Welcome to Margin of Error, a politics column from Tom Scocca, editor of the Indignity newsletter, examining the apocalyptic politics, coverage, and consequences of Campaign 2024.
Is Pete Hegseth in trouble? Midway through the week, the major newspapers were reporting that Donald Trump was considering replacing the Fox News personality with Ron DeSantis as his nominee for secretary of defense. When a leak like that comes out about someone, as a rule, it's over. But then Friday morning, Trump posted "Pete is a WINNER, and there is nothing that can be done to change that!!!" and Hegseth made it through the weekend with his nomination intact.
The Hegseth coverage had the rhythm of a scandal, with one leading outlet after another after another breaking news about the nominee's misconduct and incompetence. Hegseth, the individual stories said, had been accused of rape and had paid to confidentially settle with his accuser. His own mother had sent him an email describing him as "despicable and abusive" to one of his ex-wives and serially cruel to women. He had reportedly ruined the finances of the nonprofits he was supposed to be running while overseeing a lewd and abusive workplace. Former colleagues described him as an out-of-control drunk, to which he eventually responded by saying he would refrain from drinking as secretary of defense.
Even all that seemed a little inadequate or misfocused, though. The part of the story that appeared to be gathering the most corroboration was the drinking. Partly there were just more witnesses to be had, attesting to things like Hegseth openly sucking down warm stale prop beers on the Fox News set after shooting ended at 10 a.m. But also excessive drinking made for a comfortable, traditional sort of story; it was booze and womanizing that took down John Tower when George H.W. Bush tried to make him defense secretary in 1989. Objective, nonpartisan reporters surely weren't going out on a limb to believe the top of the Department of Defense was no place for someone struggling with alcohol—were they?
But the real problem with Pete Hegseth is that he's Pete Hegseth. Trump thought it was a good idea to hand the world's most powerful military—and the country's largest employer—over to a guy whose job was saying pugnacious stuff on TV. Hegseth has written a book about how the military is undone by "affirmative action promotions" and weakened from within by a "cultural Marxist revolution," in which he describes the country as a whole as under attack from "progressive storm troopers." He's an enthusiastic supporter of war criminals. He has extremist Crusader tattoos that led the National Guard to judge him too risky to trust with inauguration security duty. He's a sexist and a Christian nationalist. When he reportedly got drunk and started shouting "Kill all Muslims!" the drunkenness was not the most dangerous feature of the incident.
These are the features that made Donald Trump nominate Hegseth in the first place—not because Trump considers himself to be Richard the Lionhearted, but because Hegseth is exactly the kind of loser and fanatic that Trump wants to build his administration around. Existing military standards, or laws, have no use for someone as flagrantly unfit as Hegseth; his power is Trump's power and nothing more. His loyalty to the president would be existential.
How do you make the case against someone like that? Nobody understands how scandals are supposed to work anymore. A scandal is a social ritual, and American political society has ruptured. The idea that Pete Hegseth was faltering was based on a series of assumptions about reputation, public opinion, and their consequences: that Hegseth would be embarrassed by an escalating series of stories about his alleged misdeeds and failures; that Trump would be embarrassed to stand by Hegseth as those stories accumulated; that the Senate would be ashamed to vote to confirm Hegseth; that the American people wouldn't tolerate such a situation.
So far, the first two of those assumptions have been stretched beyond their presumed limits, the third appears to be on its way there, and the fourth seems moot. The only public the Trump movement cares about is the public wrapped up inside the movement's own messaging machine, who are so far being treated to defenses of Hegseth and attacks on his potential opposition. The situation can't be intolerable as long as no one agrees what the situation even is.
The watchdog only bites what the watchdog can get its teeth into. The press still knows how to destroy the president of Harvard; the president of Harvard still exists in the same established social order. Chris Rufo, the controversy-manufacturing entrepreneur, knows the words and gestures that would send the press after the president of Harvard. No one knows how to send the press after Chris Rufo.
At the same time the press was trying to see if Hegseth's drinking mattered, it was also spending more than half a week excoriating Joe Biden for pardoning his son Hunter Biden: "Hunter Biden pardon fuels Trump's 'weaponization' arguments"; "Hunter Biden pardon undermines Democrats' defense of justice system" (URL: "biden-pardon-hunter-selfish-lies"); "Biden's Pardon for His Son Dishonors the Office"; "'This Is the Land of Wolves Now.'" Three days after the pardon, the print New York Times was still devoting a two-page interior spread to pardon coverage: "Biden the Father vs. Biden the Institutionalist," "President's Broad Pardon for Hunter Biden Troubles Experts and Raises Debates," "After Biden's Son, Prison Inmates Hope for Pardon Next," and, jumping from page one, "Justice Dept. Confronts Tests From Two Fronts" and "Pardoning His Son Complicates Legacy That Biden Envisioned."
Joe Biden didn't care ("Biden not answering questions about pardoning his son Hunter"). But his party could still be scandalized into headlines like "Democrats Sharply Criticize Biden's Pardon of His Son." What counted was not the scale of the scandal—a middling and sentimental abuse of the pardon power next to Trump's own abuses of it, or the abuses by either George Bush—but its cognizability. It had the old familiar scandal-parts built into it: Joe Biden pledged he wouldn't do a thing, and then he did the thing he's said he wouldn't do. He broke his word! He used his official powers for personal reasons! How could you care about integrity and good government and defend such a thing?
It read, in the end, like one last desperate yanking of the old levers, to avoid the question of what happens to those levers—or the lever-pullers—in January. For a few days, the political media could act as if accountability were a real and stable thing, as if anybody with power needed to care what they thought about right and wrong.
By the weekend, Trump would be on Meet the Press, pledging to break the constitution and commit atrocities: ending birthright citizenship, deporting U.S. citizens, pardoning the people convicted of attacking the Capitol on January 6. All this was delivered in his usual spongy rhetoric, where he simultaneously says he'll do a thing and then disavows the consequences of the thing. The House January 6 committee members "should go to jail," he said, and special counsel Jack Smith is "very corrupt," but he wouldn't order his new attorney general nominee, Pam Bondi, to prosecute any of them. "I want her to do what she wants to do," Trump said. When he put it like that, how could there be anything to blame him for?
