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By Shane Croucher
Senior Editor
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Twenty years ago this week, President George W. Bush walked into the East Room the day after his party’s midterm defeat—a "thumping," as he put it, three years into Iraq and five for Afghanistan—and announced that Donald Rumsfeld was leaving the Pentagon.
President Donald Trump just received an almighty thumping of his own, mostly because of his own Middle Eastern adventurism in Iran, which blew back as a painful energy price pinch on already hard-pressed Americans.
Since Tuesday night, the president has reportedly been asking advisers whether his embattled Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth should stay.
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Yet when Trump was asked about replacing Hegseth, who has led the military strategy in the still-unresolved Iran war, he demurred: "No, I think he’s doing a very good job."
It looks like stubbornness, perhaps even loyalty. But Vice President JD Vance has blamed the defeat squarely on Iran. Hegseth is, by Trump’s own admission, the first adviser to "speak up" and urge that war. "Let’s do it," the president recalled him saying in March.
The midterms certainly gave Trump strong cause to drop Hegseth and try to deflect some of the blame for Iran onto his warrior-in-chief. But Hegseth is a unique character to have at the Pentagon. And he perhaps remains more helpful to Trump than a liability.
Trump is, after all, a president with no election left to win, facing a Congress newly empowered to say no. Does he have much use for a more-conventional defense secretary who can make peace on Capitol Hill? Or a gung-ho maverick who reliably says yes?
By that narrow, unsettling measure, losing Congress may have made Hegseth more valuable to Trump, not less.
This logic has a recent precedent, though it’s not one that Bush followed. Days before the 2006 vote, Vice President Dick Cheney vowed to press ahead in Iraq whatever the result: "We’re not running for office." Bush changed defense secretaries anyway.
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Two decades on, the roles have flipped. Now it is the vice president—who may yet face voters again if his 2028 ambitions weren’t also a victim of Iran—counting the war’s political cost, and the president, who cannot, insisting he still would have done it again anyway.
Washington’s new congressional arithmetic points the same way. Democrats will control the committees, the subpoenas, and largely the purse, too. Trump says he will work with them, but veto what he opposes.
What stays Trump’s is a presidential power Congress has found among the hardest to restrain: command of the military. Even while touting a possible settlement with Tehran, Trump said on Monday that U.S. forces could hit Iran’s Pickaxe Mountain "in one hour."
For that kind of presidency, where Trump is willing to use American power aggressively and unilaterally, Hegseth’s record reads differently.
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Hegseth was part of the core group in the White House that worked for months on Venezuela before January’s brazen and stunning capture of Nicolás Maduro, though the raid belonged chiefly to Delta Force and the CIA.
More revealing is how Hegseth later defined his department’s purpose: making good on the president’s word, so the world learns that "when President Trump speaks, he means business." Hegseth is a true believer in the chain of command. He follows orders.
Indeed, Hegseth said of the Venezuela raid that "no other country could coordinate that, no other president would have been willing to empower those warriors that way." And, perhaps, no other defense secretary would have consented.
If Trump has more grand plans like the Maduro operation—and he has unfinished business in communist Cuba at the very least—then he’ll need people around him who are willing to say yes to the audacious.
That instinct of Hegseth’s explains his durability at the Pentagon. His standing with Trump rests on loyalty and carrying out the president’s wishes rather than interrogating them. Meanwhile, Hegseth has purged Pentagon dissenters and tightened his grip.
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But there is no escaping the realities. A war in Iran that Trump initially expected to last four or five weeks is in its ninth month, with 23 U.S. service members dead and more than 850 injured. The U.S. is draining its munitions stockpiles ever lower.
There are reports of officials doubting that Hegseth had been fully candid with Trump about the campaign’s limits. A defense secretary’s most-important duty is to tell a president the limits of force. One who can’t say no is how presidents end up in forever wars.
The Pentagon also needs Congress. Republican Senator Thom Tillis warned on election night that Hegseth’s strained relations with lawmakers were already undermining a $1.5 trillion defense push. He faces "a reckoning," Tillis told CBS News.
There are plenty of Democrats—and at least one Republican in the outgoing Trump-critical Congressman Thomas Massie—who are readying themselves to impeach Hegseth for what he has done at the Pentagon.
Does Trump really want a defense secretary in place whose time is consumed fighting an impeachment attempt?
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A cleaner exit exists, either Hegseth falling on his sword in the way of the defeated warrior, or pushed onto it if he’s unwilling. A successor could still be confirmed before the new Congress in January.
That’s the Bush route. In 2006, a lame-duck Senate confirmed Robert Gates within a month of the election.
Plus, Hegseth has options to stay in politics. A run for 2028 is a non-starter. But Trump posited that Hegseth would be "very popular" as Tennessee’s senator, where a vacancy is about to open up as incumbent Marsha Blackburn vacates it to become governor.
Whether Hegseth is good for the Pentagon and whether he is useful to Trump are two different questions. In January, Democrats gain the power to tell Trump no. But that may be the best reason Trump has to keep the man least likely to.
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