Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is weathering calls for his resignation thanks to the support of President Trump. But he may not be able to hold on for long.
Politico reports that some of Trump’s allies doubt whether Hegseth will be able to keep his job, with two anonymous sources telling the publication that he is still in hot water. One of them said that Hegseth may “implode on his own,” while the other said that Trump could get tired of the distractions from the former Fox News host’s tenure at the Department of Defense.
Three top Pentagon staffers were fired on Friday over leak concerns, one of them being Hegseth’s former chief of staff from his time at a veterans charity.
“Central Casting can become problematic if all they’re doing is generating questions of instability,” the second source said. “What’s so troubling about it is—it’s not like these were people that were forced upon Pete. They were his own guys he had to get rid of.”
According to Politico, Trump and Hegseth met privately on Sunday, where the president reportedly offered his support to the DOD chief, as he has done publicly. At the White House’s Easter Egg Roll Monday, Trump criticized Hegseth’s detractors.
“They just bring up stories. I guess it sounds like disgruntled employees. You know, he was put there to get rid of a lot of bad people, and that’s what he’s doing, so you don’t always have friends when you do that,” Trump told reporters.
But NPR also reported Monday that Trump has begun the search for a new secretary of defense, following this weekend’s report that Hegseth shared details about U.S. airstrikes in Yemen in a private Signal chat last month that included his wife and brother while also sharing the war plans in another group chat containing The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg.
If NPR’s report is true, it suggests that Trump is so frustrated that he doesn’t care if Hegseth’s firing validates his administration’s critics. It also suggests that Trump would be willing to deal with another confirmation battle in the Senate.
“Trump goes to bat for people until the moment he flips on them,” said one of Politico’s sources. “That’s always a possibility.”