“These aren’t people who know what to do”

Kerry Howley is one of the best prose stylists working today, and I enjoy reading her about almost anything. When she gets a really juicy story, the results can be other-level. Hence, her profile of Pete Hegseth:

In the drama of Hegseth’s January confirmation hearings, it was easy to get distracted by the financial settlement for an assault allegation, by the multitudinous accounts of heavy drinking on the job, by claims of misogyny from both his mother and his sister-in-law, by the fact that Hegseth, while married with three small children, had fathered a child with a Fox News producer who was also married with small children, during which pregnancy he had slept with the woman who later accused him of assault, and thereby miss some straightforward information about his managerial experience. Pete Hegseth had run a nonprofit called Veterans for Freedom for several years, an organization that employed fewer than 20 people, and resigned after alleged financial mismanagement nearly bankrupted the organization. He had run a group called Concerned Veterans for America, which employed around 160 people, and resigned amid allegations of misconduct and, once again, financial mismanagement. In choosing Hegseth, Donald Trump did not choose from the large set of people who had never managed an organization, or the considerably smaller set of people who had managed an organization without incident, but from a smaller still set of people who had managed multiple.

It’s pretty much all this good, but particularly striking is that Hegseth has declined from his already non-existent competence for the job (or any job other than Fox News bingo caller) since Signalghazi:

That same day what anyone would colloquially call “war plans” were available to see, in a series of damning screenshots, on The Atlantic’s website. Hegseth’s denial rendered the story bigger in importance and longer in duration. Carroll felt that Hegseth should simply state that he had the right to declassify information and had done so; there was no story. He assumed Hegseth didn’t say this because he had surrounded himself with people who did not even know that he had that power. “They aren’t people who know what to do,” Carroll says.

Hegseth was different after Signalgate, according to six people in a position to know. He was more prone to anger and less likely to be clean-shaven in the morning. He seemed reluctant to make decisions; scared of doing the wrong thing, paralyzed as he awaited orders from the White House. The Pentagon had ceased, one source says, to be “creative”; it was a mechanism for implementing executive orders. Each new leak contributed to Hegseth’s sense that he was surrounded by moles in league with his enemies. It was “consuming his whole life,” says one source, “when he should have been focused on, you know, our national security. Unclear on how to move forward, he retreated into spaces where he was comfortable. “Kicked off the day alongside the warriors,” posted Hegseth against an image of himself doing a burpee.

His circle grew smaller and, to people more accustomed to a traditional Defense Department, stranger. Why was his personal lawyer, Tim Parlatore, always around? And his brother Phil? Hegseth began including his wife, Jennifer Hegseth, in meetings at the Department of Defense, a development that was reportedly “confusing” to foreign officials. Jenny directed the communications staff to “draw up a PR package” in a way that offended them; they did not work for her. In the secretary’s office are a half-dozen prints known as “jumbos.” Typically these would be pictures of tanks and troops in battle. In Hegseth’s office, instead, are seven giant pictures of Jenny Hegseth, many of them showing her in the same pink dress. “Without those two J ’s,” Hegseth once said to Megyn Kelly, “I wouldn’t be sitting here right now.” The other J was Jesus.

Read it, weep, things of that nature.