There needs to be a rule that says “chaos” should be accompanied by a definition of the word anytime it’s used in a news article intended to get people upset about Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. My guess is that if such a policy were in place, all articles about him and the alleged “chaos” happening at the department would never make it to print.
The New York Times and Politico on Sunday published separate pieces attempting to lather up more Hegseth controversy, a coincidence, no doubt, and not a coordinated campaign to take down one of President Trump’s most consequential cabinet heads. (Both articles even linked to one another!)
The Times story microwaved the “Signalgate” controversy from a month ago, this time with new anonymous allegations about a separate Signal phone app group chat created by Hegseth, which included his wife, brother, and personal lawyer, among a group of Defense leaders, and in which he supposedly shared information related to the U.S. military. Politico’s piece was an op-ed by John Ullyot, who said he resigned from his role as Pentagon spokesman last week. Ullyot wrote that under Hegseth, the Defense Department is in “total chaos.”
Since the Times article is mostly a throwback to a desperate non-scandal weeks old, is based on unnamed sources, and comes after the last president literally allowed his wife to lead a cabinet meeting — no outrage there! — let’s focus on the more pressing of the two: the op-ed by Ullyot. In the piece, the former Pentagon official indicated a likelihood Hegseth will soon be fired from the job because there’s currently a “a full-blown meltdown” at the department, one that is “becoming a real problem for the administration.” He called March “The Month from Hell,” spoke of a “near collapse inside the Pentagon’s top ranks,” and claimed Hegseth is engaged in “a strange and baffling purge” of the department.
Sounds urgent! But while Ullyot has an apparently bottomless sack of alarming phrases to use, the details of his panic and anguish are either old news or deeply boring. “First there was Signalgate,” he wrote, “where the secretary shared detailed operational plans, including timelines and specifics, about an impending military strike on the Houthis in Yemen over an unclassified Signal chat group that happened to include a member of the news media.” Why this continues to be a supposed scandal for Hegseth and not National Security Advisor Tim Waltz, who added the “member of the news media” (by mistake) is obvious — the media prefer Waltz over Hegseth, who is a greater threat to the established Washington order, i.e. lucrative war weapons manufacturing. At most, Hegseth is guilty of failing to notice an eavesdropper while sharing vague military attack plans in the chat, but he is by no stretch the centerpiece of the story. That’s Waltz.
Ullyot, who served as a top Pentagon public affairs official, also faulted Hegseth for his initial response to the story. “Once the Signalgate story broke, Hegseth followed horrible crisis-communications advice from his new public affairs team,” he wrote, “who somehow convinced him to try to debunk the reporting through a vague, Clinton-esque non-denial denial that ‘nobody was texting war plans.'” Ullyot called it “a violation of PR rule number one — get the bad news out right away.”
That assertion exposes Ullyot as hopelessly naive and with an understanding of the Washington press that he seems to have picked up from watching reruns of The West Wing. There is no such thing as “PR rule number one” to “get the bad news out right away.” That’s a stupid cliche propagated by life coach-style “communication experts” convincing suckers that there’s a tried and true formula to make a media feeding frenzy go away with minimal damage. There isn’t. And to accept the premise that there’s “bad news” solely because the Washington media have deemed it so is to prove that Ullyot was never equipped to have a job speaking with the press.
He then checked off the wife-in-sensitive-meetings story (not important), an alleged high-level briefing on China that was supposed to be attended by Elon Musk (it never took place and the details are disputed by the White House), and the “purges” of some Pentagon personnel for various reasons (government job losses). He also referenced the Times report about the alleged separate Signal chat.
I’m fully open to the possibility that Hegseth isn’t a good administrator or is in over his head as defense secretary. It’s not like he’d be the first person in Trump’s orbit to be replaced for one reason or another. But if that’s going to be the case, the supporting evidence should be a little more than a few government workers losing their jobs hysterically whining about “chaos” that affects no one but them and their personal anxieties.
They want Hegseth fired. Maybe they’ll eventually find a good reason for it.