Know Them by Their Enemies

“The vice president votes in the affirmative and the nomination is confirmed.” With that Pete Hegseth became the secretary of defense, tasked to keep the republic safe from internal enemies and external invasions. 

But it wasn’t an easy path. Senators Murkowski, Collins, and McConnell joined the Democrats against Hegseth, so the Bronze Star–winner and Ivy grad barely scraped through on J.D. Vance’s tie-breaker vote. By contrast, Lloyd Austin was confirmed as secretary of defense with a 93–2 vote, James Mattis with 98–1, and Leon Panetta unanimously. 

This clearly shows something. The president deserves to get his appointees, but what about the massive propaganda machine for derailing anyone who might threaten the uniparty system? 

If there’s any meaning to a democracy, then protest votes should mean, at a minimum, an actual change to the system. The keen-sighted among us were already aware of a few hit pieces, the latest one being against some Trump DoD picks, naming, among others, Dan Caldwell, Michael DiMino, Tulsi Gabbard, and Elbridge Colby. Most of them have been frankly idiotic, and it is a small tragedy that one has to spend time on them. One “scoop” against Tulsi Gabbard, for example, warns that there’s a clique of Republican senators who are wary of her, without actually naming even a single one of these senators. The second one is a lengthy record of very mainstream quotes by Michael DiMino, a CIA analyst who was tapped to be Trump’s DoD Middle East expert. DiMino dared to mention that the conflict in Israel isn’t a core American security concern, and that we should figure out how to get out of the Middle East. The third, a major hit piece on Dan Caldwell, mentions as an authority David Wurmser, Dick Cheney’s Middle East advisor who wrote in 1996 that America should overthrow Saddam to “enhance Israel’s security,” concern-trolling Trump’s nominee Pete Hegseth. 

“The Koch crowd,” David Wurmser, a pro-Israel foreign policy expert who served as a Middle East advisor to former Vice President Dick Cheney, said in an email to JI, is “either isolationist, anti-American or both and seeks to use American fatigue to cynically weaken our allies and diminish American power.”

The fourth entry in this record of stellar journalism cites Senator Mitch McConnell arguing that Trump should stay away from those who might make “Obama and Biden’s advisors look tough by comparison.” Incredible stuff. 

There is a lot to write about here. My colleague Jude Russo has already rebutted most of the stupid accusations against DiMino. Like him, Caldwell, and Colby (all three of whom I know personally, even writing a joint paper on Middle East force posture with Caldwell, who was briefly my colleague at the Center for Renewing America), I don’t much care about the Middle East. I have no family ties to that region, and I think we should leave it to find its own equilibrium; we should avoid further engagement there. My concern here is less about the Middle East as such and more about what the fight portends for this administration:  To what extent do the losers of a quarter century of ideological battle get to act as gatekeepers for the winners? The Cato Institute’s director of research, Justin Logan, told me to remember the Book of Proverbs: “Those who trouble their household inherit the wind, and fools become slaves to the wise of heart.”

The push for a “muscular” approach in the Middle East has been an unmitigated disaster, resulting in debt, deaths, and disillusion. It’s a miracle of unipolarity and American structural advantage that America survived the ordeal—although the fact that unipolarity now lies in ruins is a testament of how pyrrhic that survival was. History is littered with examples of great powers collapsing due to insolvency and overstretch. The architects of the bad, old model should all, at a minimum, spend the rest of their wretched miserable lives like penitent sages in the Himalayas who take on the voluntary “vow of silence.” 

Yet here we are. “The neocons have never had their popular support for their program, which effectively uses the United States like a rental car,” Tucker Carlson told this correspondent, “but the results of the last election demonstrate clearly that most Americans sincerely despise them, and for good reason. Trump should proceed accordingly, and treat the neocons as he would their allies Liz Cheney and Nancy Pelosi—as the malicious buffoons they are.”

And Trump should. Hegseth’s confirmation battle was only a start, but it was an eye-opening one. More are coming, including over Gabbard, Russ Vought, Kash Patel, and presumably anyone who has any ideas for changing the unaccountable swarm. Trump must know that it won’t be easy. Conviction, as Thomas Carlyle once noted, is basically worthless unless it is converted into conduct. The whole purpose of this election was to demonstrate that the world’s preeminent power is now led by an elected man, personally fallible, but with a grand, futuristic vision, one achievable by strength and will. America can be a place where things actually happen, instead of a backwater where unaccountable technocratic midwit goblins are in charge and elections don’t mean much. 

Carlyle’s Great Man theory’s basic lesson is that it sometimes just takes one man to show how hollow the system is. He might not be understood or appreciated in his time, but what he leads to will change the order permanently, and therein is his greatness—not great as in good definitionally, but great as in grand compared to other mediocrities. Trump is that man for our time; he should get the tribunes he needs to carry out his vision.

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