The Situation: The Cult of Unqualified Authenticity

The Situation on Friday reflected on the sentencing of Donald Trump in New York.

Today began the dawn of the second Trump administration.

No, you didn’t miss an inauguration. But the Senate Armed Services Committee held the first hearing for a Trump nominee for a major cabinet position. And that hearing made clear that the Trump era has begun anew.

Fox News host Pete Hegseth appeared before the committee to answer questions about his nomination to run the Department of Defense. And with his appearance, a not-so-subtle change took place in the terms of reference of America’s national security discussion.

The words “Russia” and “Ukraine” barely came up today. The words “China” and “Taiwan” made only marginally more conspicuous an appearance. The defense of Europe? One would hardly know such a place as Europe even existed.

By contrast, the words “lethality,” “woke,” and “DEI” came up repeatedly. The nominee sparred with members of the committee over the difference between “equality” and “equity.” And he made clear that he aspires to lead the strongest most effective fighting force in the world—with all the macho bluster such a thing might imply—but gave only the most limited sense of where and when he thinks such a military might actually have a role to play. 

Hegseth is not a stupid man. He is well-spoken, articulate, knowledgeable about a certain range of issues. And I don’t mean at all to disparage his background as a soldier and officer. There is no doubt he is qualified for some sort of defense policy position. Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) at one point suggested that he would support Hegseth as a spokesperson for the Pentagon, stating, “I don’t dispute your communication skills.”

But Hegseth also conceded up front that his background is far from a conventional one for a secretary of defense. He has never held a policy role, for example. He has never run anything larger than a company of 200 soldiers. He has never been elected to anything.

So the first question his nomination raises is whether the normal criteria our system has traditionally used to evaluate what an institution like the Pentagon needs in its management has been not just off, but wildly so.

That was the position Hegseth took in his opening statement and that some of the Republican senators took up. “It is true that I don’t have a similar biography to Defense Secretaries of the last 30 years,” the nominee said. “But, as President Trump also told me, we’ve repeatedly placed people atop the Pentagon with supposedly ‘the right credentials’ . . . and where has it gotten us? He believes, and I humbly agree, that it’s time to give someone with dust on his boots the helm.”

This is actually a radical position—and very Trumpy. The closest analogy to it I can drum up is that it’s like an extreme version of saying that because the leadership of a giant worldwide corporation like Toyota or Samsung or Amazon has under-performed, the board should appoint someone to run the whole organization who had once managed a small corner of a single factory.

If, that is, that person also had an alleged history of showing up drunk to work, sexually assaulting women and mistreating female colleagues, and didn’t believe women should be allowed to work on the factory floor at all.

I’ll come to these latter—ahem—qualifications momentarily, but let’s pause a moment over the larger proposition, because it seems to me an essential one to understanding this current political moment.

You can see in it so many of the central tenets of Trump’s approach to governance: the contempt for expertise and traditional qualifications; the insistence that the only real qualification is authenticity—and that authenticity is somehow wrapped up in performative masculinity; the belief that sounding tough and being tough are the same thing; and the conviction that complexity necessarily reduces to weakness.

It’s all right there in the nomination of a proudly unqualified individual who frames his lack of qualifications as qualification of a different, more authentic, variety that reflects what he calls a “warrior ethos” America has somehow lost in its infatuation with equity. And this idea has the apparently silent assent of all of the Republican members of the committee and a few, at least, enthusiastic takers.

Sen. Markwayne Mullins (R-Okla.), for example, said at today’s hearing that, “there's a lot of talk going about talking about qualifications.” But, Sen. Mullins said, “let me read you what the qualifications of the Secretary of Defense is because I Googled [and] in general, the US Secretary of Defense position is filled by a civilian. That's it.” In Sen. Mullins’s view,

You got a man who has literally put his butt on the line. He served 20 years in the service, multiple deployments. He has heard the bullets crack over the top of his head. has been willing to go into combat, been well seen. Friends die for this country. And he's willing to still put himself through this. His wife is willing to still stand beside him, knowing he wasn't perfect, knowing that all this was going to be brought up. He's still willing to serve the country. What other qualifications does he need?

This is the philosophical core of the Trump era. And it is interesting to watch it migrating from Trump himself down to his cabinet. In the first term, after all, Trump’s defense secretaries and cabinet officers were, generally speaking, well qualified in the traditional sense of qualifications. The cult of unqualified authenticity was then mostly confined to Trump himself. But in the Hegseth hearing, you can see it trickling downward.

And with it trickles its accoutrements. Because like Trump, Hegseth completed the package by buffaloing his way through some substantial allegations of misconduct. Merely unqualified is apparently insufficiently manly to constitute true authenticity—in fact, Hegseth, who is not an ignorant man, may know a little too much defense policy to fully embody the cult of authentic unqualification—he rounds out the picture with disdainful and implausible dismissals of allegations of sexual assault, financial mismanagement, and alcoholism.

In practical terms, this is the only part of the hearing that really mattered. In exchanges with Sens. Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii), Tim Kaine (D-Va.) and Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.), Hegseth denied as “anonymous smears” any suggestion that he had shown up drunk for work or engaged in sexual misconduct. And the senators—Kaine, in particular—seemed keen to get him clearly on the record on the subject. At one point, Senator Mark Kelly asked him whether his answers would be the same if he were under oath, a point on which Hegseth appeared to hedge:

Kelley: “If you had to answer these questions about sexual assault [allegations] against you and your drinking and other personal conduct, would it have been different if you were under oath?”

Hegseth: “All I’m pointing out is the false claims against me.”

Kelly: “Ok, I take it you do not want to answer that question.”

Unless some evidence emerges that Hegseth’s denials are false, he will—I suspect—certainly be confirmed. 

The Senate will confirm him, because Republican senators have either actively embraced the cult of unqualified authenticity or because they at least consider Trump’s reelection as validating it for his nominees. It will confirm him because Republican senators don’t mind Hegseth’s about-faces on matters like war crimes and women in combat roles. And it will confirm him because they don’t care if Hegseth might be a sexual abuser, a sexual harasser, or an alcoholic—even if that “might be” means he almost certainly. As long as there is semi-plausible deniability, denial will happen.

All bets are off, however, if Democrats produce the goods and show that not merely are the allegations true but that Hegseth was less than candid in his testimony.

The senators clearly don’t mind voting for a man who is proudly unqualified to run one of the world’s largest and most far-flung bureaucracies, and they don’t even seem to mind voting for such a man knowing that he has probably lied to them about his sexual activities, his drinking, and his treatment of female colleagues.

But they do need to preserve a fig leaf—however scanty—to preserve the fiction of their independence. The Hegseth nomination comes down to whether anyone pulls that fig leaf away before anyone has to vote.

The Situation continues tomorrow.