Summary
Senate Majority Leader John Thune has told Donald Trump that Pete Hegseth likely has enough votes to be confirmed as Defense Secretary, despite controversy over past sexual misconduct allegations, a financial settlement, and concerns about his leadership and alcohol use.
Hegseth’s confirmation hearing is set for Jan. 14, with Senate Republicans aiming to expedite key national security confirmations before Trump’s Jan. 20 inauguration.
Other high-profile hearings, including for Marco Rubio (State), Pam Bondi (Attorney General), and Tulsi Gabbard (DNI), are tentatively scheduled for the same week amidst ongoing bipartisan negotiations.
It’s transparent how “consent” is being manufactured here.
Prime the public early enough, and regardless of the level of outrage the news cycles will die down before confirmation. At that point the people who are outraged will predominantly be resigned, the bar will be lower, and the senators have cover to confirm.
It’s the typical narcissist’s boundary-pushing playbook. And it’s still working fine for Trump going on eight decades.
I wish that we only had people in our government that took it seriously and didn’t actively hate our population.
Well, he promised he would stop drinking during work hours, so it’s probably fine.
This guy sucks, but IMHO, more energy should be spent on tanking people like Patel and RFK. They’re an even bigger threat to American citizens.
They would need someone exactly like Hegseth when they go through with their plan to purge generals that would uphold the constitution and promote trump loyalists to more positions of power in the military. I’m sure there are some on Lemmy that assumes all military members are the same and pro-trump. That isn’t true. There were generals going around and talking to their counterparts to make sure the military would not come if Trump called during 1/6.
This will make it so next time they will have more backing.
Far-right Christo-Fascist White Supremacist Pete Hegseth vs Brain-Worm Conspiracy Nut RFK?
I think RFK isn’t smart enough to do enough real damage on a global scale. He just has some stupid ideas that will help insurance companies and the medical system make more money when people get sick from preventable diseases. More company profits.
I would be more inclined to agree if we hadn’t just come out of a global pandemic with bird flu doing its best to be round two.
If it comes to that, Americans may have to use VPNs to read foreign news sources to get anything close to reliable on the state of things, too. Most of the “liberal media” here is already kowtowing to these guys and they haven’t even assumed office yet. Imagine something like bird flu under these clowns and with a totally compliant media acting like North Korea’s state media…
Just look at how much death donvict caused during Covid. RFK could quite possibly kill far, far more. And this time, those impacted may very well be children.
He doesn’t even need to ban vaccines outright to cause a lot of damage. That kind of insane idiocy coming from the very top might put just enough people off vaccination as to cause a serious clusterfuck.
Add Tulsi Gabbard who is either the most clueless useful idiot out there or (more likely) clearly working for Russia.
I think they’re all bad enough to fundamentally and permanently damage democracy in the US, so it’s good not to “prioritize” in this case. Hegseth can enable Trump to use our actual armed forces to enforce whatever whim he has, which is about as scary as you can get. They all need to be prevented from taking their roles.
I wonder how many Democrats will be joining these shit Republicans in putting this completely unqualified and sexual abuser into a leadership position?
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Fuck that. Fight even if you’re going to loose because it literally costs them nothing to fight it.
Hot take: the Venn Diagram of people saying fighting is a waste of political capital and those saying people who didn’t vote for Harris consented to Trump’s agenda is a perfect circle.
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Was fighting the Brett Kavanaugh appointment a waste of political capital?
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If effort is the only cost, then yes. If political capital in the form of bipartisan goodwill is your concern, they should not have fought Kavanaugh or any appointment where the odds aren’t better than a coin toss.
Voting against this clown doesn’t burn any political capital for a Democrat.
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If they don’t fight then appointments like this get normalized.
If the Republicans have the votes to get this alcoholic, unqualified, sexual deviant into the position then fine, let them do it on their own.
It would be absolutely stupid for any Democrat to cast a single vote for those or any other unqualified Trump appointee AMD sets the tone for being capitulating jackasses that will continue to lose their base.
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It helps set the record for what your elected representatives are doing.
Unfortunately, nowadays most Democrats agree with Republican positions
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Such a major indictment of the Republican Senate majority and their complete subservience to the Orange Jesus in installing the least qualified and most unfit person ever to be nominated for the top Pentagon job.
Aren’t all those things just prereqs?
