and lavished praise on the president.

“They've come after me from day one, just like they've come after President Trump,” Hegseth said in a Tuesday appearance on Fox & Friends. “I've gotten a fraction of what President Trump got in that first term. What he has endured is superhuman.”

Hegseth isn’t the only right-wing media star turned top Trump appointee to struggle in the administration’s early days, and we should expect more such stories in the days to come. The president has prioritized hiring people who are adept at throwing red meat to the MAGA base. While that may help them weather scandals that would doom a member of a normal political movement, it is not a skill that translates to overseeing complicated bureaucracies.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.

Trump's Incredibly Inept Attempt To Destroy Our Government Is Losing In Court

Trump's Incredibly Inept Attempt To Destroy Our Government Is Losing In Court

If you’re anything like I am, you have probably spent a considerable amount of time over the past two months trying to figure out what these dull fuckers think they’re doing. I won’t take your time providing a full list of what they’ve done since Trump sat down in the Oval Office on inauguration night and started signing executive orders, but let us at least review the last week’s events.

Last weekend, Trump’s Department of Homeland Security set forth to deport about 200 alleged members of a Venezuelan gang. They have managed to get themselves hung up on violating a judge’s order to stop the deportation. It has been revealed that some of those deported were not gang members. They have refused to provide a list of the deportees. Lawyers for the Department of Justice have refused to answer the judge’s questions on grounds of “national security” and plan to invoke something called the “state secret privilege” in denying information about the deportation flights and handling of deportees, which were covered nearly door-to-door by Fox News.

A federal judge ruled that the closure of the United States Agency for International Development and firing of thousands of federal workers employed there was “likely unconstitutional” and ordered the government to reinstate them and give them access to their USAID email accounts and access to official information that will enable them to do their jobs.

Another federal judge ordered the Social Security Administration not to allow Elon Musk and his team of rat-fuckers to access the private information of millions of Social Security recipients, including their SS numbers, drivers license numbers, ages, and addresses.

Yet another federal judge stopped Trump’s ban of transgender troops at least in part because government orders are not made by “tweets,” and the government does not have any information about how many transgender individuals serve in the U.S. military, so the government does not know who would be affected by the ban. The Pentagon tried to change the definition of the ban from “transgender” to “people with symptoms of gender dysphoria.” The judge was not buying the attempted change in the ban, telling the Pentagon lawyer, “The policy’s impact is the same. This is still a ban on transgender service members.”

White House adviser and known immigration paranoid Stephen Miller, who is descended from a family of Belarussian Jewish immigrants, denounced the court decisions that have failed to go Trump’s way as “the insane edicts of radical rogue judges,” and multiple articles of impeachment have been filed against judges who have ruled against Trump by radical, rogue House Republicans, who drew a rebuke from Chief Justice John Roberts.

And then, over the last 24 hours, we have been treated to what appears to be one of the great Department of Defense clusterfucks of the last 50 years. Elon Musk was apparently scheduled to get an ultra-top secret briefing at the Pentagon today that would have taken place in the equally ultra-top secret ”tank,” about US plans to defend the island of Taiwan in the event of an attack by the Chinese military.

My old friend and West Point history professor Terrence Goggin wrote on his Substack today an excellent analysis of what actually happened. Goggin thinks an order came down from the White House to give Musk the top secret briefing and the Pentagon was sufficiently disturbed by the idea of sharing such top secret information with a civilian who had nowhere near the clearance to hear it, that news of the briefing was deliberately leaked to the New York Times, which promptly published it on the front page. Once the unusual, to put it mildly, information about Musk’s special briefing was made public, it was cancelled, and the White House and Musk scrambled to come up with another excuse for his Pentagon visit.

Goggin’s informed speculation is that what we witnessed was the Pentagon's way of disobeying a presidential order without appearing to, and of course without ruffling Trump’s hair-sprayed feathers. He may be right, or the whole thing may have been a gigantic mistake made by a bunch of nonmilitary trained amateurs, but either way, exactly nobody in the whole mess -- not Trump, not his aides, not Hegseth, and not his aides, and certainly not Elon Musk -- evidenced even a smidgen of competence or knowledge of and respect for national security.

So, what's really going on here? Trump and Miller and Musk and the various Republican maniacs who surround them are clearly trying to disassemble what they have called the deep state. Hell, they advertised as much when they told a thousand lies during the campaign that they had nothing to do with Project 2025, which they have followed almost to the letter since Inauguration Day.

But given all that planning, don't you think that they'd be able to execute their plan a little better? They've had not months but years to have lawyers scrutinize every move they planned to make sure it would pass at least minimal legal muster, not to mention that their plans would fall within the outer bounds of constitutionality. Not only has it that not happened, they haven't even come close. Which is why we've been hearing the chorus of complaints about judges, some of whom have been Democratic appointees, but just as many have come from Republican presidents.

Sure, the rank incompetence stands out, as does the quicksand of lawlessness the whole mess floats on. You can tell that they're even getting nervous about their bought and paid for Supreme Court when you begin hearing not just mutterings but squawks of outrage about Justice Amy Coney Barrett and Roberts, both of whom have been reliable votes for Republicans until now.

Is it just that they're going too far too fast? The whole enterprise is beginning to show cracks of excess and madness that are getting wider seemingly by the day. They couldn’t even get rid of a bunch of heavily tattooed drug gang members without fucking the whole thing up, and their attempt to let Elon in on state secrets that he could turn over to his Chinese friends and use to stuff a few extra 100 billion in his pockets was so ham-handed it looked like a Three Stooges skit.

You would think that long-time aspirants to fascism would be more practiced with their tiny fists wrapped tightly around the levers of power, wouldn't you? They’re as dangerous as a cornered wolverine, but smart wolverines don’t allow themselves to get backed into corners of courthouses by people wearing long black robes.

Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist, and screenwriter. He has covered Watergate, the Stonewall riots, and wars in Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels. He writes every day at luciantruscott.substack.com and you can follow him on Bluesky @lktiv.bsky.social and on Facebook at Lucian K. Truscott IV. Please consider subscribing to his Substack.

Reprinted with permission from Lucian Truscott Newsletter

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