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John M. Crisp, an op-ed columnist for Tribune News Service, lives in Texas.
Pete Hegseth’s qualifications to serve as the next secretary of defense are so scant that when Democratic senators called them into question during his confirmation hearing last week, a Republican senator rose to Hegseth’s defense by pointing out that the only real qualification is that the secretary be a civilian. Check.
But why is President Donald Trump so committed to having the minimally qualified Hegseth at the head of the Department of Defense?
Trump tends to like telegenic people that he’s seen on TV. Check. Trump appears to be attracted to the super-macho war-fighting ethos, though he never got around to serving in uniform himself. Check. Trump likes disruptors, men, such as himself, who are unfettered by the rules and conventions that constrain others. Like the Geneva Convention. Check.
In fact, during the hearing Hegseth was dismissive of the Geneva Convention, the set of rules and standards developed in the wake of World War II to restrain some of the brutality of modern warfare.
I’m not familiar with Hegseth’s specific views on torture, for example, but Trump has been clear about his: In 2016, before he became president the first time, Trump said, “Don’t tell me torture doesn’t work.” Of course, we’ll use waterboarding, he said, but it’s “not nearly tough enough.” He promised to do something “much worse.”
And, when it comes to torture, Pete Hegseth doesn’t look or sound like someone who will say no to Trump in response to scruples having to do with U.S. law or the Geneva Convention. Check.
In fact, neither does Pam Bondi. On paper, Bondi is reasonably qualified to be America’s attorney general, but Democrats are questioning whether her friendship with and loyalty to Trump will interfere with her willingness to say no to Trump if he proposes an illegal action.
During her confirmation hearing, Bondi resisted responding to what she called “hypotheticals.” But there’s nothing very hypothetical about Trump’s intentions toward, for example, Liz Cheney, who, he says, belongs in jail.
If Trump demands that Bondi investigate until she finds the pretext — a clearly illegal act — to put Cheney behind bars, will she have the principles, character and courage to say no?
It seems unlikely. In fact, Bondi appears to be so terrified of crossing Trump in any way that her hearing produced this remarkable moment: Bondi was asked what she thought about Trump’s notorious phone call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, during which Trump alleged (falsely) election irregularities and asked Raffensperger to “find” the precise number of votes (11,780) that Trump needed to shift Georgia into his column.
What phone call? Bondi pretended that she’d barely heard of such a thing. Or maybe she’d heard something about it, but, she suggested, the infamous 11,780 votes part of it was taken out of the context of the hour-long call, which she also seemed to know nothing about.
This sort of disingenuous equivocation doesn’t speak well for Bondi’s independence or her ability to resist, should Trump make a demand of her that is illegal, immoral or just plain dumb.
But what’s relevant here is not just that Trump lost the 2020 election; it’s that the price of admission for all positions in Trump’s second administration is the surrender of the independence to acknowledge publicly what everyone knows, probably even Trump. This sort of subservience does not bode well for our republic.
Still, it’s wrong to focus blame solely on Hegseth and Bondi. All of Trump’s nominees have had to accept Trump’s shameful behavior both before and after Jan. 6, 2021, and pretend it never happened. So have the nation’s richest men — Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg — and many others of the rich and powerful class. So has the Republican leadership in the U.S. House and Senate.
For that matter, so has roughly half of our nation, which on Nov. 5, 2024, chose to give Trump another four years in office.
It’s odd. As a nation, we’re just like Hegseth and Bondi: We can’t say no to Trump, either.
