Scandal in an era of epistemic closure

It seems increasingly likely that Pete Hegseth’s nomination will actually be able to get through the Senate. On one level, it’s ridiculous, but on another it makes sense. What doomed Matt Gaetz is not his conduct per se but that a lot of the Republican conference absolutely despised him, so his misconduct was useful. If Republicans like you, though…once you’ve accepted Donald Trump as your own personal god what does scandal even mean?

But the real problem with Pete Hegseth is that he’s Pete Hegseth. Trump thought it was a good idea to hand the world’s most powerful military—and the country’s largest employer—over to a guy whose job was saying pugnacious stuff on TV. Hegseth has written a book about how the military is undone by “affirmative action promotions” and weakened from within by a “cultural Marxist revolution,” in which he describes the country as a whole as under attack from “progressive storm troopers.” He’s an enthusiastic supporter of war criminals. He has extremist Crusader tattoos that led the National Guard to judge him too risky to trust with inauguration security duty. He’s a sexist and a Christian nationalist. When he reportedly got drunk and started shouting “Kill all Muslims!” the drunkenness was not the most dangerous feature of the incident. 

These are the features that made Donald Trump nominate Hegseth in the first place—not because Trump considers himself to be Richard the Lionhearted, but because Hegseth is exactly the kind of loser and fanatic that Trump wants to build his administration around. Existing military standards, or laws, have no use for someone as flagrantly unfit as Hegseth; his power is Trump’s power and nothing more. His loyalty to the president would be existential. 

How do you make the case against someone like that? Nobody understands how scandals are supposed to work anymore. A scandal is a social ritual, and American political society has ruptured. The idea that Pete Hegseth was faltering was based on a series of assumptions about reputation, public opinion, and their consequences: that Hegseth would be embarrassed by an escalating series of stories about his alleged misdeeds and failures; that Trump would be embarrassed to stand by Hegseth as those stories accumulated; that the Senate would be ashamed to vote to confirm Hegseth; that the American people wouldn’t tolerate such a situation. 

So far, the first two of those assumptions have been stretched beyond their presumed limits, the third appears to be on its way there, and the fourth seems moot. The only public the Trump movement cares about is the public wrapped up inside the movement’s own messaging machine, who are so far being treated to defenses of Hegseth and attacks on his potential opposition. The situation can’t be intolerable as long as no one agrees what the situation even is. 

The watchdog only bites what the watchdog can get its teeth into. The press still knows how to destroy the president of Harvard; the president of Harvard still exists in the same established social order. Chris Rufo, the controversy-manufacturing entrepreneur, knows the words and gestures that would send the press after the president of Harvard. No one knows how to send the press after Chris Rufo. 

Both Republican legislators and high-information voters get their information from the same media source, and Hegseth not only has their support, he’s one of them. Which means he’ll probably be confirmed, and the mainstream press will learn to normalize this process quickly.