The Real Protection Hegseth Has Is MAGA Loyalty — and Liberal Scorn

Why aren’t more Republican senators opposed to Pete Hegseth’s nomination as secretary of defense, particularly in light of new allegations, delivered in a sworn affidavit this week by his former sister-in-law, of excessive drinking and “abusive” behavior in his second marriage ?

The obvious answer is party loyalty. In 1989, President George H.W. Bush picked John Tower, a former Republican senator from Texas, to serve as secretary of defense. Like Hegseth, he was a military veteran who had been dogged by charges of womanizing and heavy drinking. Unlike Hegseth, he had top-level experience in defense matters, including the chairmanship of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

A history of heavy drinking should be disqualifying in nearly any leadership role, never mind one with responsibilities as vast and consequential as the Pentagon’s. Even so, only one Republican senator — Kansas’s Nancy Kassebaum — voted against Tower, who went down in defeat, 47 to 53. If Hegseth’s candidacy, which could come to a vote as early as Friday, is opposed by any Republican, it will most likely be from another independent-minded woman, Maine’s Susan Collins.

(Through his lawyer, Hegseth has denied his former sister-in-law’s claims, and denied as well that he has issues with alcohol. In a statement to NBC News, his ex-wife said, “There was no physical abuse in my marriage.”)

In the case of Hegseth, the power of party loyalty is compounded by three additional factors: fear of Trump, the Cult of MAGA and the boomerang effect of liberal scorn.

As to the first: At least Kassebaum didn’t have to fear a social-media fusillade from Bush, and Bush would have been too much of a gentleman to do more than fume in private over her vote. Today, any Republican senator who defies Trump risks not just public mockery and belittlement from the president, but threats of a primary challenge, too.

Then there’s the MAGA cult, whose bro culture Hegseth typifies: the big tattoos, womanizing and fervent Christian piety. When Hegseth questions the capacity of women to serve in combat, or when he is quoted as having once drunkenly chanted, “Kill all Muslims! Kill all Muslims!” (which Hegseth said last week was an anonymous false charge), it doesn’t dim his star in MAGA world. Instead, it signals that he’s reliable. That’s a bond that neither Trump nor most of the G.O.P. caucus will want to mess with.

But nothing will do more to persuade Republican senators to support Hegseth than the torrent of scorn now pouring over him from the organs of the perceived establishment. In December, The New Yorker’s Jane Meyer published a devastating exposé on Hegseth. In a different era (say, 10 years ago) the article would have destroyed his chances. Instead, it resuscitated a candidacy that, for a brief moment, looked dead on arrival in the Senate. Similar unflattering reporting by other news organizations only further abetted his comeback.

That doesn’t mean journalists shouldn’t do our jobs. It just means that, in this moral and intellectual climate, we shouldn’t expect it to make a whit of political difference.

Talk about cultural whiplash. The Biden administration — which was elected on the heels of gigantic racial justice protests — made consideration of diversity, equity and inclusion the law of the land. Now the Trump administration is not just rolling back those programs and getting rid of the people who ran them, it’s encouraging workers to rat out any colleagues who might have slipped through the cracks.

Following President Trump’s executive orders ending government diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility programs, the Office of Personnel Management sent out guidance on how the sudden stop will be carried out — including a template for the chilling message that agency heads are supposed to send to their employees.

“We are aware of efforts by some in government to disguise these programs by using coded or imprecise language. If you are aware of a change in any contract description or personnel position description since Nov. 5, 2025, to obscure the connection between the contract and D.E.I.A. or similar ideologies, please report all facts and circumstances to the [email protected] within 10 days,” reads the template.

The suggested notice to agency employees goes on to warn, “Failure to report this information within 10 days may result in adverse consequences.” On Wednesday, federal workers started receiving the message; for Department of Homeland Security employees, the template was tweaked to say failure to report “will result” in adverse consequences.

To be clear, there are reasonable people who oppose D.E.I. as wasteful and divisive, as Trump’s executive order describes. But the government’s move to encourage workers to inform on one another should give all of us the heebie-jeebies. It’s easy to imagine the bureaucratic knife fights going on in the federal offices right now, as people competing for power — or perhaps just survival as federal employees — seek to prove their loyalty and suck up to the new administration by starting whisper campaigns about who is a proponent of “similar ideologies.”

After railing for years about being the target of witch hunts, Trump appears to be setting the stage for what could be one of the most disturbing witch hunts since the McCarthy era. It reminds me of George Orwell’s 1949 novel “1984,” in which the government is always watching. Americans ought to know that nothing good comes from the government threatening those who don’t tell on their friends and co-workers. History is going to judge the cure for D.E.I. worse than the disease.

The line of destructive executive action on climate was entirely predictable on President Trump’s Day 1: withdrawal from the Paris agreement, a threat to clean-energy subsidies, a promise to ban offshore wind and radically accelerate the energy permitting process (though that last one contains, potentially, some upside). It’s not yet clear how all this will net out — executive actions are memos in search of policy, and the slow decline of emissions has proved pretty stubborn lately. But it isn’t likely to be salutary, and the symbolism is undeniably grim.

Grimmest, perhaps, was the withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement — which, though it is a rerun of what he did in 2017, takes place in a very different global environment.

Eight years ago, when Trump made a show of exiting Paris while “Summertime” played in the White House Rose Garden, it helped kick off a remarkable period of worldwide solidaristic backlash — the global climate equivalent of the liberal “resistance.” We owe much of the climate progress of the last decade to that resistance — to climate protesters, sympathetic prime ministers and presidents and legislators, entrepreneurs and banks and asset managers who understood the urgency of action clearly enough to see it as a financial opportunity, too.

It is early, but there are not obvious signs of anything like that on the horizon now — no large-scale protest movements adding adherents and gaining steam, few major global leaders treating the climate crisis in existential terms or pushing policy that would make decarbonization a core goal of economic development, and a rapidly dwindling number of corporate leaders even paying lip service to climate urgency.

Instead, though money continues to flow into green energy, the global mood seems, as it does domestically, exhausted, distracted and capitulant. Only four countries in the world are now not party to the Paris agreement: Iran, Libya, Yemen and the United States. This is ugly company, but it no longer feels so exceptional that the United States has abandoned the principle of climate cooperation; other countries have taken advantage of the voluntary, enforcement-free framework to simply drag their feet. The question is whether emissions trends will continue in the absence of the old cultural and political momentum.

Warming and decarbonization were receding from politics almost everywhere, even before the global rightward shift of 2024. According to some analysts, no single country in the world is decarbonizing in line with the more ambitious goals of the Paris agreement, and over the last few years, disappointed in the rate of progress, several of its most prominent architects have called on major reforms to the process that produced it.

The agreement was in many ways the culmination of a decades-long effort, beginning in 1992, to organize a cooperative, positive-sum approach to a maddening challenge of global governance — a throwback tribute to the liberal international order, if one often honored in the breach. Today that whole project appears in tatters — not just because of Trump, though his return to the most powerful office in the land confirms the trend. It is what Tim Sahay, a climate policy expert and an analyst of geopolitics, recently called the most important worldwide development of 2024: “the total collapse of global cooperation and multilateralism in favor of the law of the jungle and ‘might makes right.’”

“Total” is probably too strong, but the direction of change is inarguably dark, and not just for climate.

When Ronald Reagan was inaugurated on Jan. 20, 1981, no one knew it was the start of 12 years of Republican rule — that Democrats would prove so out of step with the country, so mistrusted by voters, so unable to fix their left-wing brand that they would fail to win a national election for a dozen years.

The nation hasn’t seen a 12-year drought like that since then. But as Donald Trump reached for some Reagan ideas on Monday — “the golden age of America” astride Reagan’s “era of national renewal,” their shared attacks on government, their inaugurations amid breakthroughs in hostage crises — I found myself thinking about whether the Democratic Party may be at the start of its own era, a wilderness era, when it comes to the presidency and perhaps even government.

This is not a prediction, and on Day 1 of Trump 2.0, I’m watching for Democrats who speak effectively and persuasively to the national mood. The scope of Trump’s victories doesn’t compare with Reagan’s landslide wins, of course, but that might cause some Democrats to underestimate the problems they face. Right now, the Democrats are leaderless, and there isn’t a lot of evidence pointing to how that messenger will come forth.

Some smart Democrats I talk to are counting on the party moving to the political center over the next four years and nominating someone who can speak to the broad middle about the economy, immigration, artificial intelligence, climate and more. Democracies are good at self-corrections; politicians can learn from mistakes and feedback and pivot accordingly. There’s a reason America has gone from Barack Obama to Trump to Joe Biden to Trump in the Oval Office in just over eight years.

But there was an expectation in the early 1980s, too, that Democrats would self-correct after Jimmy Carter’s presidency. The presidential primary process — which brings out party loyalists — yielded a familiar figure, Walter Mondale, rather than a bold choice. The self-correction took time.

What proved most important in that era was how durably popular Reaganism would be on the right, to the political center and among some Democrats. I’m in no way betting on Trump, JD Vance or their allies being that popular. But as I wrote in November about the dozens of Times Opinion focus groups we’ve conducted, Democrats are in for a rude awakening on illegal immigration, and they have lost the trust of many Americans because of tone-deafness on the economy; a lack of solutions and progress on the cost of living, affordable housing and public safety; and the perception that party leaders and Biden covered up his decline and pulled a fast one on the American people by slotting in Kamala Harris as the Democratic nominee. A self-correction that builds trust is a serious undertaking.

In the end, Americans may not want one political party in the White House for more than one or two terms at a time. And the 2024 election was close. But all of this is to say that the questions I close out the day with are: How long will the Democrats’ wilderness years last? And who will lead them out of it?

“American carnage” was gone. No phrase in Donald Trump’s second Inaugural Address distilled his distemper quite like those chilling words from his first.

But the recriminations that gave rise to them? The portrayal of the United States as a dystopia in desperate need of immediate rescue? Those were as vivid on Monday in the remarks that he delivered in the Capitol Rotunda as they were in the speech he made after taking the oath of office eight years ago.

And they were joined by a newly pronounced messianic streak. America’s 47th president — who was also our 45th president — told us that he is not merely on a quest to bring this country into line with his and the MAGA movement’s vision for it. He is on a divinely directed mission.

Recalling the day in Butler, Pa., in July when “an assassin’s bullet ripped through my ear,” Trump said that “I felt then, and believe even more so now, that my life was saved for a reason. I was saved by God to make America great again.”

That’s the keeper this time around — Trump’s trademark narcissism and usual grandiosity, along with an unsettling measure of theocracy, in one profoundly disturbing sentence. And it’s a signal of the sureness that he feels about all the executive orders that he then went on to promise, all the legislation that he foreshadowed and all the changes, from a militarized border to a war on wokeness, that he vowed.

While parts of Trump’s speech — the promise of national prosperity, a pledge of “national unity” — honored tradition and yielded to convention, there was a darkness in it that such scattered niceties couldn’t and didn’t veil. For much of it, he wasn’t sowing inspiration. He was serving notice and settling scores.

He riffled through a seemingly endless litany of complaints about the screw-ups of Democrats holding the reins of government before today. Cleanup efforts in North Carolina after Hurricane Helene, attempts to contain the wildfires in Pacific Palisades, inflation, initiatives related to race and gender, regulations regarding fossil fuels — America under rulers other than him could apparently get nothing right. But he’d fix it all. And seize control of the Panama Canal along the way!

His strangely subdued manner contradicted a ludicrously colossal agenda and an even more colossal sense of self. It’s said that our most distinctive traits intensify as we age, and Trump is that maxim made president (again), his vindictiveness and vanity at their peak.

In one of his speech’s other most memorable lines, he claimed, “Over the past eight years, I have been tested and challenged more than any president in our 250-year history.” That’s a crazily reductive read of the American story. I wonder what God would say about it.

The looming TikTok ban has convened an interesting group of strange bedfellows: lawyers, politicians, journalists, commentators and activists have been joined by rank-and-file social media influencers in watching — and critiquing — the move.

Some of those incensed content creators are following the legal arguments about civil liberties and market competition. But a lot of them are throwing something else into the mix: They see the ban as an attack on their economic viability. TikTok is how they pay their bills.

The truth of that statement is a case study in the obscure economics of online hustling. For every viral social media star who translates 15 seconds of fame into a substantial payout, there are untold millions of users who will either never go viral or go viral but not make any money. Even the infrastructure of influencer stardom is convoluted. White influencers make more money than nonwhite influencers. There are credible charges that platforms and user biases unfairly promote white creators over minority-group creators. There is also a parallel star-making system in Hollywood. Agencies and representatives cherry-pick influencers for the real-world endorsements and live events that can turn marginal celebrity into actual money.

Very few viral influencers break through, and that is kind of the point. Influencing looks a lot like a Ponzi scheme. A small group of winners justifies the millions of people who will never make a dime being popular online. So the question is, why do so many people see social media influencing as an economic opportunity?

Influencers tap into the folk economics that a lot of young people believe in. They intuitively sense that the prescribed route to success — a college degree, student debt and an ever more nonexistent entry-level job market — is precarious. My college students frequently report that they would leave their professional paths if they could hit it big as an influencer. They probably do not have the right assessment of their personal risk. Their degrees are a better bet. But they do have a sense of their generation’s collective risk. People without college educations or prestige or specialized skill sets especially will have a bumpier road moving along the opportunity structure.

But even with good odds in that structure of sorting or allotting income, jobs and status, a lot of younger people will find it harder to secure housing, save money, get health care and afford to start a family than previous generations. For them, influencing is about as risky as obtaining a middle-class lifestyle. TikTok and other social media platforms — and the influencer fantasy — seem like they are spackling over the deep cracks in our social mobility ladders.

When users complain about their app being banned, a lot of them are also decrying the circumstances that make virality their best shot at economic security.

The rage around banning TikTok poses a lot of political problems. There is the sense that out-of-touch politicians dislike young people who like and use the app. There are also big issues about the First Amendment, proxy wars with China and executive overreach (should Donald Trump intervene as he implies he will). But there is also a less-observed problem: Young people feel trapped. Their sense that they don’t have a shot at economic opportunity is being funneled into their online influencer fantasies. They seem desperate for anything that promises a way forward, even if it is just an algorithm.

Shutting down TikTok won’t solve that existential crisis and it may, for many, make it worse.

Constitutional common sense has prevailed. Early on Friday, a unanimous Supreme Court upheld the Protecting Americans From Foreign-Adversary-Controlled Applications Act, which will effectively ban TikTok in the United States unless it divests itself of Chinese control.

The court’s opinion was simple and straightforward. First, it raised doubts that the First Amendment even applied to the case at all. The act regulates foreign control of the platform and doesn’t directly apply to any of the content.

But the justices assumed that the First Amendment applied, and they analyzed the case using First Amendment principles. The key element of the court’s reasoning was its recognition that the ban was “content neutral,” meaning that it wasn’t aimed at any of the expression on the platform.

It was aimed instead at the control of the platform and the control of the personal information that TikTok collects through the platform. And in that case, the court recognized the significant national security risks in allowing a hostile foreign power that much direct access to the American public square and that much access to Americans’ personal information.

The argument that Congress couldn’t regulate Chinese control of TikTok was always a constitutional long shot. There was never a good chance that TikTok would prevail in court, but there have been no significant moves to sell the company — at least not yet.

Instead, TikTok seems to have pushed all its chips onto the political table. Donald Trump opposes the ban, and he may attempt to circumvent it with an executive order. President Biden has reportedly said he won’t enforce it before Trump takes office. Roughly 170 million Americans use the app, and many politicians appear to be realizing that TikTok users are not going to be happy if and when their app goes dark.

Republicans and Democrats should hold their ground. In many ways, the ban is a virtual national security I.Q. test. Why would a rational nation give its most dangerous foe such comprehensive access to American data?

As I wrote last week, it’s not hard to imagine scenarios in which China could use the app to sow chaos and confusion through blackmail and by sending waves of disinformation and propaganda into American homes.

Americans are slowly waking up to the reality that we’re in a cold war with China. But the moment that TikTok disappears from their phones might mark a more tangible turning point. The old world of cooperation is truly over. The new age of competition has begun.

Confirmation hearings rarely cut to the heart of an existential question about the nature of our society. But Thursday’s hearing for Scott Bessent, President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for Treasury secretary, did just that when Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont tried to get him to admit that the United States is becoming an oligarchy, a question that ought to be the subject of far more public debate.

Quoting from President Biden’s farewell address to the nation, which warned against the unchecked power of tech moguls, Sanders asked if Bessent agrees that the concentration of so much wealth and political and media power in the hands of three men — Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos — is a danger to democracy.

Bessent, himself a billionaire hedge fund manager who has never served in government before, gave all the answers one would expect: Musk and the others made their money fair and square. Biden has been friendly with some billionaires, too.

“Forget how they made their money,” Sanders pressed. “When so few people have so much wealth and power, do you think that is an oligarchic form of society?”

Bessent replied that it depends on whether people have the ability to move up, implying that social mobility inoculates the country from the detrimental effects of extreme inequality. It felt like an answer for the 1980s, not the inequality of today. Sanders disagreed, but moved on. He had limited time and wanted to get to other issues, like raising the minimum wage and capping credit card interest rates.

But the question still hung in the air, begging to be taken up by the American people at a time that wasn’t limited to the five minutes that Mike Crapo, the U.S. Senate Finance Committee chairman, assigned to each committee member. Are we an oligarchy yet?

The fact that Zuckerberg and Bezos have been falling over themselves to suck up to Trump, who was — like it or not — elected by voters, suggests that ordinary people still wield important power. But maybe that’s wrong. Maybe Bezos and Zuckerberg are just waiting for their invitation to Trump’s billionaires’ ball, where our country will get divided up like the spoils of war. Maybe Musk, an early investor in Trump, is the one who will be doing the divvying. Maybe Bessent will help him do it. Maybe the rest of us will have a hard time organizing our protest marches on social media this time around.

I fear that by the time we get around to talking about oligarchy, it will be too late.

The consequential confirmation hearing of former Representative Sean Duffy of Wisconsin for secretary of transportation has largely flown under the radar, but his elevation is yet another signifier that reality TV and politics are now one and the same.

Duffy and his wife, his fellow Fox News host Rachel Campos-Duffy, got their start in public life on the MTV mainstay “The Real World.” As a not especially political teenager in the 1990s, I remember finding both of them to be charming and relatable. Campos-Duffy started appearing on “The View,” and Duffy, as Andy Greene pointed out in Rolling Stone, “became the Ashland County district attorney the same year he won ‘Battle of the Seasons,’” referring to a reality competition show on which Duffy appeared.

I used to assume that being on reality TV meant that someone would never be taken seriously. But in this age of reality TV presidents and online influencers, name recognition can only be a boost to a professional life of commentating and public service. So, too, can a penchant for attention-grabbing conflicts that catapult your name to wider public attention.

On this week’s episode of the decline and fall of America, there was a telling showdown between Representative Nancy Mace, Republican of South Carolina, and Representative Jasmine Crockett, Democrat of Texas. During a House Oversight Committee meeting, Crockett said about Mace: “I can see that somebody’s campaign coffers really are struggling right now. So she is going to keep saying ‘trans, trans, trans, trans’ so that people will feel threatened, and child, listen ——” Mace was offended by Crockett’s description of her as “child” and ultimately asked Crockett whether she wanted to “take it outside.”

It once might have seemed beneath the dignity of the office for politicians to go at each other, but in today’s mercenary attention economy, some aggressive table flipping is essential. Most voters who don’t pay close attention to politics will see only viral moments from the most charismatic public servants. Many people see anger and aggression as signs of authenticity and a willingness to tell it like it is.

Duffy and characters like him are sure bets for a president who relies on capturing attention to maintain authority and eminence. Though he struck a conciliatory pose in his hearing, that’s not how Duffy got Donald Trump’s attention in the first place. He’s been a reliably rabble-rousing, pro-Trump voice as a political commentator on CNN and Fox News in the past several years. Announcing his selection of Duffy, Trump mentioned that he’s “the husband of a wonderful woman, Rachel Campos-Duffy, a star on Fox News.”

Everybody now needs to play the game. When The Times spoke to 12 men who voted for Trump in the 2024 election, more than one of them said they liked him because he’s a “fighter.” Duffy, Crockett and Mace are fighters, too. They know that to win, you have to give the people what they want..

A telling moment in the supremely depressing Senate confirmation hearing for Pete Hegseth, the Fox News personality who is Donald Trump’s pick for defense secretary, came right at the beginning, when the former Republican senator Norm Coleman introduced him.

“Four years ago, President Biden’s nominee, Lloyd Austin, a good and honorable man, received 97 votes on the floor of the Senate,” said Coleman, “and we went through the debacle of the Afghanistan withdrawal, Putin invaded Ukraine, the Houthis endangered our shipping lanes” and America was insufficiently supportive of Israel. The implication seemed to be that, since good and honorable had failed, it was time to try something else.

Hegseth is something else. As has been widely reported, in 2020 he paid off a woman who filed a police report accusing him of sexual assault. (He insists they had consensual sex.) As Jane Mayer reported in The New Yorker, Hegseth “was forced to step down by both of the two nonprofit advocacy groups that he ran — Veterans for Freedom and Concerned Veterans for America — in the face of serious allegations of financial mismanagement, sexual impropriety and personal misconduct.” His own mother wrote, in an email obtained by The New York Times, that he “belittles, lies, cheats, sleeps around and uses women for his own power and ego.” (She has since disavowed that message.)

But this is Trump’s America; abusing and degrading women is obviously not disqualifying for high office. As Democratic Senate aides told New York magazine’s Rebecca Traister, success in the hearings “would mean not leaning in on the rape allegations and instead creating space to oppose him on grounds that Republicans can also oppose him on.” Much of the hearing on Tuesday seemed to involve a search for those grounds, but it’s not clear they exist.

Several Democrats focused on Hegseth’s insulting comments about female troops, perhaps hoping they could reach Joni Ernst, an Iowa Republican who is a veteran and an advocate for women in the military. (“We need moms,” Hegseth wrote in one of his books. “But not in the military, especially in combat units.”)

Tammy Duckworth, a Democrat from Illinois and a veteran of the Iraq war, nailed him on his sheer ignorance of American defense policy. At one point, she asked him to name one of the countries in ASEAN, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, and to describe our security arrangements with them. He couldn’t do it, instead sputtering about Japan, South Korea and Australia, three countries that are not in ASEAN. Mark Kelly of Arizona, a former astronaut and Navy veteran, grilled him on the many reports about him being drunk on the job. Gary Peters of Michigan established that Hegseth has never led an organization of more than a couple of hundred people; the Pentagon employs almost three million.

Any one of these things should derail this preposterous nomination. I doubt any of them will.

The hearing was over in about four hours; Democrats’ requests for a second round of questioning were denied. They’d just scratched the surface of Hegseth’s record, but Republicans had heard enough.