Someone wondered aloud on a social media platform the other day, “Where is Pete Hegseth these days?”

What a good question. Let’s consider it. Figuring out where Pete Hegseth is keeping himself will tell us something important about the Trump regime and how it operates — or, better put, who actually operates it in the Trump White House’s name.

PATRICK LAWRENCE: Serial Buffoon at the Pentagon

Trump elevated outsiders without necessary experience to his cabinet to avoid the deep state subversion that was rampant during his first term. The “blob” responded by making some of them irrelevant. 

During the invasion of Venezuela, a momentous military endeavor by any reckoning, it was hard to find the defense secretary. He didn’t show as President Trump declared his intention to take over Greenland, by military force if necessary.

Now the Pentagon has a “massive armada”— the Trumpster’s phrase — deployed in the Arabian Sea, the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf in preparation for a potential attack on Iran that could lead to a war of world-historical magnitude.

No Hegseth.

Finally, finally, the secretary of war, as Hegseth fashions himself, came up for air. The former Fox News presenter launched a blistering attack on Harvard University on Feb. 6, declaring the Pentagon will, as of the academic year commencing next autumn, sever all ties with the pride of American scholarship. 

“The War Department will discontinue graduate-level, professional military education, fellowships and certificate programs at the school,” the department stated in some kind of in-house, news-like report, the nature of which I will take up shortly.

Here is Hegseth explaining himself in a note posted on X wherein he included a video of his no-more–Harvard statement:

File this under: LONG OVERDUE

The @DeptWar is formally ending ALL Professional Military Education, fellowships, and certificate programs with Harvard University. Harvard is woke; The War Department is not.

Wow. Does this guy have cojones or what?

Here is a little more from that statement the Pentagon dressed up as a news piece:

“’For too long, this department has sent our best and brightest officers to Harvard, hoping the university would better understand and appreciate our warrior class,’ he [Hegseth] said. ‘Instead, too many of our officers came back looking too much like Harvard — heads full of globalist and radical ideologies that do not improve our fighting ranks….’

‘Campus research programs have partnered with the Chinese Communist Party,’ he said. ‘And university leadership encouraged a campus environment that celebrated Hamas, allowed attacks on Jews, and still promotes discrimination based on race in violation of Supreme Court decisions….’” 

Going forward, Hegseth said, the War Department will focus on developing warriors, increasing lethality and reestablishing deterrence. 

“That no longer includes spending billions of dollars on expensive universities that actively undercut our mission and undercut our country,” he said.

The War Department, our warrior class, developing warriors and increasing lethality: Hegseth is plainly a man on a mission. What is the mission?

To put the point plainly, Hegseth is performing the role of defense secretary while leaving others — uniformed officers and civilian operatives acting in behalf of the national-security state — to run the Defense Department. 

Significant as this is in itself, Hegseth’s histrionics at the Pentagon afford an important insight into where power resides in the Trump regime altogether. 

My read: It does not reside in either the Trumpster or the incompetents with whom he has populated his cabinet.

My mind went back to Hegseth’s first months as defense secretary when I considered the “Where is Pete Hegseth?” question. 

Sworn in on Jan. 25 of last year, he was in office but two months before he formed a “chat” group in the Signal platform — “Defense Team Huddle,” he called it — wherein he shared highly sensitive Pentagon plans to strike Houthi military units in Yemen.

When news of this broke last April, it turned out that the Huddle included Hegseth’s wife, Jennifer, Philip Hegseth, his younger brother, and a former Fox News colleague. 

In a second chat around the same time, a journalist was — supposedly by accident, but who knows? — also let into the conversation.

The defense secretary’s wife and brother? A television producer with whom Hegseth had worked? What in hell was the point of these grossly irresponsible “chats”? 

I can think of only one explanation: Newly arrived in high office after years as a T.V. presenter, the utterly green Hegseth was sharing a few Gee–Whiz moments with intimates: Look, Jen and Phil. Look at all this classified material they give me.

By all appearances, it is important to add, Hegseth had absolutely nothing to do with planning or executing the March attacks on Houthis. He was a thrilled spectator allowed to listen in as those planning this operation huddled.

A few months after the Signal breach of security, Hegseth started issuing orders for staff reductions in the military: A fifth of the Army’s four-star generals were to be eliminated, along with an additional 10 officers of lower rank in all four services. 

By this time Hegseth had already fired Lisa Franchetti, an admiral and the Navy’s top-ranked officer, James Slife, the No. 2 in the Air Force, and a lot of Pentagon lawyers.

Again, what was this all about? The Pentagon has long been wastefully top-heavy with uniformed bureaucrats, no question. But there is no way to count the canning of eight or so generals — of the 40–odd who wear four stars — as any kind of major restructuring of the U.S. military command, although it seemed intended to look like one.

In any case, apart from the dismissals of the two above-named officers, I can find no record of these reductions having been substantially executed.

Next we come to Hegseth’s late–September order that roughly 800 top officers from all four branches gather from all over the world at the Quantico Marine Corps Base in Virginia to hear what the secretary had to say. 

And he did have a lot to say, as the record of this “call to the commandant” — the Pentagon’s term for the occasion — make plain. 

Recall this with me.

Hegseth denounced everything to do with “wokery,” a constant pebble in his shoe, and “fat generals and admirals.” He then went on to address standards of hygiene (no beards, back to military haircuts) and higher fitness standards — all in the cause of “the warrior ethos.”

It was at Quantico that Hegseth announced that he was changing — on his office door, anyway — the Department of Defense to “the Department of War.” 

It is a more accurate name for what the Pentagon makes its business, but it can neither stand as or signify any fundamental change in the department’s direction or in the conduct of its policies.

Fresh from the self-evidently pointless gathering at Quantico, Hegseth announced his now-infamous new rules governing journalists covering the Pentagon. These require defense correspondents to pledge not to publish or even request information that is not authorized for release, this on pain of losing their credentials. 

Their movements inside the Pentagon are also restricted: They can go down this corridor but not that one; they must be escorted to and from their scheduled appointments.

Corporate media having rejected these conditions, not quite but nearly, en masse, Hegseth has reduced the Pentagon, as earlier noted, to issuing p.r. releases written to suggest that news reporters still cover the Defense Department routinely. Pitiful.

Put all this against what the late-phase imperium got up to during Hegseth’s first year in office and draw your own conclusions. 

My view may by now be evident: What Hegseth has intended as displays of decisively exercised power, look — unmistakably to me, anyway — like upside-down displays of impotence and irrelevance.

Cabinet secretary as performer, or as janitor, or as housekeeper, or as custodian of images appealing to the Trump regime’s constituents, or simply as serial buffoon: This is my take on Hegseth.

And it is my take on the Trump regime altogether, with some qualifiers that bear mention.

Consider Tulsi Gabbard in this connection. She took office as director of national intelligence with high expectations that she would begin the work of bringing the Deep State finally under control. 

She has done nothing nothing nothing of the kind — nor has John Ratcliffe, who served earlier as Trump’s D.N.I. and is now director of the C.I.A.

I have heard nothing of note from or about Ratcliffe. Gabbard’s latest newsworthy act was to oversee the removal of ballot boxes in Fulton County, Georgia, a district that helped swing the 2020 vote to Joe Biden.

The case of Marco Rubio is a touch complicated. He appears to be running the operations against Venezuela and now Cuba, but the subversion of both have been longtime objectives of the national-security state. He is more or less sidelined otherwise. 

Trump has two New York landlords running the Ukraine talks, and in West Asia he, Trump, takes orders from Bibi Netanyahu: The Israeli prime minister this week made his sixth visit to the White House since Trump began his second term a year ago.

The obvious exceptions in this are figures such as Kristi Noem and Linda McMahon, secretaries of Homeland Security and Education. They have displayed considerable autonomy, but this is in keeping with a longstanding tradition: The Deep State tends to be indifferent to what one or another administration gets up to on the domestic side, however big the messes that may result — just as Noem and McMahon have been free to make theirs. 

It is foreign and national-security policies that matter to the late imperium’s managers.

The Deep State and all its tentacles — at the Pentagon, in the intelligence apparatus, in the corporate media and so on — mounted what must be the most extensive subversion operations in postwar U.S. history during Trump’s first four years in office. It was incessant subterfuge one day to the next.

Trump learned a bitter lesson. This is why he has surrounded himself this time with outsiders, most of whom are distinguished not by qualifications but simply by what they are not.

A year into his second term, it emerges that the Trumpster was too smart by half as he reassumed office, as the Hegseth story demonstrates more plainly than any other. 

Deep State operatives sank Trump’s ship the first time around. 

He now has a regime stocked with foolish incompetents who don’t know how to sail it — so leaving the national-security state to run the show once again.

Patrick Lawrence, a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for the International Herald Tribune, is a columnist, essayist, lecturer and author, most recently of Journalists and Their Shadows, available from Clarity Press or via Amazon.  Other books include Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century. His Twitter account, @thefloutist, has been restored after years of being permanently censored. 

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