The uproar over President Trump’s Cabinet picks is somewhat humorous. Some of the people in the Biden administration were not particularly competent at their jobs and definitely did not represent mainstream America. Pete Buttigieg as Secretary of Transportation oversaw one of the worst rail disasters in American history–also one of the most poorly dealt with. Sam Brinton was caught stealing other people’s luggage.
On Wednesday, The Washington Examiner posted an article about the choice of Pete Hegseth for Secretary of Defense.
The article has a few interesting observations:
WHAT THE HEGSETH NOMINATION MEANS. On Tuesday evening, President-elect Donald Trump shook up Washington by announcing that he would nominate Fox News host Pete Hegseth as secretary of defense. “Pete is a graduate of Princeton University and has a graduate degree from Harvard University,” Trump said in the announcement. “He is an Army combat veteran who did tours in Guantanamo Bay, Iraq, and Afghanistan. For his actions on the battlefield, he was decorated with two Bronze Stars.” During his years as co-host of Fox & Friends Weekend, Hegseth has focused extensively on military and veterans affairs. This year, he wrote a bestselling book, War on Warriors, in which he decried the new woke military.*
…The fact is that despite his impressive qualifications — Princeton, Harvard, two Bronze Stars, and professional success — Hegseth does not have the resume one would expect from a secretary of defense, most notably the management experience to run one of the largest bureaucracies in the world, with an $841 billion budget this year. But Trump clearly wanted a change in direction.
Trump can look at past secretaries who had the right resumes and didn’t work out. Bill Clinton picked a Democratic member of the House named Les Aspin, who had decades of experience overseeing the Pentagon and turned out to be a terrible secretary of defense. George W. Bush picked Donald Rumsfeld, who had vast experience in government and had even been defense secretary before, and Rumsfeld made grievous errors in the job. Barack Obama had problems with the Pentagon, and Trump himself struggled to find the right man to run the Department of Defense, going through five secretaries or acting secretaries in the first Trump administration.
The article concludes:
So now, Trump is proposing a radical change at the top of the civilian leadership of the military. It could be a breakthrough success, rebalancing the military as a fighting force above all else. Or it could be a failure, and everyone will be asking what Trump was thinking when he put Pete Hegseth in charge of an $841 billion bureaucracy. But if voters sent any message in the election, it is that they want a change from the Biden administration and that they approve, in a big-picture sense, of Trump’s leadership in his first time in office. So now, Trump is, as promised, bringing change.
“All the criticism of him is that he’s not the expected Washington pick, and I’m just saying to you that the American people just voted against the expected Washington pick,” CNN resident conservative Scott Jennings said Tuesday night. Yes, Hegseth will have to run the confirmation gauntlet in the Senate, Jennings continued, and will have to show that he has the knowledge to do that job. “But we ought to give this man a chance, in my opinion.” That’s what the election was about.
What we are doing isn’t working, let’s try something different.